L'On Y Danse

Oct. 12

Another life ambition achieved today: I danced on the bridge, or what’s left of it, at Avignon. To my own extremely poor accompaniment: “Sur le pont d’Avignon” et cetera. OK, so I don’t dance well, but I try to move like a movie gangster when I do it, so nobody will give me a hard time.

From the time more than 40 years ago when I first heard the song and learned what the words meant, I have wanted to come here and see the bridge. Then I learned that most of it had fallen down centuries ago. That’s all right, so did London Bridge, and I crossed the ocean to see that.

If you’re old like me you pay 11 euro for one ticket that gets you onto the bridge and also into the Palace of the Popes. Quelque chose! a bargain.

And it was an all-day trip. We left the hotel around noon and went to the post office because I had a couple of cards to mail to the States.

The post office is right by one of the city gates. The walls run all around Avignon. They are largely intact, but in bad repair. People aren’t allowed to walk on them because some of the stones are loose. You could fall, or knock one down on somebody’s head.

Many of the old stone walls here are made of limestone or sandstone, or maybe chalk and butter. I’m not sure. In the Palace of the Popes, Joanna brushed against a wall when she was trying to take a picture, and there was white dust all over her trenchcoat.

Many walls have deep holes where the stone has dissolved in the wind and the rain. I put my fingers into one stone and some grains came away. It was upsetting. Oh no, I just took six months off the life of somebody’s house.

In fact, the window of my room looks out on some ancient-looking stone walls. You can see where a piece of one of them fell and lodged in the roof of an adjoining building. Now, if that happened in New York, or maybe anywhere in the States, there would be a dozen hungry lawyers trying to find out who owns the roof and how much they can get.

The bridge that stands in the Rhone now consists of four arches. There used to be more than 20. The original bridge was the inspiration of someone named St. Benezet. He raised money in the 12th or 13th century and roused people to build it.

The Rhone at this stage outweighed medieval bridge work by a good measure, so the thing kept falling down. It was abandoned in the 17th century. The last remaining arches were restored in the 19th or 20th century and are now part of the Unesco World Heritage Site at Avignon. The papal palace and a couple of other things are also part of that.

It is made of blocks of stone and is paved with a difficult surface of river stone laid in concrete. Think of round bulbous things poking up to torture you.

Joanna says this kind of surface is recommended for reflexology. If you walk on the surface in your bare feet, it makes you healthy. I walked on that pavement in my long-distance shoes, a pair of rubber-soled Rockports, and those stones took some work.

I have learned on this trip that the Rhone was the border between France and somewhere else. The popes lived on this side and Philip the Fair had the other. the bridge was heavily protected on both sides. There’s something, the tower of Philippe le Bel on the far side of the Rhone. The Avignon side includes a drawbridge.

I suddenly remembered my Monty Python. Imagine a bunch of French guys running across the bridge shaking their swords. The drawbridge goes up. They fall into the river. The pope is on the wall saying, “Aha, you silly French persons, your father is a hamster and your mother smells of elderberries. I fart in your general direction.” Or words to that effect.

I’m sure that Matt, who has the movie memorized, can give me the correct dialogue.

When we came to the end of the current bridgework,  Joanna got a cool shot of our shadows in the water. There we are on the Rhone.

We left the bridge and climbed a tower to see if it led to the palace. It didn't, but that's all right. You can see why.

We backtracked and wandered toward the plaza where they actually let you into the palace. It was 2 o’clock by then and I hadn’t had wine all day. But there is always a cafe when you need one. I was able to order a cheese plate with bread and a glass of white Cotes du Rhone.

There were two soft cheeses and one hard, served with a fig and some tapenade, probably egg plant. This white was very interesting with the cheese. It had several fruity and sometimes even mineral flavors, and they changed depending on the type of cheese I had just eaten. I think Joanna noticed that too.

After lunch, we climbed a steep alley of stairs and came out into the plaza of Le Palais des Papes.

The palace has wings inside wings, and there used to be more. After the Revolution it was adapted to serve as an army barracks and several structures were torn down.

I think the place was planned to be confusing, to control housebreakers and assassins. Unless you were an insider and knew your way around it, you would get lost in there and starve.

We followed the tour circuit because there were signs pointing the way, but I had no idea where we really were at any time inside the palace.

It is fascinating even now with the furnishings gone. Some rooms, like the papal apartment, have period furniture, but the pieces are not original to the house.

Many rooms—and this I found astonishing—are still covered with vivid painting from the 1330s. Chaucer really was a boy then. The pope’s room is decorated with a tracery of vines with birds and small animals hidden in the motif. The recesses for the windows are painted with trellises and trefoil arches so they look like corridors or alleyways.

It’s very amusing stuff, and according to the notes, shows the influence of early Renaissance techniques being developed in Italy at the time.

There is a chapel dedicated to John the Evangelist and John the Baptist that is still very much preserved. In the panel where they bring Salome the head of the Baptist on a charger, there is a puppy standing next to her.

The consistory, where the pope met the cardinals for official business, the chapel, and the dining hall are huge spaces with Gothic vaulted ceilings.

There are displays of fragmentary objects found during excavations on the grounds, often they are bits of stained glass, or small ornaments. There is a pile of round stones in one corner outside. They are bullets thrown by ballistas or trebuchets, or some other kind of early artillery during various times when the palace was under siege.

One display includes fragments of the pope’s artillery. That case also includes a human skull pierced by the quarrel from a crossbow.

The tour lets out on the far side of the palace, and so we wandered for a while through some very narrow, very old streets.

We saw a drawing of the bridge of St. Benezet somewhere in the day’s travels, and it shows the palace, and behind it an open space with what appear to be windmills. They’re not going to fit any windmills in the old city now. There is no room for sidewalks so you have to watch for the cars and get up against the wall when they go by.

We headed back to the hotel for a breather. Joanna took a nap. I opened the other bottle that we bought at Et Si Bacchus Etait une Femme. The label says Les Tetes de Chats, Coteaux du Giennois, 2007. It is bottled by Mathieu Coste, vigneron a Villemoison. I think it’s form the Loire Valley. At least, that’s what the lady at the wine shop told me.

A very interesting drink, it had an almost spicy hot bite. If I remember what Larry told me, the Loire Valley sits on a vast limestone formation that flavors the soil, the grapes, and so the wine. I have sensed a pleasant mineral flavor in other Loire wines, but this was different, and very good in its own way.

Later, for dinner, we retraced our steps from the night before. On the way to New Ground, we had stopped in front of another restaurant to look at the menu. The waiter opened the door for us. We already had a reservation, so we told him “tomorrow.”

This was tomorrow. L’Hermitage is tiny and the menu very short. It bills itself as Provencal.

We started with appetizers. The terrine maison tout cochon was a mixture of onion, other stuff, and maybe pork. It came in two parts, one on a thick slice of lettuce and the other on a cake that may have been foie gras. Les oeufs mollet aux girolle were poached and the yolk still runny, served in a bowl with a creamy sauce.

For dinner we had a filet of beef with real French fries. The meat was not as tender as you’d expect in an American restaurant, probably because the beef was grass fed, but that made it taste even better.

Wine, for my record, was Domaine du Coriancon by Francois Vallot, vigneron a Vinsobres. It was labeled “cru des Cotes du Rhone” and was a blend of Grenache, syrah, and Mourvedre grapes.

Hot damn! Vive la Provence.

Oct. 12 My dear Grasshopper,

"Les oeufs mollet aux girolle were poached and the yolk still runny, served in a bowl with a creamy sauce."

Did you copy the name of that dish correctly? I wasn't sure, so I did a Google translate: "the calf eggs with chanterelles." If I remember my French, folks would use "oeufs l'agneau" — the lamb eggs — as a polite way of saying one of my favorite dishes in Morocco, lamb's testicles. Is it possible your eggs had no yolks at all, but were indeed calf's testicles? Call me curious.

Larry

Oct. 12

Sorry to say, I'm pretty sure these were hen's eggs, Sensei.

Had I the slightest clue that I was eating anything even remotely like prairie oysters, you know I'd be bragging about that.

These were soft white eggs, with a runny yellow yolk. By the shape, I knew they were poached or cooked in a similar way.

Grasshopper

Oct. 12

Hmmm...how did they come up with that name for the dish? I will have to ask my friend Claude the next time I talk to him

Larry

Oct. 13

I have a Collins translating dictionary with me. The assumption that I have miscopied something in French is always a good one.

This time, however, the dictionary says “mollet” as a noun can indeed mean “calf” or “calf leg,” which of course I didn't know until just now when I looked it up. The word's also an adjective that means "softish" and that's where the dish name comes in.

Collins lists a special usage of “oeufs mollets” as “soft-boiled eggs.” So these may have been soft-boiled and taken out of the shell whole. Or maybe poached also counts.

Oct. 13

Mystery solved....nice work.

Larry

Under the Watch of Popes and Sphinxes

October 11

The wine I opened on the train was very good indeed. Of course, it’s hard to beat a smooth, fruity wine sipped from a plastic cup at some improbable speed across the Earth. I don’t know how fast the Train a Grande Vitesse goes, but I did notice that poles near the tracks disappear. An occasional blip of a shadow is all you see.

Riding on a train is always fun. In the States, you see the seediest sides of cities because that’s where the warehouses are.

On this trip, we went through farms and forests. The ground just south of Paris is as flat as East Texas or South Jersey. Then it starts to roll. The farms and villages have terra cotta roofs, maybe made by Rodin. Who knows?

We had bought a sandwich at the station. Sandwiches are very popular and are sold in most places that sell bread. It’s funny, though, because as rich and complex as so much French food is, the sandwiches are simple. This one had one layer of meat and one of cheese, no dressing.

Maybe the filling is considered dressing for the bread. The bread here can be a meal in itself.

The TGV has a station of its own in Avignon. The cab ride is OK. You see the Rhone and some hills. The shapes of the architecture, the cars, and the signs tell you that you’re someplace else. It doesn’t look like home, so it’s kind of fun.

Then you come to the city walls. Wow, now you know that you’re someplace else.

We’re staying on the second floor of the Danieli, a small hotel in the old city. There is no elevator, so carrying the bags up was good exercise. The room is at least twice the size of the one in Paris.

We had been sitting on the train for two and a half hours, so it was time for a walk. We headed toward the Palace of the Popes. It was around four in the afternoon, so we didn’t go inside then.

We did climb up to the attached church, but the entrance was blocked off by a truck and a temporary fence. The church is on a hill overlooking the Rhone. You can see the remnant of the old Pont d’Avignon, on which people dance, according to the song.

The bridge is one of the things I came here to see.

The wind was kicking up and the drizzle sent us back to the old town square, La Place d’Horloge, which is a few hundred meters from the hotel. It’s where the city buildings are and it’s named for a clock that was put there in the 15th century, when a clock was a rare thing.

We sheltered from the rain in a cafe called La Civette. Joanna warmed up with hot chocolate, and I saw white Cotes du Rhone on the menu. Wow, even the luncheonettes down here carry it.

So I had a glass from les vignerons de Roquemaure. The white Cotes du Rhone is hands-down my favorite white wine. I drink some others on occasion—Chardonnay with Thanksgiving turkey, for instance, or Loire Valley whites, which have a mineral aftertaste—but not a lot. I find them light and a little on the sweet side.

White Cotes du Rhone is almost as good as a red. It’s hearty and has enough flavor to fill the mouth.

We wandered down a couple of side streets after the rain let up. We came to a medieval church dedicated to an early Bishop of Avignon, St. Agricol. Parts of the building date back to the 7th or 8th century. Most of it is later, maybe 12th or 13th century.

Outside are remains of the old Roman walls of the city.

We came back to the hotel, which is covered in ornate Belle Epoque grandeur. You enter through an alley that makes an S curve. I like the sphinxes guarding the door. They make me feel secure.

We found a guide book in the lobby and took some notes on restaurants. We had a few candidates and wound up at one with the unlikely name of New Ground.

It specializes in Provencale cooking.

I was going to order the house red, which was 2 euros and change per glass. The waiter showed me the list of bottles. I could get a whole bottle of Cotes du Rhone rouge for less than the cost of three glasses of wine in Paris.

He recommended Les Amariniers, Cotes-du-Rhone Villages, 2012. The village is Signargues. The wine is made from a blend of Grenache and syrah grapes. I know this because the notes on the back label are in French and English.

According to a sticker on the front of the bottle, it took the Medaille d’Or at the 2013 Councours des Vins in Orange.

First course was grilled tuna. It was supposed to come with mashed sweet potatoes. There was a mashed vegetable, but I had never seen green sweet potatoes. There was a kind of ratatouille made of leeks and mushrooms.

We asked the waiter about the green sweet potatoes. So happens, they weren’t sweets at all, but mashed peas. “There was a problem in the kitchen,” the waiter said.

I can only say, give me more problems like that one. This was comfort food right from the start.

That was followed by duck leg with herbed rice and another ratatouille-like dish of sweet peppers, eggplant, and small tomatoes.

The food, along with numerous glasses of a superb red, put a great cap on the day.

I put the remains of the bottle in my raincoat pocket and we set out for a stroll.

I think we stopped at a bar back at La Place d’Horloge, then came back to the Danieli, where I polished off the Signargues.

Oct. 12

Grasshopper,

Enjoying your missives and so glad you know just how lucky you are to be there. One of my favorite parts of the world. Avignon is OK, but the surrounding country is incredible, with the occasional exception of suburban-style blight. I hope you get the chance to return for a longer stay.

Random thoughts:

The ramparts are really cool, yes? And the way they connect into the Palace of the Popes is really something.

Try to get to Les Halles. A modern market where you'll find lots of local products and flavor. 

Most of the restaurants in that big public square are not very good.

And I'm impressed with your white wine crusade. It's exactly what I do when I'm there. Some are really interesting. See if you can find a Vacayras white (the reds can be excellent, as well.) And need I say, if you feel like a splurge, a white Chateauneuf du Pape from the right producer, with a little age, can be a revelation. But proceed gingerly. Lots of bad Chateauneuf du Pape around in those parts. If it seems too cheap, it's probably not even worth what you're paying for it.

Try to eat some lamb. The area is known for it.

Have fun!!!

Larry

Pont, Pontoise, et La Porte de L’Enfer

October 10

Following up on a couple of recommendations yesterday: Larry recommended the Rodin Museum. After Bill pointed out the error of my working from memory, I reread his original e-mail and Googled Le Petit Pontoise to get the address, 9 Rue de Pontoise.

I had Bill’s e-mail but misremembered the street the night before and had gone to Rue du Petit Pont, and so wound up at Le Petit Pont.

When the computer found Le Petit Pointoise for me—a few blocks away from the Little Bridge, its rue, and its restaurant—I phoned in a reservation just to be sure.

The visit to the Rodin Museum took us back yet again to the neighborhood of Les Invalides. I had heard the name of Les Invalides before I came to Paris but knew nothing about it. I have in the past couple of days learned that it started out as a hospital for disabled veterans. It was commissioned by Louis the Fourteenth, and like the public structures of that era is a spectacle. It’s a hospital with a facade of huge columns and a dome in gold leaf. Nothing like a V.A. hospital today.

I understand that Napoleon is buried somewhere around there. Maybe inside. He was short and wouldn’t take up too much room.

The Rodin Museum is in a mansion called Hotel Biron, where the artist paid rent when he was in Paris. He owned an estate somewhere else.

The German poet Rainer Marie Rilke lived there and recommended it to Rodin, who moved into a couple of rooms. He lived there for something like 20 years. Eventually he was the only tenant.

I’m fuzzy on the details, as usual, but it seems that some of the people may have been evicted because the owner, maybe the French government, wanted to sell the property. It was a pretty serious piece of real estate—big enough to have its own chapel, for instance.

Rodin by that time was in his 70s and famous, but even he was under pressure to move out. That’s when he came up with the idea of donating all his unsold work, studies, papers, etc. to the government to establish a museum, on the condition that he could live in the Hotel Biron for the rest of his life.

The grounds of the museum are formal gardens with Rodin bronzes at intervals. Some of the appeal of Rodin for me is that his work ranges from the realistic to impressionistic, sometimes in the same piece. It is very sensual and the faces are expressive and alive.

The Burghers of Calais are a group of larger-than-life men who strike anguished poses with grieving faces. They have ropes around their necks as they go out to submit to Henry V. Hang us if you must, but spare the city.

The Gates of Hell are covered with a tangle of naked bodies plummeting into chaos.

Balzac is in the garden, and so is The Thinker. The Three Shades from the top of the Gates of Hell appear nearby as a separate group in much larger scale.

Inside the house, are Rodin’s studies for several of his works—early alternative compositions of the Burghers, for instance. Plaster and terra cotta pieces that would become bronzes, several marble works, and some early paintings by Rodin.

Thanks to Larry for pointing that one out.

We stopped at a corner café across from Les Invalides before the hike home. There was a mirror in one window. Very strange. You can see people and cars through the window going in one direction, and people and cars in the mirror headed in the other, but they never crashed. They just passed through each other.

We walked back along the river past the government buildings at Quai d’Orsay. There are some really outlandish looking structures across the river at that point, but we didn’t get to see them today. Maybe when we come back from Avignon.

We took the Boulevard St. Germain to Rue St. Jacques, walked around the Pantheon again, and took some side streets to get back to the hotel, when I made the reservation at Le Petit Pontoise.

Charlie once said to me that he’d follow Larry to a restaurant anywhere. Charlie, take it from me: You can be just as sure if you follow Bill.

As it is in many small restaurants here, the menu at Le Petit Pontoise is short—shorter than the breakfast page at a Jersey diner. But there was still a range of unusual (at least for me) things to choose.

Free-range chicken with mashed potatoes probably would have been better than the way my grandmother used to roast it, but it sounded too tame for me. Veal kidney? Interesting, but generally I like my meat grown up before it is put on the plate.

We decided on two courses, fish first. We shared sea bass in vanilla sauce. Fish and vanilla didn’t sound at all like an intuitive combination, so we guessed that it would have to be good. That sauce went with everything—not just the fish, but the carrots, green beans, zucchini, bread, and pinot noir, too.

Quail with grapes followed that. Three bird legs with more vegetables and roast potatoes. I think it may have had rosemary in it.

Thank you, Bill.

I had a white Cotes du Rhone with the quail. I don’t often drink white wine, even with fowl or fish. But white Cotes du Rhone is hard to get, at least in the States, so when I saw it on the board, I decided to order it.

White wine always tastes a little sweet to my tongue. Wine in general tastes sweeter than my other favorite drinks, black coffee, or IPA and other heavily hopped beers, which are bitter.

The Rhone white has almost as much flavor as a red. It held up pretty well against the rich quail, but I probably would have tasted more of it if I had taken it with a mild cheese and some bread.

Well, we’re on the Train of Great Speed headed for the banks of the Rhone now, so I hope to get plenty of chances to pair the whites and reds of the region with foods over the next few days.

I have a half-bottle of Bordeaux in my book bag. We bought it yesterday at a wine shop across from the hotel. The name of the place is Et Si Bacchus Etait une Femme (And If Bacchus Was a Woman). With a name like that, it was a must-see on my list.

I’m about to open it now. It’s Chateau des Gravieres ’09. Let me see how good it is.

Today's photo, by the way, is Harry Goes to Hell.

October 16

Hi! Greetings from home!

We have checked in on Miss Maggie frequently. She is doing very well. She loved the attention (even from me when I would go over during the day to make sure she was OK). She is so affectionate I did not want to leave her.

We will check in until you return.

Just wanted to let you know she is doing great!

Anna

[Editor’s note: Harry did not at this time keep a mad relative confined to his attic. “Maggie” refers to a 10-year-old cat that has the run of the house.]

Charmes et Invalides

October 9

Breakfast yesterday consisted of yogurt, figs, a peach, and plums from a shop next door, croissants from a boulangerie around the bend. Very local, maybe even moderately—dare I suggest it?—French.

Coffee, however, was a large Americano from Starbuck’s on the corner.  It’s the only place I can get coffee to go with a lid.

We decided to visit the Galeries Lafayette store in Montparnasse to buy Joanna a Paris charm for her bracelet. It’s a reasonable distance, and we decided to walk.

From the hotel you go to the fountain by St. Medard’s church (where Life photographed the bride) and take Rue Pascal, which is a charming little alley, to the overpass where Boulevard de Port Royal goes overhead. You climb the narrow steps and then you come out onto the wet pavement of a broad avenue. The city has a truck out to wash the dog turds off the sidewalk.

I’ve been only to a few neighborhoods of Paris, but from what I can tell it is the second-dirtiest city that I have seen. I’m talking world-class cities. Newark doesn’t count.

Paris is not as dirty as New York by any means. The sidewalks here, for instance, are not decorated with the black dots where people have spit out their chewing gum. But even in the Louvre somebody left candy wrappers in front of a bust of Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s wife.

There was a site for a produce market along the boulevard, and vendors had left all kinds of debris behind—spoiled plums, corn husks, empty boxes. If that happened at a neighborhood fair even in New York, let alone the Saturday morning farmer’s market in Montclair, that market would never reopen.

The Blvd. de Port Royal eventually becomes the Boulevard du Montparnasse and we had to walk as far as Blvd. Raspail. The city has lots of boulevards, which is good, because they are hard to miss, even when you are distracted by the scenery. and there is plenty of that.

There are Belle Epoque apartment blocks, and streets lined with plane trees. In some parks, like the one behind the Eiffel Tower, the planes in rows are pruned into cubes, and that is downright fantastic. It is so clever and strange that you want to laugh out loud.

Turns out that right on the point where we wanted to turn lies Le Dome. It used to be a cheap place where hungry writers and artists hung out. So I took Joanna in for a glass of wine at the bar. The bar, we were told, is just a decoration. They serve drinks in a glassed-in patio, which was even better because we got to sit at a table, eat olives, and watch the traffic outside.

Maybe it’s here where you’re supposed to be able to sit and see everybody you ever met. I think I saw my second grade teacher, but I’m not sure.

We shared a glass of a house red listed as “Ballon Bordeaux.” It was tasty enough and went well with the dish of olives that came with it.

From here we walked down Rue Delambre, another narrow street, which had a few adult video stores in the mix. The store we were looking for on Avenue Maine was gone, so we went to Galeries Lafayette, which had what we were looking for.

The lady who sold Joanna the charms was named Tamea. She asked where we were from. We said, “New Jersey.” Where in New Jersey? Montclair.

“My sister opened a bakery in Montclair. It’s called Petit Paris.”

It’s near the library and Joanna had lunch there one day. We’ll stop by when we get back and say hi to Rimi.

Paris shopping malls are surprisingly similar to the ones at home, so we didn’t browse long. There was nothing as interesting as we found in Montreal, for instance, at Hudson’s Bay Co. No canoes, no tomahawks, no fur hats with ear flaps.

From there it is a straight walk to Les Invalides. This time, the gate was still open so we were able to sit in the formal garden. It has flowering plants in circular plots anchored by conical evergreens.

We took a cab back to the hotel because we had walked several miles, our feet hurt, and I have no clue how to use the Metro. Seems that to get to Les Invalides, for example, I take the local metro to one station, leave the system and walk to another station, take a train to a fourth station, get out again and walk to yet another station, where I can get a train to Les Invalides. It’s supposed to take 40 minutes, but I’m not sure I can do that all in one day.

Joanna went up for a nap and I went out for a drink. I had three and read the French papers at Cafe Lea, a couple of blocks from the hotel. There was a discussion of charges that Sarkozy misused public funds, a story about Islamists yielding power in Tunisia, and an essay about the U.S. as policeman of the world.

Of course, these were all in French, so I’m not absolutely sure what they were about.

We went to the St. Medard for dinner. We shared a salad that included gizzards, smoked duck breast, and foie gras. It was wonderful. We had chicken skewers for the entree, because we weren’t in the mood for steak or salmon, which were the other options.

Wine notes: Langue d’Oc merlot van de Pays d’Oc—smooth and easy.

Sud Ouest Gaillac AOC 2010 Chateau des Saurs—sharp and spicy, acidic in a good way.

We had dessert at a small place on Rue Mouffetard, the narrow commercial street above St. Medard. There are lots of cafes and creperies, but also stores that sell fish, meat, and bread. It feels a lot like the old city of Prague. The streets are blocked off part of the time, but not all the time, so pedestrians are everywhere. Many seem to be local people.

We ordered crepe and marrons. The crepe was covered with chocolate syrup, vanilla ice cream, and whipped cream. The marron is a chestnut flavored pudding also served under whipped cream.

I ordered a glass of Bordeaux in French and wound up getting a small bottle, but that was all right. It didn’t go to waste.

I, however, did. And so, wasted again, Harry made it back to Point A and slept the sleep of the just. The just made it, that is.

Actually, it wasn’t all that bad. You can ask Joanna. She will have a better memory of the walk home.

Love to all.

October 9

Harry

You are in Paris and I am on my way to Philadelphia. Life is unfair.

Have a nice glass of wine and don't gloat too much.

Charlie

October 10

What part of Philadelphia?

I was at a Best Western on Chestnut near Liberty Hall. Belgian beer at one bar, craft brews and billiards  at another, the City Tavern around the corner, a short walk to Little Italy. It was a fantastic weekend.

Harry

October 12

I'll say!

I'm hoping to get back to Provence this spring. Want to meet me there, Charlie?

Larry

October 15

Right across from the  new Convention Center, which is either the world's newest, biggest boondoggle or a far-sighted business catalyst for a second-tier city.

Couldn't get out much, but did find a nice restaurant with good food, beer, and wine near Rittenhouse Square neighborhood—Pennsylvania 6. A touch of class in a city that desperately needs it.

Charlie