(Tuesday night)

On the TGV ("train à grande vitesse", 'high speed train') with my parents, from St.-Pierre-Des-Corps to Paris Montparnasse. I guess I forgot to write before that we were going to the Loire Valley to see châteaux and drink wine. Anyway, that's what we did. And now I have a little less than an hour to blog as we zoom towards Paris at some ridiculous number of kilometers an hour.

On Friday morning I went out to CDG to get my parents. It was a bit tricky; I took the Air France bus from Gare de Lyon to CDG, but the bus had a hard time getting through Nation, which was full of students standing in the intersection protesting the CPE. They were even starting to light a bonfire. This at ten in the morning! I thought protesters didn't get up that early. At any rate, the bus had to inch slowly through the circle until we could break free without running any students over. Needless to say, my parents and I took the train into the city instead of the bus.

It was great to see my parents; they were tired but amazingly stayed up all day. I had them staying at a hotel across the street from my post office. After lunch and a visit to my apartment, we walked across the islands, to Sainte Chapelle, since it was sunny.

I hadn't been there in more than a decade! (I forget if I had to go through a metal detector to visit it in 1993.) Dad and I took photos and Mom got to just admire. I'll put up the photos later.

We walked up then to a place called La Quincampe, in the third by Beaubourg, which has a fireplace in their very cozy back room. We had some Morroccan pastries there, including one made entirely out of pistachios, and we noticed that for Sunday brunch they have beignets marocs (Morroccan doughnuts), aka "sfienji". Just like the Italian side of my family used to make, though I think it's spelled differently in Italian. But it's pleasing to think that the reason Italian allows consonant clusters like /sf/ and /sb/ is because of the influence from Berber.

We had a grand dinner that night at Café de la Poste with JD, and we all went to sleep.

The next day I had my parents stop at my favorite bakery to get croissants; they also bought coffee and tea and some extra mugs, since I only had one! And we tried to figure out where not to go, since there was sposed to be a big manifestation. By googling I discovered that the manif was going to go from Denfert-Rochereau to Nation, so we avoided those places and stayed on the right bank: Place de la Madeleine, to look in the yummy pricey épiceries there (we got some not-so-pricey things at Hédiard and Maille), and to have macarons at La Durée. JD joined us for that, and expertly guided us around for the rest of the day! We went up the Champs-Elysées; later we braved the left bank to go to Café Flores, where Sartre and his buddies used to hang out. As we walked along Blvd. St. Germain to a couscous place in the 5th (actually the same one I went to with Sn and his brother, several months ago), we saw up St. Michel lines of police in riot gear. But we were not really affected by the protests otherwise. The couscous was lovely, as was the company.

The next morning, after more croissants and JD helping us find the car rental place, my parents and I took off in our rented Peugeot, for points southwest! Dad drove, for which I was grateful; anyway I was needed for reading signs and maps and navigating. We did all right escaping from Paris. As we drove south, we saw a sign for Chartres and I brought up the idea of going there, though it wasn't on our itinerary. So we did! We knew we were getting close when we could see the asymmetrical spires of the cathedral on the horizon. We had lunch in a place so touristy that the restaurateur was dressed up like the 16th century. Okay, not the whole century, you know what I mean. But the food was fine; chicken stew, said to be the favorite dish of Henri IV, who incidentally was crowned at Chartres.

The cathedral was gorgeous, of course. There was a mass going on for boy scouts and girl scouts, so we didn't get to see the labyrinth in the middle of the floor, but we did get to walk around and look at the windows.

Next, the escape from Chartres. We had a big road map, and we had maps in a Loire Valley book JD had borrowed from a friend for us, though we didn't know about those maps (and anyway they wouldn't have done us any good as we weren't in the Loire Valley yet). Finally we got out... and drove and drove and drove for a few hours... on roads that got smaller and smaller.. and finally, as the sun was setting, we got to Saumur, which was our destination.

At least, we thought it was our destination. It turned out our hotel was in a small town outside of Saumur, instead. We had pulled up to a brasserie in Saumur, intending to ask inside. But... I saw they had wifi, so I just opened up trusty plusqueparfait here and we got a map and figured it out, getting to the hotel just as it started to rain.