Two.

Bloody. Hell. Have been, for over two hours, wrestling with train/bus/hotel logistics for getting out to Basse Normandie, to the little town whence my ancestors immigrated to Canada in 1634. Or, to get to the real root of the problem(s), trying to triangulate a visit there, to a museum of Percheron immigration (because so many people left headed for Quebec) and whatever else there is to see, with part, at least, of a day in the departmental archives in Alençon. I don't even know exactly what the archives hold in their collections, except that there are documents for that whole region going back to the 11th century. (Nerd alert? You ain't seen nothing compared to this archives junkie on the scent of some amazing records.) If by some stretch it's a total bust, there are other things to see in Alençon until a train takes me to L'Aigle. Where I guess I'll spend the night, so that I can take a bus on to Tourouvre the next day. From there it gets ugly, and it looks--believe me, I've tried to get around it--as if I'll have no alternative but to arrive back in Paris after 10:00 P.M.

I was originally going to be doing this tomorrow and Friday, but seeing as not only does the SNCF website warn you that the strikes will be disrupting rail traffic still, but that the reasonable (if in that category we include 7:25 A.M. trains) times were already apparently sold out (or cancelled?) for the next couple of days, I just pushed the whole endeavor back a week. (And leaving at 7:25 becomes reasonable compared to having a 2-hour trip take up to five hours if you leave at another time.) That one's booked; I just can't stand any more for this evening. I should probably just rent a *^#** car, but I'm too chicken.

After spending most of the morning taking care of various paperwork and business, including trying various places to send a fax, I went over and walked through l' Église St.-Sulpice (also undergoing some serious restoration work). Aside from the Da Vinci Code events set there, it's an imposing church generally--AND has the amazing gnomon, the obelisk lined up with the sun to determine the vernal equinox for that pagan celebration, Easter. Maybe there's one of you who recalls the photo of it I posted last spring on Facebook at about that time.

In the afternoon I went for the first time to a meeting of the conversational group I've been going to, at a location other than the language school whose premises it borrows: Coolin, an Irish pub (would I make this up?) in the Marché St.-Germain. Had my obligatory half-pint of pale ale (sorry; bière blonde), as close to actual beer as I'll ever get. And fun; the conversations, mangled though they are, are always interesting. Our little half of the group contained two Americans, the other of whom I'd met once before at the school, an Austrian, and an Englishman, plus the French--leader/moderator. I'd love to go back to this place, actually, because they have Celtic music (the leader, plus what I've seen online, said it's totally packed and people dance on the tables : )

Yesterday I gave in, in acknowledgement that I really don't know the Marais neighborhood at all, and that maybe a condensed overview would help, and took a guided walking tour. It was great: Paris Walks. It came highly recommended to me, and I add my recommendation to that. It was (oh, no! : ) essentially entirely a historical tour (so I'll still have to pound pavement sometime for myself), but the guide really knows her stuff and makes it very interesting. Although it's now the appeals court, she got permission for our huge group (I never actually counted, but she requested that 25 be allowed in) to enter the courtyard of the former Hôtel Beauvais), take photos, and listen to more details of the--ahem--amazing woman, primarily, who lived there.

. . . and now I will try to recreate the second part of this post, which the wretched site ate rather than save . . .

She (all of their guides, I'm sure) carries photos of, say, how the 14th/15th-century Hôtel de Sens looked as a jam factory in the 19th century, when the former mansions had become a slum of light industry; or of Visigoth-era tombs discovered when a parking garage was excavated in front of the mairie of the 4th Arrondissement; or of how the Église de St.-Gervais et St.-Protais looked after a German shell hit it during a Good Friday service in 1918 (some shrapnel marks were left on the columns in memory of the 88 people killed). And incidentally, for the first time it was cold, with a biting wind, clearly much colder than any of us had anticipated, for whenever we weren't in the sun, we were shivering.

And then, late in the afternoon, at the American Express office at the Place de l'Opéra . . . there's no way to make this any more incredible, so I'll just say: the woman handling my transaction was wearing a Ragin' Cajun shirt (under her jacket), an LSU lanyard thing around her neck, and a Who Dat bracelet--because she's from River Ridge (married to a Frenchman). She was home in July . . . I was in New Orleans in July. She’s homesick.