Paris!

It's good to be back!  Here's the view from my hotel window, and the Frenchest of French rooms.

A pet shop window (because I miss them);

and a bowl of superlative onion soup - as good as it gets (followed by some raie and capers).  It's fifty five years to the month since I first came to Paris, and it's both changed a great deal and hasn't in many quintessential ways changed at all.  I haven't stayed in the Quartier Latin since 1973, when I was a - a what? a kind of nanny? - to a family whose Paris base was in the rue du Bac - an experience that's seared on my soul (and not in a good way, though the rue du Bac itself was rather fine ...).