Shopping for a wedding dress!

This week I did something I haven't done in over 10 years, and that is to go wedding dress shopping! My friend, Amanda (that I wrote about May 24th) and I went shopping for her wedding dress.  It was so much fun!  Amanda described what she was looking for in a bridal dress, so I kept my eyes open for one that she might like, and I found one on the way to my French class.  Wow!  She tried on the model and it was beautiful, fit her perfectly, and cost 1850 euros, which is close to $2000!  It was silk and every dress is custom made to fit the particular bride, hence why it was so expensive.

Needless to say, we passed on it and looked some more.  At the next shop, she tried on one of their two short dresses, and it was gorgeous!  So, after only trying on two dresses, she found the perfect one, and at a much more reasonable price!  She is beautiful in it and though I am invited to the wedding, I will be in the U.S. when she gets married!  I am soooo disappointed but they couldn't change the date so I'll just have to see all the pictures!  I'll also miss getting to spend time with her mom, who is also a friend of mine, when she comes for the wedding!  

(Excuse the poofy hair.  Must have been a windy day and I did't notice my hair was messy. Nor did Amanda mention it.)

The other big thing that happened this week was receiving a gift from Amanda's mom!  When Linda sent Amanda a care package, she included Fritos for me!  Yea!  My absolute favorite snack food!  We had company over for dinner on Saturday night and shared our treasured gift with them, and then I had Fritos with my chicken salad wrap on Sunday evening!  I hope Amanda tells her mom how much I enjoyed her gift!

3 days a week Glenn and I pass through the Luxembourg Garden on our way to and from language class but it has usually been overcast each time.  This past week the sun was finally shining as we walked through so I took advantage of the bright sunshine to take a picture of the beautiful gardens!  It is a huge place, loved by joggers, strollers, lovers and senior adults alike.  There are also some really interesting playgrounds for my grandkids!  Glenn and I are making mental notes about where all the cool playgrounds are!  (I heard that groan, Kiwi! I'll start writing them down too!)

One day as Glenn and I were walking through downtown, we came across this gas station!!!  It is truly a drive-thru!  There are no air pumps, no repairs done on site, no car wash, just gas.  :-)

Love the sushi delivery moto with the sign on it that asks what we think of his driving!

And Glenn's favorite is the Speed Rabbit Pizza place.  Is the rabbit on speed, or is the rabbit on pizza?

Or did they mean Speedy Rabbit pizza???

Today is Father's Day. While officially celebrated in both the U.S. and France on the third Sunday in June, Father's Day here in France is basically ignored for the most part, and another holiday is celebrated in it's place.  Fete de la Musique is BIG here!  It is celebrated on June 21, the summer solstice, and goes until midnight.  It is a celebration of music, performed all day and night by professional musicians and amateurs alike, in the streets, on the sidewalks, in parks, in concert halls, EVERYWHERE!

I was invited by our pastor's wife to go to a concert in a park today on the other side of Paris to hear one of the young men from our church.  (He's in black, on the far right end on the row above the director.  He's playing a violin.)

As it turned out, it was MORE than a concert!  There was a play using human marionettes, with 4 opera singers singing as the characters acted out the story, and the orchestra played the music written by Mozart.

The character on the left is a person with a huge mask, but the bird on the right is a puppet attached to the front of a person's body.  I didn't recognize it, though Lydi said EVERYONE has heard the story of ....  (everyone except me, evidently.)

Anyway, it was 2 hours long (and I mean LONG; come on, it was orchestra music, with opera singers, in French, and strange characters.  Oh, and we were in a concrete amphitheater.  Believe me, it was long.)  It was interesting though and I'm glad I went, even though it took a 4 hour chunk out of Glenn's Father's Day celebration!

Did you call your Dad to wish him a happy Father's Day?  I hope so!

Nice and quiet ...

It's been a quiet week around the Borders' apartment, which has been nice.  

Glenn and I are taking a French refresher course at Alliance Française that meets 3 mornings a week (lundi, mardi et jeudi) from 9 am to noon.  On Tuesday (mardi) after class, we met up with a couple from our organization for lunch in town, and then went back to Alliance Française to study in the library for a couple of hours.  (We saw on the library shelves a copy of Bien Dire, the french magazine that our daughter used to edit when she lived in Lyon!  How cool is that!)

After a couple of hours of studying in the library, we met up with the 28 other people who signed up for a field trip to the famous kitchen of Le Cordon Bleu!

Founded in 1895, Le Cordon Bleu in Paris is world renowned for it's educational program, dedicated to teaching the highest level of culinary and hospitality instruction to students who come from all over the world.  "Le Cordon Bleu is considered to be the guardian of French culinary technique that continues to preserve and pass on to future generations the mastery and appreciation of the culinary arts."  :-)

But before we could learn all their special secrets, we learned about the many French wines that are produced throughout the various regions of the country.  Not being a connoisseur nor even a fan of wine (about the only time I've had wine has been during the Lord's Supper in churches here in Europe),  I had a lot to learn.  It was interesting, even if the knowledge won't be particularly useful to me in the future. 

 I learned that the best wines produced in France are exported (because they can make more money selling them elsewhere) and therefore it is difficult, if not impossible, to buy the best quality French wine here in France.  I also learned that the residue that sticks to the side of a wine glass when it is swirled has nothing to do with the quality of the wine, but everything to do with the cleanliness of the glass.  The wine sticks to particles on the glass!  The purpose of swirling the wine is to oxygenate it to bring out the flavor. Also, it is a technique called "playing with your drink".  :-)

Then the chef prepared a colorful meal of meat that was basically lightly boiled for a few minutes and a side dish of green beans with beets, carrots, shallots, peas and snow peas all boiled in different pots of water, added together at the end and with a  large dollop of butter.  No French bread.  No dessert.  An incomplete meal, if you ask me!

While his "assistants" were slicing the pieces of meat and spooning the veggies on small plastic plates, the chef was creating his masterpiece for our aesthetic pleasure.  :-)  We watched him WITH HIS FINGERS painstakingly arrange the green beans, carrots and beets in a colorful "pile" (I don't know the technical culinary term for piling food) and then strategically placed 4 peas in a line on the plate to fan out from the pile of veggies.  

I'm sure to him it was a work of art, but to those of us who had not eaten dinner and had been sitting there for 2 1/2 hours, we were starving to death and just wanted to eat!

The finished culinary delight!  I guess the 4 peas in a line were on the back side of the meat, but do you see the drops of beet juice that he has dribbled across the plate???

The cooking demonstration was VERY interesting (it should be ...  at the cost of 40 euros that came out of our registration fee to Alliance Française) and the chef was quite entertaining as he bantered back and forth with his audience and shared cooking tips with us.  How was the meal?  The meat was tender and cooked to perfection and the veggies were very flavorful but by time all of us were served, the food was cold.  It was 9:00 pm when we finally got to eat so we were starving and would have been happy with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!

As I mentioned, it was a quiet week around our place.  Saturday, we did odd jobs around the apartment.  I was taking care of things that had been covering the dining room table (my office) and Glenn was digging out from under the pile on his desk.  Glenn must have finished his pile first and was bored because I found him in the kitchen with a duster!!!

I've often said there is nothing sexier to a wife than to see her husband pushing a vacuum cleaner or  dusting the house!  Look at that fine specimen of a man!  He's got the moves that make my heart flutter!!!

We're here for two more weeks before we hit the road again ...

A little of Paris

This has been a busy week, and the week of my birthday!  Before I share with you some pictures I took on my birthday present, I want to show you a picture of some of our dear friends from Cote d'Ivoire.  

We've been in touch with Martine and Ambroise ever since we left Africa, over 20 years ago.  Ambroise used to work at the student center with Glenn, and Martine worked with Childhood Evangelism Fellowship.  Now Ambroise is the national director of Childhood Evangelism Fellowship in Cote d'Ivoire.  Skype is a wonderful thing since it allows us to keep in touch through the years and across the miles!

We had language class this past week on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday mornings.  I would show you a picture of Alliance Francaise where we take our course but they have security folks at the front gate who might fuss at us taking pictures of the building.

For my birthday (which was Friday), Glenn and I joined two other ladies who also celebrated their birthdays this past week and another couple on Saturday morning to go sightseeing in Paris on the Big Bus, one of the hop on-hop off bus companies.  

It was a lot of fun as we rode the large loop around the major tourist sites.  It was a great overview of the city.  :-)

Rather than show you one of the many, many huge, ornate and famous buildings, I'm showing you some things that are a little more unusual.  These were some really old cars that were on display.  I thought of my son and how much he would have loved seeing this.  Not quite as large as the Cruise Nights that we used to go to in Marietta with 30-50 cars!

In 1895, two men opened a fashion store in a small haberdashers shop at the corner of rue La Fayette and the Chaussee d'Antin in Paris.  The endeavor was so successful that the next year their company purchased the entire building.  Galeries Lafayette  is currently housed on 10 floors, and has expanded to 6 other countries around the world, with more expansion planned for the future.

On the left bank of the Seine River are some vendors with all kinds of souvenirs from France.  My favorites are the oil and watercolor prints of sights from around Paris.  I could spend hours thumbing my way through the stacks of them!

Saw this street sign for one of our former Presidents.  :-)

Having wedding pictures taken in public places at famous sights is something that is very European that, as far as I know, has not made it to America yet.  We've seen this in many countries in central and eastern Europe.

The Big Bus tour lasted 2 hours if you stayed on the bus and rode the route straight through, so we finished just in time for lunch.  We were close to the Latin Quarter where there were lots of interesting places to eat, but we settled on a 1950's diner that sells hamburgers and serves A & W root beer!

The rest of the group stayed longer to go back on the bus and get off at particular places that they wanted to visit up close, but Glenn and I had to get back to Gentilly by 3:00 pm.  Our church planned a work day in the yard to spruce it up so, as good honorary church members, we cut our Big Bus ride short and headed home to get our work gloves.  Unfortunately, we were the only ones to show up!  We worked for 1 hour 45 minutes, and then after washing up in the kitchen sink, Glenn and I headed back into town to a huge used bookstore that we discovered a couple of weeks ago.  So much fun!

Well, back to language school again this week.  We've got an exciting field trip on Tuesday afternoon so come back next week to find out where!

Have a good week!