I am sure they will not be missed

Things that I do not need and will not miss!

Grande lattes
Supersizing
Those plastic chairs that they sell at Home Depot for $6 that bend this way and that, and that some outdoors terraces use for their customers to sit down in. Don’t see them here, and good riddance.
Lots of ice in your drinks. Get them cold from the refrigerator, but don’t dilute them.

More to come.

I will have to write about small things, while still in the thrall of exoticism. After some weeks I presume that the observations will get subsumed in the quotidian.

The homeless are present on the street of Paris, like everywhere else. They are not called homeless, though; they are designated under the nicely taxonomic and unemotional name of “sans addresse”, without an address.

On our way along the Faubourg Saint Antoine (a busy street) we saw a lady in a raincoat and a headscarf lying on the ground next to her crutches, stirring sugar into her expresso cup, before starting her daily begging job.

Everybody does a lot of walking. It is rare to see anybody eating or drinking while they walk, and those are mostly tourists. I used to think that thirty minutes per day on the Precor qualified as exercise: here, in the first days, I was charleyhorsed to death, but now I am building real stamina.

Yesterday,Thursday, we walked for four hours. Because Linda was feeling unwell, we requested an appointment at the American Hospital, where we were snottily dismissed until next week, and threatened with a $150 charge if we did not show up. Consequently we located a clinic downtown and walked there. We could easily have taken the Metro or the bus, but we thought it would be more fun to walk and watch the neighborhoods and the people. We got to the clinic, next to the Gare St. Lazare, at around 10 am, without an appointment. We waited for about fifteen minutes, and were seen by a general practitioner, in a well equipped small office, who looked at Linda’s throat, wrote a prescription for three products, put her mind at rest with a laughing reference to “Microbes, microbes!” and sent us on our way. Cost: Euros 28 (about $45), and the receptionist was not very sure on how to handle a paying customer. In the pharmacy, just across the street, as we lacked the universal medical card that everyone carries, there was some confusion on how to enter a cash transaction for Euros 19 ($27 aprox.),
The whole medical event took about an hour. Then we happily went to lunch on the roof of Le Printemps for an all-around spectacular view of Paris under a cool blue sky.