Saturday, May 24, 2008

from Paris: “when one jumps out, the other jumps in…”

It’s a child’s rhyme. But so apt for this day.

Ed and I eat breakfast in Lannelis, just outside Aber Wrac'h. You know, the place of the best baguette.


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We sit on the square, by the church, where the market is held Thursdays. The market where we picked up the most flavorful apple juice. No market today. Just a place to pass through. Or pause, for a pain au chocolat. Or a friendly chat with neighbors.


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We pick up juice (note to commenter: Four bottles. One for the ride, two for the sheds back home and one for Ed’s cat sitter) and head east.


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We break for bread and cheese. Overloooking a Brittany graveyard. We read gravestones and talk about lives cut short, family funerals, small cars. And apple juice. Life can be random. So can lunches and musings in the shadow of a village churchyard.


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Continue. Eight hours of driving (note to commenter: no, it wasn’t Ducey!) until Paris.

I marvel how I can force our car into the madness of Place de la Concorde and emerge without a dent.

Paris. Too late here for much of anything. We walk to a nearby restaurant, passing the Parisian bikers. So different from the Lannelis ones! I’m wondering, do they bike much in Morocco?


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We are only two hours late for an 8 pm dinner reservation, but the place is chaotic and informal and monsieur seats us anyway. It’s a French-Italian restaurant (Casa Bini). I do not want to face another plate of seafood. Here, in Paris, we seem so far from the sea…

And, it’ll have to be fraises des bois over mascarpone cream rather than crème brulee. Pink. Paris rosy pink, over Brittany blue and buttercup yellow. Or butter yellow. Or cider yellow. Oh, Brittany...


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And then it is night.

…and then the early light of the next day comes through the window that overlooks the very quiet little street that Ed likes so much (I can hear footsteps outside, even in the middle of the day).

I’m about to see Ed to the gate where he will catch a flight home. (Thank you so very much for liking Brittany with me!) Minutes after, I’ll meet my daughter at another gate, where she will have arrived for a week long vacation with mom. (Hello, little one! Tell me about you, tell me about your sister…) If we’re lucky, we’ll be in time for our flight to Morocco. If we’re super lucky, our hotel in Casablanca will indeed have Internet as promised and I’ll be able to post from there.