Day 2...

Whirlwind comes to mind. Our morning included a gourmet tour of markets, award-winning patisseries and fromagers (where we sampled the goods), a walk through the 5th arrondissement, entry into a secret passage in the middle of the city that our guide was privy to, and a cheese, wine, and grape stop before we embarked to the d'Orsay lunch and museum. More on that later. Our days are full. And though I have been here often, I found much that was new and all that was fun.

I sat where Owen Wilson sat before the black cab picked him up (Midnight in Paris)

There's a whole quiet community of lovely places to live behind these doors.

                     

A jar of Parisian specialties

Art surrounds us.

Writing my memoir where Ernest wrote his.

               

"...strive to live artfully..."

From the graduation speech by Jessye Norman and Oberlin College:

"I remind you, dear graduates, with all that is before you, that you decide to strive to live artfully. It is simpler than you think and is not to be left only to those classmates of yours who have chosen the arts and humanities as their fields of study and proficiency.

You see, art brings us together as a family because it is an individual expression of universal human experience. It comes from that part of us that is without fear, prejudice, malice or any of the other things that we create in order to separate ourselves one from the other. Art makes each of us whole by insisting that we use all of our sense, our heads and our hearts, that we express with our bodies, our voices, our hands, as well as with our minds."

With that in mind, here are a few photos of a magnificent mosaic wall along a walk path in Santa Rosa, California, where we were guests at a very lovely wedding and shared good times with old and dear friends.