Birthday brunch

Yesterday I went to see LN, who lives right near the Musée D'Orsay (LN = professor at my university here, but we know lots of people in common from the old country, as it were). It was a lovely morning and I walked along the river, stopping at a boulangerie on Île St. Louis to pick up a baguette (this one had no bag) and some croissants.

Turns out it was LN's birthday, which she hadn't told me; she showed me her birthday gift to herself, a bottle of perfume from a small perfume store nearby. Another colleague, LR, came over. He brought some passionfruit, which I had never eaten before. Anyway, we sat around eating brunch and having a hoot of a time. LN does mighty good impersonations of people. They gave me a list of good words to know to refer to women, from nana, a very neutral and positive word, to pétasse, which is essentially "bimbo." I shared with them some English slang that I won't repeat here, as this is a family blog!

We also hatched a plan to go sometime to Conques, Roman ruins in the south of France, so I do hope that comes to pass.

Eventually we went out and LN and I hit some of the soldes... ah, it's dangerous, that, but in the end I resisted temptation except for a nesting set of trays which I needed anyway and am very happy with.

Later on (after the conversation mentioned in the previous post), I saw Js, who had drank a bit too much the night before in celebrating the end of the week. I'm noticing that I need to catch Js on a Friday, because when I try to see him later in the weekend he's invariably recovering from Friday. :)

It's a beautiful morning again today, so I'm going to go out and enjoy it.