Champion de rue de Seine, my touchstone for groceries and inexpensive, but good – to me at least – wine, is gone. Just like the lady and her wine and cheese shop before, followed not long after by the local market almost adjacent to Champion. At least the fromager across the street from the place where the lady had been is still there. But no it's not. One of those time killing but necessary to make an apartment a home things that I was doing on arrival day was to gather the essentials for my cooking for eating in the apartment, after an initial burst of dining on the economy would have driven me to the brink of insolvency, requiring a more economical means of eating for awhile. Key ingredients to that endeavor were going to be fromage blanc and two or three spreadable cheeses to go on the baguette that I would buy in the morning. So I headed up rue de Seine to that fromager. It was gone.
I finally decided that the little mall just off rue de Tournon must have a fromager. And it did. But the cheese was average and the – prepackaged, not scooped out of a massive bowl – fromage blanc was lily livered and runny, barely fir for being used as a swirl in a bowl of gazpacho (I don't know how to spell that, but it looks to me that Microsoft doesn't, either). So the next day I walked multiple miles to rue Cler where I knew that there was a great fromager, and this time my knowing turned out to be true. They were still there and still had that massive bowl of wonderful fromage blanc on offer.
Thierry is coming to show me how to operate the washer dryer in my new apartment, so I need to bring this to a close.
Some parting observations:
It's hard to find a croissant that is really crunchy-flaky anymore. Even Gérard Mulot failed me. This morning I decided to make an initial sortie into the companion island to the one on which I am now living. So I started down rue Saint Louis de ile which is the spinal street to Isle de Saint Louis. I quickly broached a boulangerie, which had the advantage of being open, as opposed to the one that I had planned to buy from, which was closed. The little nucleus of food heaven that I had discovered a few days previously on or about 47 Boulevard Saint Germaine apparently reached a form of commercial frenzy by mid day on Sunday and needed a day off for recovery. My lack of knowing that had left me without anything to eat or drink. I know that Sunday at 1300 or so things shut down, but my experience elsewhere has been that Monday early the stores are again open for business. Although somewhere on the list of things I needed to do there was the need to explore Isle de Saint Louis, it had been down on the list. The discovery of no food off my island anywhere close had inspired me to put that exploration to the top of the list . I have always heard that the inhabitants of Isle de Saint Lois see no reason to ever leave the island, so I figured that there must be grocers and the like on the island.
I saw no indication that if those isle de Saint Louis inhabitants didn't leave they might not be pretty deprived of groceries, vegetables and fruits, but I did find a boulangeri and that boulangerie had croissants that were wonderfully flaky and crunchy.
So change takes and sometimes change gives back.
The weather part of this post will probably be part of tomorrow's effort.
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