The ballet

Unbelievably lovely here today. Sunny, 55 degrees and of course no school. Maybe lots of people have a work holiday because the parks and gardens are full of people enjoying the bright green lawns and the fountains, just like a summer weekend. Shoppers everywhere too, in many shapes and speaking many languages. You hate to think the overweight ones might be Americans; then, unfortunately, you see one carrying Rick Steves' PARIS book. 

In our apartment we're lucky to look at a small park across the street in front and onto a green courtyard behind us:

We're just back from coffee, a walk beside the Louvre along the Seine (below, with the two square towers of Notre Dame in the distance) and some shopping ourselves, and ready for an early supper and a trip to the majestic old Garnier Opera House (photo and photo) for an evening of ballet. More on that later.

The ballet

The day I started grad school in upstate New York fifty-one years ago, a professor said the thing he most enjoyed when he went to New York City was the ballet. This South Dakota country boy couldn't imagine that. Now he can! Tonight was one of the loveliest musical evenings ever. Our seats, the only ones available a month ago, like at the opera last night were at the very end of one of the rings. But this time it was the bottom ring, not the top, and the seats were like our own private box, right across from the elaborate Royal box. We could almost have have jumped onto the stage or straight down onto the tuba player. As from similar seats at Lincoln Center once, we could practically smell the sweat. Those lighter-than-air leaps? They end with a thud. Those effortless lifts? Straining, quivering muscles. But what an ideal balance of music, drama, scenery, costume, athleticism and, of course, elegant movement .. music by Tchaikovsky, a tragic love story (Eugene Onegin) by Pushkin, danced by a world-class ensemble. Thankfully, Elsa had told me the plot. From then on, in one of the world's grand old opera halls (with a new ceiling by Chagall), it was sheer delight.

And then, just across the street, Christmas lights on the Galleries Lafayette department store. What a Christmas.

Ah, but then there's that transit system. After spending just a minute at Galleries Lafayette, we rounded the corner to the bus stop only to see our #52 departing, heading straight to our neighborhood. No problem, an electric sign tells you how many minutes till the next bus arrives. Wrong .. this time the sign said "Last departure. Service terminated." At only 10:20. Happily, there's a Metro station right there too, so we took it home instead and probably faster, but with two problems. We just missed a departing train at the point where we had to change lines, waiting an extra-long nine minutes. And in walking that underground "correspondance" from line 8 to line 10, we had to climb 49 steps!!!!! And THAT is why we always prefer the bus!!