Another Out & About- The Sequel

While still in lockdown, we do take advantage of our daily, permitted time to go for a walk. Lately we have used up most of our permitted hour. There are lots of interesting streets, buildings, doorways just calling out to be photographed.

Part of this building is but one room wide. Barely noticeable in the shot are 2 poles attached to this building and the one to the left. I suppose those are supporting the building.

A particularly nice sky on this day.

While many streets are very small alleys, there are a few main roads down which the tram system runs. B walks down this street between the temp apartment and the office. They are permitted to be at the office a maximum of 2 days per week during the lockdown. Other days-- work from home!

Yes, these are roads.

I loved this really big door.

Puy-de-dome is in the distance.

A variety of window coverings.

Through this opening is a street? It's labeled Rue de ...

A drawbridge-like entrance to your apartment!

In front of a building we noticed these medallions embedded in the stone walkway. Vercingetorix, a Gaul chieftain led a failed revolt against Julius Caesar's Roman forces.

Pascal was born here in 1623. He was a mathematician, physicist and more...  

These signs are all over the city. It means wearing masks are obligatory. Above the text is a graphic of a head wearing a mask. 

The Holidays Approach

Christmas is around the corner.

Display at the larger grocery market-- a wide variety of advent calendars, chocolates, etc.

And... they have chestnuts in the market!

On Thursday and Friday, Nov 13 and 14, a 27 meter (90 foot) tall Christmas tree was installed in a square named Place de Jaude. It is located within the 1 km limit from our temp apartment. It is a fir tree which was considered dangerous and could have fallen on homes in a bad storm. So, the 5 ton tree was cut down and transported here to decorate the square for the holidays. I guess we will be able to see it decorated even with the lockdown. I had read about the tree coming, then on a walk, as we approached Place de Jaude, I realized the tree had arrived.

This tree is taller but weighs much less than the tree just installed at Rockefeller Center this week.

The lockdown has indeed been kept in place until at least December 1. We hear that some restrictions will be lessened at some point. We will keep taking walks to watch the tree decorating progress.

To the right of the tree is a statue of the ancient Gallic leader Vercingetorix. The statue was created by Bartholdi— creator of the Statue of Liberty.

Grocery, Bakery, Miscellaneous

We were absolutely spoiled with the coffees available in Indonesia but we are hunting for some French options. The Carte Noire is pretty strong so I use less. The decaffeinated one has a nice flavor and great for late in the day cups. We also found a more mild caffeinated version (no pix). More research will be required.

Did I mention there is no half and half here? The milk we've purchased so far is labeled as semi-skimmed milk (english translation) so we think it's probably 2%.  To be honest, it took us a while to notice this fine print on the bottle. We needed milk and so we bought what we saw. On our next shopping, we will see if we can find real skimmed milk. For coffee, I mix the semi-skimmed milk with cream to come up with a homemade half and half.

There are so many tiny streets to explore here. Most shops are of course closed, but grocery stores, bakeries, pharmacies and even wine shops are considered essential and can be open. Many have limited hours. On one of our many lockdown walks we discovered a bakery near the temporary apartment. This one labels itself as a Boulangerie (bakery) and a Patissier (pastry shop). This shop is just a few minutes of walking away. It is so close, it may be too close. 

B can be seen just entering as he was first in the queue when I shot the photo. From what we've seen, there is a moderate queue line here daily—especially in the morning.  We did purchase a small baguette here as well as two other items.  The patrons seem to self-limit the number of customers in the small shop. This shop is at the intersection of Rue de Pont Naturel and Rue Saint-Alyre. There is a fountain in front of the shop. We've seen a lot of these fountains during our walks. B thinks the fountains are normally working in the summer months. 

This pastry is chocolate, almond paste, and almonds. It was large enough it could easily feed two.

Ah, lemon tart!!! Yum!!!

Shops selling sweets are "essential" I guess because at least some of them are open. We also found our first pate de fruit. Pate de fruit (fruit pastes) are little intensely flavored jellies made from real fruit purees, pectin and sugar. There is a legend these were accidentally discovered by overcooking jam around 1500. Then there is a more likely 'real' origin by about 1700 to preserve harvested fruit. All that sugar! We first had a few of these little gems in Paris years ago and I was so impressed by the quality and variety of flavors. These are just delicious- nothing evenly remotely like a gumdrop or jellies I've encountered in the US.

On our walks we located a Carrefour Market within walking distance. This is a much larger store than the neighborhood Intermarché we frequent.We were out on a certificate to be walking, not buying groceries, so we did "walk" through the store, but didn't buy anything. The next morning we went out on a certificate to be buying groceries and picked up some things.

We also have located a pharmacy with a parking lot in case we ever have to drive to one. Are there enough signs on this door?

I happened to be looking out the window one day and saw our postman. He rides a bicycle.

I discovered a cleaning product in Indonesia. It cleaned glass shower doors and cleaned stainless steel cookware so it looked new. I found it here at the larger grocery market.

Our temporary apartment windows and balcony doors have very interesting "blinds". On our walks, we have seen a lot of buildings outfitted in this way. I took this shot of a window in another building, but these are just like ours. They sit outside the window but are controlled by a device you crank from the inside. The "blind" rolls up into a box above the window. You can adjust the height they are opened or even close them nearly all the way leaving tiny perforations still exposed. I suppose that is for some airflow? There are no screens on the windows. Every evening we close them ( it keeps the apartment warmer) and every morning we open them all.

Remember green stamps or others? You collected the stamps and then could redeem the stamps for merchandise? Our Intermarché market is running just such an event. We now have 4 coffee cups and 4 bowls. The apartment only came with 4 espresso cups and two small, odd coffee cups and only 2 cereal bowls. We had purchased 2 coffee mugs to use but we saved our stamps from the market and turned these:

into these! Now we have 4 coffee mugs and 4 bowls.

Washer/Dryer update. It turns out the technician was unable to get the part to fix the dryer portion of our washer/dryer combo unit. We are told it will be another 3 weeks without a dryer. Not happy about it.

Here is the sky as our first real rains approached. We did have some light rain and/or drizzle before this day. In thinking about it, we've never lived in a place where there was a mountain range next door. I don't really know the impact of such a  topographical element. We do understand what living next to a large lake in winter does to the weather-- SNOW-- but this is new.

We watched it until it got dark and began raining. Later the winds really kicked up. With impressive gusts it sounded like our front door was going to pop open, but it didn't. We weren't treated to any thunder or lightening. Maybe in the summer?

A couple of days later we watched an interesting approach to removing leaves from the street. They used a guy with a pressure water washer to push the leaves around– either into the street (for the street cleaner machines to pick up) or into "natural" areas with bushes/grass.  I will put this system into the same category as the neighbor in Kentucky who would routinely remove light snows from his driveway using his leaf blower.

Another Out & About

The lockdown continues.

The highlight of each day has been a daily walk and possibly a walk to the grocery store if needed. Here is B just back from a solo, early morning walk to the grocery. With every trip out of the apartment, we carry our signed certificates indicating why we are out in the world and we wear masks. A recent update to the online, fillable certificate remembers your personal information so you just have to change the time and check the reason why you are out box and download the form to your phone. We still carry our paper forms as well.

On recent food runs we picked up a couple of French cheeses: 

Tomme de pyrénées which is a rustic cheese, very mild. We haven't been able to label it as similar to something else, but it is good.

We also picked up a small piece of Brie. Yummm!

B picked up an interesting cake mix on an early run before we managed to pick up some flour, sugar, etc. to allow us to bake anything. I was trying to determine which container I would try to bake it in because of the limited options supplied in our temporary apartment. I opened the box. It contained it's own baking pan. Surprise!

It's a pretty good tasting chocolate cake.

We tried yet another French apple: This is something called a Reinette Grise. It's an old French cultivar of a domesticated Grise apple-- a type of "golden" apple that keeps it's shape especially in an apple strudel.  To me this looks much like an Asian pear. Taste was OK.

We had a service call on the combo washer/dryer and it isn't heating for the dryer because a part is bad-- that means another week without a dryer while the technician gets a new part.

We had a big day this week. We spent a couple of hours doing virtual tours of 3 possible apartments and 1 possible house with a realty agent. One of the apartments is a possibility. The house hasn't been ruled completely out yet but it is further out of town and is being completely redone inside so who knows how that will turn out.  After that exciting virtual house hunt, we walked to the bank to open our French bank accounts. It was sort of a cold, drizzly day but I did take this photo. There is an interesting bronze(?) looking statue in the middle of the shot which looked interesting. We hurried back home and back into lockdown due to impending heavier rain.

Printer Issues

We have placed an order for a printer which will make it easier to accomplish things here. For those who don't know, the chips on ink cartridges for inkjet printers are regional. We do have a US printer in our shipment that will come once we find a place to live. However, we cannot purchase cartridges locally for that printer. We did the same thing in Indonesia-- we bought a printer for which we could locally source printer cartridges. The US purchased printer, however, has a document sheet feeder which can send documents to the computer so we hang onto and sometimes use that as well. It just can't print once we use up the cartridges we brought with us. I then sold our Indonesia regional printer to a friend prior to leaving the country. For a day to day printer, we really need to be able to locally source cartridges. The printer and the ream of paper arrived before I published this post! Yay!

Coffee Maker Issues

We purchased a pod coffee maker in Indonesia. We weren't 100% sure we could purchase pods for it in France. It turns out, yes we can! They carry them in the small neighborhood grocery we can walk to from our temporary apartment. Once our shipment arrives, yay!

I should note, though, that we are making some excellent cups of coffee using ground French coffees from the market. I miss my milk foamer, though!

Out & About

As I wrote previously, we were permitted to take short walks while in isolation and we will continue to walk daily during lockdown. Here are some photos. Newly planted tree. Some sort of bamboo wrap fully around the trunk. Could just be so the tree supports don't damage the trunk.

Really old door.

Sidewalk.

Road. Looks very similar to the sidewalk, no?

You can see a tram in this one.- some pavement here but we don't see much of it.

This building dates from 1778. Cool.

We've traded in active volcanoes for dormant ones. View of Puy-de-dome. This is the highest volcano in the Chaine de Puys ( a UNESCO World Heritage Site)-- a series of about 80 dormant volcanoes. Puy-de-dome peak elevation is 1465 m (4883 ft). From what I read, these volcanoes last erupted about 7,000 years ago and were formed in a similar manner to Mt. St. Helen's in the US. Gallo-Roman pilgrims traveled to this spot. There is a temple atop the mountain built in the 2nd Century AD. We could tell it was already raining in the mountains. It started raining here a few hours later. It will be great when we are eventually able to get to the top and have a look-see. We'll be able to share more details!

Our first spotting of a company sign in town as we take our short walks around the apartment.