Strolling around Paris

I decided to walk to one of the few large Parisian parks that I hadn't seen before, Parc Montsouris, which means Mouse Mountain. It's called that, I've read, because it had been a quarry that was rebuilt into a park with manmade hills, gullies, ponds and streams. Apparently, before it was recreated into a park, it looked like giant mice had been eating the landscape. On my way there, which took a long time, not only because it was a long way to walk, but because I always get distracted and go off course when I see something interesting, I met a man walking down this allee with two whippets.

I stopped him to ask him about his dogs (out of my comfort zone, Krysta!) and to tell him that I had a greyhound. He was delightful - we chatted for some time; he was very patient, not in a hurry (he said the outer arrondissements move a little more slowly), and as we talked my French became more fluent. Sometimes he waited while I had to think of a word or a construction, sometimes he would help me. We talked about dogs, about how everyone closer to the inner city speaks English (very annoying), he asked me about where I lived and wanted to know if it was near Boston. He told me about some American friends he had at one time, and that he found English too hard to pronounce. I asked him if my accent was hard to understand, and he said he could understand me very well, but my French lacked "la musique." French is a very musical language, and I've noticed that even Americans whose French is much better than mine lack the intonation and cadence of the French - the music. Anyway, it was a very special moment for me - he'll never know how pathetically grateful I was for his generosity.

I finally made it to the park, a great place for kids with play areas and a puppet theater.

Yesterday I strolled around Montmartre, both the butte and the other side, stopping to look in the windows of a lot of real estate agencies. For a fairly nice, three room apartment here, you would need to pay about a million euros. Today that would be $1,400,000. I didn't buy one. I had planned on going to a concert at the Madeleine church at 9:00, but I hit the wall about 6:30 and came home instead. Today I met the guide for the walking tour I was supposed to have had last week, who didn't show up. The walk was around a very familiar area, so I didn't really learn anything new. Although he was supposed to have spoken French, he decided that since there were several Americans and two Germans, he would speak English instead. I could have understood him better if he had spoken French. We had to help him out several times when he couldn't come up with the English word he was searching for. One of the others in the group was a woman from L.A. who spoke French about as well as I did, who was dragging her husband and teenage son along. They kept drifting farther and farther behind and it was obvious this wasn't their idea. She said yesterday was her birthday and she was still working on credit. We actually had a lot of fun together on the walk once it became obvious the walk itself was worth pretty much what we had paid it - nothing. Here are some photos I took the last couple of days: