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Au Revoir, Paris

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Monday, November 19 I remember more than a decade ago, we were visiting Paris and I saw a row of bike-share rentals. It was the first time that I had actually seen one. That concept had not come to New York City yet. The bikes were all purple and the company was called Velib. I took a great photo of the bikes all lined up. All you needed was a credit card to tap on the meter and off you would go. Naturally, the US did not have that type of credit card, so I couldn't take one out for a spin. Now, years later, the concept is still going strong in Paris and other French cities. But, this time around, Velib has bikes that are electric and you don't need a credit card, you just need the app on your phone. (Smart phones didn't even exist back then!) Monday was a work day, so these are all lined up by commuters. And now, there is a new business that we didn't see last year -- renting electric scooters. Same deal; use the app and you're on your way. These sco
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Paris

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Wednesday, November 14 Larry does not like cities but he makes an exception for Paris. I'm a city girl at heart, so I feel reasonably at home here -- with the exception of the language barrier, of course. I am learning some new vocabulary which I can understand when it is written down, but I am totally unable to understand anything that is spoken -- even when I hear it and see it at the same time. My ear is not tuned to the cadence of French, and the French do not speak distinctly. They slur their words together as if an entire sentence were one word.  Someone that I was talking with recently (in English) said that just about anyone under the age of, say, 40 has learned English in school as it is becoming the lingua franca of the European Union. (Isn't that ironic since England is leaving the EU.) Americans and Brits (and Canadians, and Australians, etc, etc) will in future decades have less trouble when they come here to France. However, since French is not widely spok
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