Health news and other trivia

Walt and I went to the doctor's yesterday. It was time for the twice-yearly check-up and the renewal of prescriptions. Can you imagine this? It costs 22 euros for a doctor's visit here. The price is fixed by the Sécurité Sociale administration. And most of that cost is reimbursed by the national health insurance.

(Some recent flower close-ups to dress up this topic)

Our doctor has his office in a little medical building where there is a receptionist who works for him and four or five other doctors. When you get there, you just walk into a waiting room shared by two doctors. The waiting room furniture is vinyl patio chairs. There are magazines to read. At the appointed time, the doctor comes into the waiting room and greets you, inviting you into his office.

You sit in a chair and talk for a few minutes after presenting your health insurance card. The doctor looks up your files on his computer. Then, after asking how you feel, he tells you to undress. So you do, just in the middle of the office. I don't mean you strip naked, but you get down to your underwear. There's no screen or separate examining room. Then he checks your blood pressure and listens to your heart and lungs with his stethoscope.

At the end of the check-up, you give the doctor his 22 euros in cash or by check. He puts your insurance card into a little reader that sends data to the insurance administration and a few days or weeks later some money (14 euros, I think) shows up on your bank account.

This time, the good news for me was that I have lost seven kilograms since July 2007. I knew I had lost a little weight, but I didn't think it was that much — 15 lbs. Callie the Collie is to thank for that. Those long daily walks in the vineyard are good for her and for me. Walt has lost more than 20 lbs. over the past year or so. Obviously, eating good French food doesn't necessarily make you gain weight.

The bad new was that even though this was a scheduled, routine check-up, I had been feeling lousy ever since I got back from Paris a week ago. I have some kind of throat-mouth-sinus infection that is very unpleasant. My mouth is raw inside and my lips are chapped. My head aches. The doctor doesn't know exactly what it is but he gave me a prescription for some kind of mouthwash that I have to use once a day for a week.

At the pharmacy, Madame Smith (a French woman whose husband is Scottish) went over the instructions for using the mouthwash with me. She said I needed to take it a spoonful of it once a day and hold the liquid in my mouth for 10 minutes. Okay, I said, if I can be quiet for that long. Then she said I was supposed to swallow it.

"Swallow it? I thought it was like wine tasting and I should spit it out," I told her. She smiled at me and said no, swallow it. Doctor's orders. A good Sancerre it is not, but I took some yesterday and at least it doesn't taste too bad.

I'm not so sick that I can't go out or be active, however. Yesterday I spent a couple of hours washing the car to remove accumulated green algae that had grown in all its cracks and seams over the course of the long wet winter we had. And today we are going to drive over to Romorantin, 20 miles or so east, to go shopping in the new Carrefour "hypermarket" over there. Exciting, no?

It's supposed to be in the high 80s F today — 31ºC. That's hot for Saint-Aignan. But tomorrow a rain front is going to move in from off the Atlantic Ocean and temperatures are going to plunge. Oh well.

Window panels at Bourges cathedral

It's fun to take and see pictures of stained-glass windows in churches. The colors come out really vivid when the light is right. Too much bright sun right behind the glass won't work, and neither will a gloomy gray sky.


The day CHM and I spent in Bourges had perfect weather. Mixed clouds and sun, so you had plenty of chances to take a good picture as light conditions changed. Here's a link to the first topic I did about the cathedral at Bourges.


After lunch that day we spent a couple of hours in the cathedral taking pictures. I snapped away with abandon, convinced that if I used up my camera battery it wouldn't matter because I had another, fully charged one in the car. My battery did run down, and when we went back to the car, I discovered I had left the spare battery in its charger... at home!

That limited my picture-taking for the rest of the day, but I was able to take a few pictures here and there. We mostly saw churches, with a couple of châteaux. That's what there is to see here.

An appointment at the doctor's at 9:30 has cut my blogging time very short this morning.

L'Eglise St-Gervais-St-Protais in the Marais

A gothic-style church...

...behind a classical façade

On the way to the Trumilou restaurant with Cheryl on June 2 (can it have been that long ago already?) we walked past the St-Gervais church on the edge of the Marais neighborhood — just as I have done so many dozens of times over the years. It's official name is l'Eglise St-Gervais-St-Protais, and it's in the same neighborhood as the Trumilou restaurant and the Café Louis-Philippe.

Stained glass windows in the Eglise St-Gervais-St-Protais

The Michelin Green Guide says that Gervais and Protais were brothers and Roman military officers who were martyred during the reign of the emperor Nero. As early as the 6th century, there was a basilica on this same site dedicated to the two sainted brothers.

The windows were refurbished in the 1800s

and again over the past ten years by the city of Paris

The window pictured just above is called The Wisdom of Solomon. It shows figures dressed in French Renaissance style and in a Renaissance-style palace. The poses and gestures of the figures are remarkable, as is the detail of their costumes, and this window is an example of technical virtuosity for its time (early 1500s, Flemish school). That's what I read on this site in French.

The current St-Gervais church was built in flamboyant gothic style beginning in 1494 and was completed in 1657. The church's façade is in the French classical style and was built between 1616 and 1621. Some like it, and some don't. In 1918, a German mortar shell hit the church and caused major damage, killing more than 100 people inside. The church was repaired, then, in the 20th century. It is home to a monastic community even now.

Tall vaulting at St-Gervais-St-Protais

Some of the stained glass windows in the church, dating back to the 1500s, survived the WWI bombing incident, as did the church organ and some of the old carved stone and arches. The organ is in fact the oldest church organ in Paris, and the church has played a big role in the history of French music.

Some of the more contemporary windows at St-Gervais

The pictures in this entry include some parts of the old stained-glass windows and some windows that were obviously done as part of the 20th-century repairs to the building. The old windows feature bright panels in primary colors, red and blue, especially, whereas the newer ones use more muted, earthtone colors and abstract forms.

Be careful what you visit, because the Cadogan Guide to Paris says the Eglise St-Gervais-St-Protais isn't even worth going into. I wonder if the guidebook writers saw the same church I saw.

Another lunch at the Café L.-Ph. in Paris

Le Café Louis-Philippe in central Paris

For somebody who almost never goes to restaurants, I had a great month of June. In fact, May wasn't bad either. I got to go have meals in two Paris restaurants where I'd been wanting to eat for years -- one of them twice. Thanks to Cheryl and CHM for the invitations.

The menu

I wrote about the Trumilou here and here and about the Café Louis-Philippe here, here, and here. Then CHM and I went to the Café L.-Ph. again last Monday. It was good the second time too.

A menu on a blackboard

As it turned out, these two restaurants are located just a few steps from each other on the right bank of the Seine, near the Paris Hôtel de Ville and the Ile Saint-Louis. The Trumilou is an old bistrot that I'd been reading about for ten years, and it wasn't a disappointment. The Café Louis-Philippe is a place I had walked past dozens of times during trips to Paris starting in the mid-1990s, but without ever managing to stop in.

Paris is one thing, and Saint-Aignan is another. I was also lucky enough in May and June to eat two meals at one of our local institutions, Le Crêpiot. I blogged about it too.

At the Café L.-Ph., CHM had a herring salad, which is the same thing that Cheryl had when we went to the Trumilou with Claude a couple of weeks earlier. The one CHM had is pictured below, and the one Cheryl had looked like this. Actually, Walt had the same thing at the Crêpiot in Saint-Aignan a week or so earlier. Looks like a trend.

Hareng, pommes à l'huile — herring fillets with potato salad

At the Café L.-Ph., I had what I think is called a Lyonnaise salad: greens with lardons (chunks of smoked pork bacon) and a poached egg. I had had the same salad a the Trumilou a few weeks earlier. The one at the Louis-Philippe was tastier because at the Trumilou the dressing seemed to be watered down. Both had perfectly cooked poached eggs, however. The L'.-Ph's is below and here's a link to the one at the Trumilou.

Salade aux lardons avec un œuf poché

As main courses, I had bœuf bourguignon and CHM had blanquette de veau (links are to pictures I posted a couple of days ago). We chose those because they are classics but also because the L-Ph. has them on its menu every day. The beef was mostly very tender and falling apart, as was the veal. CHM said he thought the rice with the blanquette wasn't very good — it might have been instant rice. And it had some wild rice mixed in. I tasted the veal, however, and can vouch for its goodness.


The weather was gorgeous and warm, and we sat outside at the Café L.-Ph. The service was very good. The terrace is a little noisy because there is a lot of car and truck traffic on the wide street right there along the Seine, but hey, this is Paris and it is bustling.

The lunch (starter + main course) with a small carafe of rosé and a glass of Burgundy red cost just short of €30 per person. That's reasonable for Paris. We didn't have dessert but I did have an espresso.

The café stays open all afternoon and features a wine for daily tasting and drinking. Last Monday it was Chablis, which, in case you don't know, is an excellent dry French-style Chardonnay from the village of Chablis in the northern part of Burgundy. It was going for €4.50 a glass.