Our Holiday Visitors

January 5th, 2018

The holidays have wound down, and I'm back in the US for a week to attend a conference and visit my parents.  It's nice to reflect on some of the activities of the previous two weeks, with Anna and Caroline both staying with us and my sister Katie, her husband Paul, and their daughter Roxy visiting as well.  Katie and Paul are shown above, with Katie wearing the crown from the galette des  rois, which we ate.  Overall, we ate well while they were here, some highlights being the braised beef mentioned in the previous post for Christmas, a casual dinner at our neighborhood Vietnamese place, pizza at Luisa Maria, and the moelleux au chocolate from The Smiths, a dense and deeply chocolatey cake that we love. 

Katie and Paul packed a huge number of activities in, with various ones of us along for some of them.  They visited the Louvre, L'Orangerie, Saint Sulpice, Saint Germain des Pres, Eiffel Tower, Champs Elysees, Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, Sainte Chapelle, Musee des Arts et Metiers, Sacre Coeur, Rodin Museum, the Pantheon, and many more.  Paul raved about the Musee des Arts et Metiers and convinced us to go soon.  A few of us went along to L'Orangerie, and here are photos of one of Matisse's masterworks, The Three Sisters, Anna pondering a Monet, and a detail from Monet's Water Lilies Cycle. 

Caroline and I also managed a trip to the Jeu de Paume to see the current exhibition of photography by Albert Renger-Patzsch.  I loved it.  The subjects of his photography were so wide-ranging, but still each period of his career seemed to resonate with me in a different way.  He adored trees and landscapes but spent as much time featuring the jarring geometry of industrial objects, sometimes in contrast with more organic forms.  You can get a taste here:

http://www.jeudepaume.org/?page=article&idArt=2757

And I almost forgot to mention the baking class that Katie took Caroline, Anna, and me to.  Here we are, along with some of the results: