Sunday in Paris

I spent most of today working on the SciPy 2009 proceedings with Gael and catching up on sleep and email.  For dinner, Gael, Emmanuelle, and I meet Jean-Baptiste Poline at the Denfert-Rochereau station and found a very traditional french wine bar called Au Vin des Rues, which is on rue Boulard just off of rue Daguerre and was open on a Sunday evening.  (I had a delicious slow-roasted leg of lamb with potatoes au gratin and rum baba for dessert.)  The rue Daguerre has a wonderful pedestrian street market I often seem to visit when I am in Paris.  Here is a picture of looking down the rue Daguerre (the street market is closed, of course) toward rue Boulard (you can see JB just right of center with Gael peeking over Emmanuelle's shoulder):

PJ Toussaint, who just flew back from a conference in Greece, joined us just in time for dessert.

Saturday in Paris

Just thought I'd try to keep a little journal of my trip.  We'll see how long this lasts.  Anyway, I landed at Charles de Gaulle at about 6:30am on Saturday morning and took the RER to Bourg-la-Reine to stay with Gael and Emmanuelle.  Here is the entrance to where I am staying:

And the view from my window:

Once I arrived I took a short nap and then went out with Gael to hunt and gather in the market above the passage he lives on.  Here are a two pictures I took at the local market (they had all kinds of things, but cheese and meat are, of course, the things that attracted me most):

We also went into a store called frozen food store called Picard:

After lunch, Gael and I headed to Paris.  Over the last five years, I've tried to visit the catacombs numerous times.  Unfortunately, every time I've visited, they've been closed.  This time turned out to be no different.  The picture on the left is Gael standing in front of the entrance to the catacombs (you can see a sign on the door, which states that they will be closed for the next month) and the picture on the right is of the road behind me:

Since I couldn't visit the catacombs, we decided to head to the Montmarte district to walk around for the afternoon.  Here are a couple of pictures of the Sacre Coeur at the summit of Montmarte:

I forgot to take pictures for the rest of the day, but after Montmarte we headed back to the Latin Quarter to spend a couple hours talking about the SciPy proceedings (which we hope to finish today) in a cafe with wireless internet.  And we grabbed an early dinner at 8pm with Emmanuelle and a couple of colleagues from Neurospin.