5 May - Deb, Jill and Mista Badger in Paris

If you like this page, you may also like this one from my travelling companions, Miss Gillanders and Mista Badger.
http://sablegerbil.blogspot.com/

I got up early and went to the pharmacy around the corner and explained that I had fallen yesterday and hurt my ankle, and needed a bandage, and the homeopathic remedy beginning in ‘a’ that I couldn’t remember the name of. I was very pleased with my French coping skills and was able to strap up my ankle for some support, and put arnica on what was turning out to be a rather black and swollen ankle. I told Deb we might have to use buses from time to time, and she was very patient with me and regularly asked how my uncle was. I had forgotten that she is English and kept thinking she was asking about Uncle Jack, who (if you had read this blog from the start you would know) had just turned 90, and wondered how she knew to ask about him.
Deb brought her own tea bags, being English, and though I quite liked the breakfast, she found it had too much sugar in it. I said she should try America if she wants sugar. They even put it in the conversations over there.

I ate so much I needed very little for the rest of the day. We visited a textile exhibition in Gobelin that I was happy to go to in case we saw some goblins, but we didn’t, except on the tapestries. I saw a lovely set of red embroidered chairs but I wasn’t allowed to take them away. We sat and drank coffee for a while and felt quite French until the waiter spoke to us in English, and we visited the Louvre outside places and took photos of the tourists. Deb gave some money to a boy and I chastised her for encouraging him to beg. As it was too late in the day to admire the art works within the Louvre walls, and we felt a glass of wine coming on, we ensconced ourselves in a suitable Louvre environment under the cloisters, and with Mista Badger, enjoyed a quiet reflective drink. I was pleased to have seen the cleaners attending to the dirt left by the tourists at the Louvre, as I like things to be clean. That in itself was a work of art.

I need to introduce you to Mista badger, who to the uninitiated might be a badger puppet, is actually a close friend of Deb’s (sorry Mary, Celia et al) and enjoys travel to foreign climes, whatever they are. Perhaps they are places where the climate is foreign, but you can get that by going to Wellington for an hour. Anyway (where was I?), Mista Badger had never drunk alcohol before, so I was a little on edge (I have a nervous disposition) in case he overdid things and fell off his perch so to speak (do badgers have perches?) but he didn’t, as the pictures show. He loved Deb’s vin chaud, and I loved the glass as well as the vin, so took several pictures. I went to the toilets to look for the famous louvre windows (sort of glass venetian blinds), but couldn’t find them anywhere. I assume the Louvre is named after these windows, so I thought they might have done the decent thing and put some in the dunnies. The hand basin was interesting, so I photographed that instead. I think they copied the design from Middle Earth Tiles in Newmarket, as they sell them there. I was becoming suspicious about the authenticity of the art works inside the building, and thinking it was just as well we hadn’t paid to go in.

We also went to the Moulin Rouge so I could photograph the windmill and say I had been there. I think we ate feral strawberries for lunch (Deb was very taken with the food shops and had to photograph everything in them) and more cheese for dinner. We‘re not big spenders, and I doubt if our visit registered even a minor blip on the French tourism expenditure statistics, but it’s likely that Deb’s presence in France was noted, as she photographed absolutely everything (she always takes her camera when she goes to Paris), talked to absolutely everyone, and absolutely had a good time. Me, I’m the quiet one.