Strolling…

It was not hard for us to fit into the French way of strolling neighborhoods, pausing for a bite, and sitting in small parks with great views. (Proud to say the outrageous eating I did for two weeks had no negative effects due to the walk, walk, walking also involved.) The first full day we needed to be over in the 5th Arrondissement for our Untours orientation. We started early so we could walk the area and see some sights.
I kept my eyes upward and kept snapping pictures because I was awed by the architecture

We came to Place St. Michel (if there is going to be a student demonstration this is where it will start and locals rose up against Nazis here, commemorated under the dragons) where there is this magnificent fontaine

We did like that they were blowing bubble in our honor (rather than throwing cobblestones)

We walked on toward the Il de la Cite trying to remember to check the red man and green man signs and the zebra stripe crossings (must have been successful because we made it back home)

Discovering bridges and The Seine

(have decided for the next trip a goal will be to walk over every bridge)
We wanted lunch in the Place Dauphine behind the Palais de Justice and here I take a small diversion. We arrived in Paris the day after their Presidential election and in a few weeks they would have more elections so there were some interesting things revolving around the election to see. Lots of activity with press and police at the back side of the Palais

And one of the first chocolate shop windows I looked in (sorry about the glare from the glass) had this wonderful piece in chocolate…a large square, maybe 18 x 18, that looked like a die on top and on its sides had chocolate portraits of Hollande

And Sarkozy

Hollande won and we found our Place Dauphin

A lovely square

We ate right there…

White asparagus and beef salad for him and avocado and shrimp salad for me…

And we looked at this (a ProHDR app shot)

And realized we wouldn’t mind living up at the top in one of these buildings (if there was an elevator)
Enjoyed the blooms on these trees

We walked out the end of the square and saw Henry IV

Down the other side of the island we passed by the Conciergerie Prison where you waited for the guillotine

We passed a demonstration with white flags and whistles blowing

After visiting the big sight of the day, we rested in yet another park with this view (another ProHDR app shot)

I will show you pictures of that big sight in the next post.

Pot pourri…

When we were in Italy last October I took one random segment of video. I have no clue as to why except that it was a beautiful clear day, I was overwhelmed by the environment, and I wanted to remember the music I was hearing. I have been carrying around this one and one half minutes ever since, not knowing quite what to do with it. Almost trashed it many times. Then, for the final project of the Xanthe Berkeley class I was taking we needed to combine video and work with “ducking” sound. I finally had a use for it and I made this memory of Italy from my iPhone photos. It was a fun project to try to find coordinating music for the rest of the movie.

Made a strawberry and ricotta tart after the Chandler strawberries came into the Farmer’s Market last Sunday.

Also came across rhubarb at Whole Food’s. Pulled out my favorite recipe from a book I got many years ago written by the proprietors from a Cafe in Paris. I am going to now have the opportunity to visit this cafe in person.

The black and white striped French fisherman’s shirt I ordered from LLBean has arrived in time for its trip to Paris.

The signatures for my travel journal are ready to be sewn into its cover.

It happened again: before we went to Italy I discovered a magazine I had kept for at least ten years. It was an issue devoted to Tuscany and one of its articles was a list of paper stores in Florence. I had a fabulous time searching for all the stores while I was there. A couple of weeks ago, I went to storage to get some furniture for my daughter who was moving apartments. There was a random box that was labeled papers so I brought it back home with the intention of sorting and recycling. The box was filled with old magazines that had belonged to my father. An example was Life magazine from 1943 talking about the war in the Pacific. (My father had been on a destroyer in the Navy.) There was also a copy of Holiday Magazine from 1948. (I was two!) The table of contents said the magazine had an article about the circus, but all the pages for that were neatly cut out. Most of the rest of the magazine was devoted to Paris! So now I have some wonderful graphics for my travel journal.

The most giggle inducing event is that a long-time friend (we met in fourth grade) and her husband are going to be in Paris at the same time. Happenstance is a powerful thing…if we had tried to actually plan this it never would have worked out. We are like school girls, school girls I tell you…

Still have to do the trial run with the suitcase and apply the Murphy rule. Pack it, then unpack and leave half of the contents at home. Counting down the days…

I no longer say ciao, I have switched to au revoir…

Orvieto…

Our last day trip was further away and actually in Umbria rather than Tuscany. The drive was about two hours and we also got to see a body of water (the only one on the trip). This is Lago di Bolsena.

Orvieto, as were all the hill towns, was magical.

When we first got there we got a little lost looking for the Duomo. An extra treat was coming upon wood sculpture on the walls of a hidden street. I think they are by The Micelangeli Workshop.

Great birds, of course…eventually we found the Duomo.

Inside this Duomo are frescoes by Luca Signorelli of Dante’s Inferno and Paradise. Done forty years before the Sistine Chapel frescoes, they are given credit for influencing the style used by Michelangelo to do the Chapel. They were fantastic (have I said that over and over about this place?). I wish I could show you some images, you will just have to go see for yourself. Across from the Duomo, is a wonderful Etruscan Museum. Of course, the streets are wonderful to stroll.

Then we came home. Processing these pictures and posting these entries has been fun and helped me make sense of the things I saw. The only drawback is the list, longer than my arm, of things we missed, things we should have looked longer at, things we want to do again…now I have to get back to my real world…and plan our next trip.
Ciao

Random impressions…

Truth be told, this was not Terry’s first visit to Florence. More than forty years ago he spent his junior year of college in Switzerland and during the break between sessions he traveled for a few days to Florence and slept on the floor of someone’s apartment. It was three months after the flood of ’66 and when he mentioned it on this trip he was invariably asked if he had been a “mud angel”. (The swarm of students that arrived to help with the clean-up.) Art work is still being restored and like our fires and earthquakes in California, the flood seared the collective consciousness. This is the entry of our apartment with a plaque well above Terry’s head on the wall. These plaques are on many walls in buildings throughout the city indicating how high the water rose on that fateful day.

Random shots of things that I liked on the trip.

Ribollita

Barrista

Brides in Florence and Siena

Alter boys in Pienza

Cats at Boboli and turtles in Siena

Fish in the Oltrarno and crows in a fresco

The market

Polizia

Terry at our doorway in Florence. You can see the size of the sidewalk and to the right just out range is a line of scooters, small cars, and bicycles ready to whiz by.

When we left Florence, Terry had his Audi (since returning home he makes sound effects for his Civic when we go up hills) but I found my heart’s desire on the streets of Orvieto.

A Fiat 500 with the colors of the Italian flag on its rag top and tricked out by Gucci. Heaven…
And for your listening pleasure…

Stripes…

More than twenty-five years ago, I went through a phase where I was obsessed with black and white checkerboard. I put them everywhere I could, bought fabric for quilts in every size I could find, and used them for borders whenever possible. I grew out of that phase, but now I fear it is coming back. Only, this time it is black and white stripes, or maybe grey and white depending on if the building facade has been restored and cleaned in the last few decades. There will be more of these places in the future, but these are the stripes of Siena and Orvieto, my new passion.

And this

Has sides like this

Which when turned into a black and white photo with Dramatic B&W app looks like this

Stripes are the new black…

I like…

about Portland, that it has:
Powell’s Books-a bookstore as big as a city block with uncounted rooms filled with every book you can imagine, and independent, too.
The Hawthorne Bridge-just waiting there to be walked over. (It reminded me that I have never walked the Golden Gate so I have put that on my to do list for a sunny day!) beautiful views and majesty.

Parks from the waterfront

to pocket parks where Kathy’s eagle eyes saw this wonderful elephant sculpture

the mixture of old and new architecture

and the most fantastically, wonderful Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) where we not only got to see the great exhibits, but we got to have lunch with Jenny’s son and my talented niece, Katura, who has just gotten a job there. Can’t get any better than that! I took these shots on the bicycle path back to the Hawthorne Bridge.

Almost forgot, I liked the Portland sense of humor (a sign in the middle of a busy road)

and Voodoo Doughnuts, where there is always a line, twenty-four hours a day, (but I wouldn’t want to eat one…

iPhone Photo Friday…

It began the first night of our recent trip when we arrived in Ashland, Oregon. It happened to also be a Friday night art walk. On one corner was a living sculpture that it took me a moment to realize was actually breathing.

After that, during the trip I kept running into small, and not so small, sculptures that caught my fancy above and beyond the entire street in Seattle’s University District that I have already blogged about. These photos are my subset, in geographic order. The next day after Ashland, we pulled into Eugene and had a couple of hours to kill before we could check into our B and B. We wandered the downtown (honest it was my only short time for souvenir shopping on the whole trip) and Terry shared a bench with other tourists (notice the iPhone and Sudoku in his hand.)

When we left Eugene we paused for lunch at the Portland Zoo where we ran across wonderful small bronze sculptures in front of animal enclosures. This great little pika

was near a facsimile of a sketchbook showing a page on pikas. Great inspiration for budding naturalists!

Mountain goats in front of their enclosure.
A gopher.

A squirrel with his lunchbox of peanuts. I am thinking a whole bunch o little kids have sat on the bench next to this little guy patting him on his head, giving him a good polish.

A beaver.

The beaver was next to a bronze backpack, water bottle and demo sketchbook.

Then, of course, the salmon swimming up stream.

Leaving the zoo we traveled up to Longview, Washington, where we saw the six-foot tall wooden sculpture of a squirrel.

On our way to Hope, B. C., we stopped at Minter Gardens where I made a snide comment and then thought someone might think I was less than gracious when I was a guest in their country. I realized the worker man’s ears didn’t really work with relief.

Rolled into Hope and saw our only bear on the trip.

Near him was a monument to a Mounties’ faithful dog who had given his life to save his master.

Going back south to Salem, as we strolled their waterfront park we came across this statue of Tom McCall, former governor and environmentalist, with a salmon next to the Willamette River.

A sculpture in front of the nearby Children’s Discovery Museum in Salem.

Ashland’s pioneer and lithia fountain and Jacksonville’s pony express rider.

I like what sculptures can say about the history of a place.
These photos were taken with the native camera of the iPhone 4 and then processed with Snapseed on the iPad.

Traveling companion…

On our recent road trip to Canada through Oregon and Washington, I took along a travel journal that I made as a result of taking an on-line class from Mary Ann Moss (her blog is here). The class was called Remains of the Day and the book has a soft cover made from scraps of fabric and has pages of scrap papers sewn together using a sewing machine. The fun thing was that on our second stop my niece, Katura, gave me a bag she had gotten from a street vendor and it was the perfect size and an incredibly coordinating fabric with the book, which then got to travel the rest of the way in style in it’s own little container.

What did I learn from this soft travel companion?
1. When you are my age and you drive six hours on a day, run around and see all the sights that you can, find dinner and then settle in to journal or blog, it is probably not going to happen. I finished blogging about the trip two weeks after I got home and three weeks later I am just now finishing up the journal.
2. I wish I had figured out before the trip that the Diptic app creates a great size image for the size of this journal (6×9). I thought I would use 4″x4″ images but when I started glueing things in I needed some to be smaller in order to fit more. If you create a four box image in Diptic each image is 2″x2″ and they can be cut out individually or cut in a horizontal or vertical strip depending on the kind of pocket you want to slip them in. Wish I had created a Diptic image each evening of the four best shots of the day so they were all ready to print when I got home. My journaling would have been faster. So now I know.

Maps and brochures fit in clear sheet protectors sewn so they are pockets. I do not think this journal will ever be complete, I see myself adding things forever.
The point of this journal was to chronicle what we saw and visited, but now I am working on one that is strictly going to be visual. Another Mary Ann Moss class (called Full Tilt Boogie). I am behind, of course, so although the class has now completed I just finished my first book today. Found a really ratty Victorian photo album on eBay for cheap (the wooden frame inside the cover velvet fell out when I removed it from the photo frames-what is that horsehair it was padded with?) Anyway, recovered it, made a page block, and made a closure because only half the clasp still remained. Light pencil writing indicated it was given to someone on Christmas 1891. Couldn’t save the name, but wanted to keep the date visible. Now to fill it…