April showers

We went out to dinner last night with Bob and Ann, a couple from Maine. We used to have a mutual friend in Bill from New Hampshire. He passed away five years ago already. You might remember him and his comments on this blog.

Bob is a wine writer, and Ann is a writer and editor working in educational publishing. I've followed Bob's blog for years. It was great to finally meet them. The restaurant was crowded, warm, and noisy in a good way. The food was excellent — smoked salmon, foie gras, guinea fowl, sea bass, pork cheeks, rib steaks, and ripe cheeses. No, each of us didn't all have all of that, but all of it appeared on the table at one point or another.

When we left for the restaurant, it was raining and felt cold outside. When is it not raining? Or at least threatening to rain? Ah, France! Ooh, April! Ne te découvre pas d'un fil... The fine food and drink were a good antidote.

The photos here are shots I took out of an upstairs window just a couple of days ago. We didn't end up having storms — those stayed off to the south. We could hear thunder in the distance. It was pretty, but a bright sky would have been just as nice.

Le balcon du Panthéon

Two weeks ago, les parties hautes (the upper levels) of the Panthéon in Paris were re-opened to the public. The 18th-century monument, located in the center of the Latin Quarter, has been undergoing major renovations for several years.

I was surprised when I heard about le balcon du Panthéon, because I don't think I was ever aware that visitors were allowed to go up there. The "balcony" offers a 360º view of the Latin Quarter, the historic center of Paris, and much of the city. I want to go up there this year. Walt might go on May 2, when he'll be in Paris on his way to Montréal and New York.

You might know that I really enjoy seeing Paris from on high. In my life, I've been up to the top level of the Eiffel Tower three or four times (1970, 1997, 2007...) that I can remember. Walt and I climbed the stairs up to the Eiffel Tower's first level, and maybe the second, some 25 years ago. I've been to the top of the Tour Montparnasse as many times, with Walt, CHM, and my friends Evelyn and Lewis (last year), among others. The links here will take you to some of my photos.

A few years ago, when it was first opened to visitors, I climbed up 300 steps to the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques, which stands square in the middle of the city. I took dozens... nay, hundreds... of photos from up there. You can see many of them in these blog posts.

I have good memories of going up into the towers of Notre-Dame and out onto the rooftop with Walt in maybe 1988. « Monte là-dessus — tu verras Montmartre », we joked. We also went up to the top level of the Arc de Triomphe one year — at least 20 years ago — and, around that time, up into the Grande Arche de la Défense, west of Paris proper, for the views from there.

The Panthéon as I saw it from the Jardin du Luxembourg in August 2009. You can see several other photos of the Panthéon by clicking on this link or this one.

So how have a remained ignorant of the balcony of the Panthéon all these years? I worked in the shadow of the monument back in 1974-75, when I was on staff at the University of Illinois Year Abroad Program. We had our office on the rue Soufflot, just down the street. As early as 1970, on my first trip to France, I spent two weeks in a hotel just down the hill from the Panthéon, near the Place Maubert. I was a teacher at the nearby Sorbonne in 1975-76.

Despite all the time I spent in the neighborhood, I never knew I was missing out on a chance to go up to the balcony that surrounds the base of the dome of the Panthéon. Now I have all these digital cameras to take up there with me. I can't wait to go this summer. You have to pay the 8.50€ entry fee to get into the Panthéon, plus a 2.00€ surcharge for the guided tour up into the parties hautes du monument. Not bad.

By the way, yesterday I was wondering how high the Panthéon balcony is compared to the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques. Walt looked it up. He found a site that gives not only the height of the buildings but also the altitude above sea level of the ground that various Paris monuments stand on.

It turns out that the Tour Saint-Jacques is built on ground that is at 35 meters above sea level, and the top of the tower is 54 meters above ground. That means that when you're up there, you're at about 89 meters (or some 290 feet) above sea level.

The Panthéon, built on top of the big hill called La Montagne Sainte-Geniviève, stands on ground that is 58 meters above sea level, and the staircase (200 steps) that leads up to the balcony is 35 meters tall. So when you're on the balcony, you are at 93 meters, or about 305 feet, of altitude. I think I got all that right.

Here are links to several web pages in French, with photos, about the Panthéon and its balcony: easyvoyage.com, the newspaper Le Parisien, franceinfo.fr, and paris-pittoresque.com.

« Les Bouleaux »

Les Bouleaux — The Birches — is the name of our house and land on official maps. It's a house we found in December 2002, with the help of a real estate agent who had offices in Amboise and Montrichard. We had come to France to look at houses for sale in the area around Vouvray and Amboise, but we had no idea we'd put a down payment on one right then. I had quit my job in October, and I'd been spending time on the web looking at houses that were for sale in the Loire Valley.

In four days, the realtor showed us about 15 houses around Montrichard, Amboise, and, at his suggestion, Saint-Aignan — a town we had never heard of, much less set foot in, before. All were in our stated price range. At the time,we were living in San Francisco, where we had bought a house seven years earlier. I was tired of the rat race of a life that I was living there — driving 100 miles a day to Silicon Valley and back, spending 3 to 5 hours daily in the car, in freeway traffic, five days a week.

When we saw Les Bouleaux, we looked at each other and said, "We could live here one day." It was the only one of the houses we saw in those four hectic days where we could clearly starting picture a new life. Part of it was the setting — the house is at the end of a dead-end road, at least as far as pavement is concerned. There are vineyards on two sides, and a dirt road running through the vines. But it's only two miles from the center of Saint-Aignan and all the conveniences we need.

There's a tall hedge around the sides of the property (half an acre) where you'd be glad to have some privacy. And all the rooms have big windows that let in a maximum of daylight and provide views. The yard was already landscaped, and there was room for a vegetable garden. There was attic space that could be converted into one, two, or three rooms at some point. The place was modern (built in the late 1960s) and didn't need major renovations. We could move right in if we decided to.

A few days later, back in San Francisco, we sent the real estate agent some money to put a hold on Les Bouleaux. The closing date was set for April 15 — 13 years ago today — which gave us time to arrange financing for the actual purchase. We thought we might refinance our house in San Francisco to raise some more cash, and I would look for a new job. We'd have a place in France where we could come spend as much time as possible each year, and we'd slowly fix the place up, with retirement as our timeframe (I was 53 years old). We had met in Paris in the early '80s, and we'd spent most of our vacations in France for nearly 15 years.

Well, it didn't happen that way. We decided pretty quickly to see what kind of price we could get for our house in San Francisco if we were to sell it. We got the agent who had earlier helped us buy it to put it on the market. We did some improvements — painting, mostly, and some cleaning out to make the place feel more spacious. Whether you are planning to sell and move or not, those are always efforts that pay off.

We ended up selling the SF house in February 2003 for nearly three times what we had paid for it in 1995, and for quite a bit over the asking price. We could pay off the mortgage and still have a tidy sum left over. We could afford Les Bouleaux and still have money to cover living costs for a few years. By June 2003, we had moved into our house near Saint-Aignan.

Macro and zoom

Most of the photos I took that first day (last Monday), after I received the new old camera, were macro shots. That means close-ups, with the camera set in what is called macro mode. One definition of macrophotography is "extreme close-up photography, usually of very small subjects, in which the size of the subject in the photograph is greater than life size."

That applies to at least some of my photos, including the one above. Click on it to see it at a larger size. The insects in it are harmless little creatures called firebugs, or gendarmes in French. They're about the size of a ladybug, they don't fly, and they feed on plant debris, cleaning up your yard for you as they enrich the soil.

The one above of some some purple flowers in the neighbors' flower garden is zoomed in. The TZ18 handles both kind of photos well. The photo below is also a zoomed shot. The cameras has a 16x optical zoom, and an optical zoom range of 24 (wide angle) to 384 (telephoto) millimeters, if that means anything to you.

The houses above are on the other side of the Cher River from our house, and maybe 3 km (nearly 2 miles) from where I was standing when I took the picture. I didn't have any kind of support for the camera, which I was just holding in my hands. And no, there's no viewfinder, just the LCD screen on the back of the camera.

As you can see in the two photos above, irises are starting to bloom in our yard. It's early yet, but a bed of iris bulbs I planted two or three years ago and which was nearly overtaken by weeds for a while has now crowded those weeds out. There are only two or three flowers right now but there will soon be many more. I took the first photo on Monday, and the second on Tuesday after it had rained.

Finally, here's a branch of one of the plum trees out on the edge of the vineyard, taken against a clear blue sky. Unless the weather turns really cold, it looks like we'll have a good year for both red and yellow plums.