Saturday, October 3, 2009

Castles in the air and graves in the ground ...Au voir to Paris

Our trip through France is almost impossible to sum up but the title seems to try. France had a huge legacy of places of history of various kinds - castles for want of a word - and also, as we found when we went to Omaha Beach and the American War Cemetery,they remember and honour their past, even if the maintenance is getting a bit much in some areas.Tagging and cigarette butts abound everywhere and noone seems to care much.
5am is a brutal time to wake up - but a useful time to refelect on what we have been doing. Paris is a city I have read much about all my life so to see it in actuality was a really interseting experience.It is, in the Haussmann section of the central city, a very beautiful place. Our first encounter in the Charles Michel area was a kind of composite of may elemtns, The carousels which appear on many street corners;the regularly planted and clipped rows of military-like trees; the cafes and bistrots with chairs facing outwards to see what is going on;the traffis and the pedestrians which seem to co-exist somehow.Seeing Paris in the autumn for the first time makes me want to return in the spring.

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