Paris with Friends (Part 1)

We returned to Paris once again to meet up with friends visiting from the US. Of course, we are always happy to visit Paris, although this was the closest to real "high season" that we have ever been in the city. (Our July 2020 visit during covid hardly counts as "high" season.) It was quite busy with tourists, but overall not too bad. Although we may have heard more English than French this trip.

The night we arrived, we had a delicious dinner at a little bistro that we had tried to visit, but missed, on a previous trip. Le Bistro de Madelaine was fantastic, and the locals next to us seemed to appreciate our weak attempts at speaking French.

The next morning, we went to an exhibit at the Picasso Museum; yes, another one. It appears that Picasso's art is a never-ending fountain, and we never get tired of seeing new things. This exhibit was dedicated to his first daughter, Maya (born when Picasso was already 53) who recently donated nine pieces to the museum that she had kept (it turns out that France allows donations in lieu of paying estate taxes, which has allowed the Picasso Museum in Paris to create an amazing collection over the years). The exhibit really focused on Picasso's paintings of children (particularly Maya) and showed a different side of the artist.

That same afternoon, we met up with our friend Lorna who we had not seen in many years. 

We spent some time walking through the Montmarte district, an area of Paris we had visited, but never really explored. While walking through a park in the area, we came upon a very serious game of Petanque (the French version of bocce):

If you look carefully at the picture, you can see that the kneeling players are using a tape measure to determine which ball is closer to the target (we told you it was serious!).

We also got this really cool view of Sacre Coeur from the streets of Montmarte:

After our walk, we met up with Lorna's daughter Allie, and enjoyed a fantastic meal at Signature Montmarte, which we had finally managed to visit (after several failures) on our last trip to Paris. Once again, the Korean-French fusion food was fantastic, and the owner was super nice. We highly recommend Signature to anyone who is going to be in Paris, even though it is a bit out of the way.

Our dinner was made even more enjoyable by our dining companion at the next table:

Yes, that is a purebred Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Scarlett is only seven months old, but she was very well-behaved and super cute. Our readers will not be surprised to learn that we ended up talking to Scarlett's humans about Bonnie and Clyde and showing pictures of them.

After dinner, we went with Lorna and Allie to do something truly touristy: see the Eiffle Tower lit up at night. This occurs every hour for about five minutes. Unfortunately, this being summer in Paris, it does not happen until after dark (i.e. starting at 11 pm). So, we had some time to hang out (note that this photo was taken after 10pm):

Finally, after almost an hour wait, we were "rewarded" with what we came to see:

Not exaxtly the Disneyland fireworks show, but it was a lovely night and we had fun talking to Lorna and Allie while we waited. Our late night didn't matter too much because we were able to sleep in the next day before meeting up with our dear friend Debbie and her niece Devin who we were with for the rest of our trip.

Hasta pronto,

Jeff and Shana