***
We then took the Metro to the FDR station on the Champs Elysées to make reservations for dinner tomorrow. The restaurant personnel apparently looked Chris and Kathy over carefully -- they were dressed in shorts and t-shirts -- and gave us a 7 p.m. reservation somewhat reluctantly. They added that we had to be finished by 9 p.m.
***
We arrived at the [restaurant] right on time at 7 p.m. A very attractive and enjoyable restaurant, decorated in a clean style that I'd call West Coast, but that Frommer calls "post-modern." Certainly not the heavy, plush, classical French style I'd anticipated. We ate ourselves silly, course after course, wine after wine, to the tune of €544 for the six of us.
Once the wait staff saw that we had come to eat and drink in earnest, there was no further mention of any 9 p.m. deadline for us to be finished, and we ate ourselves considerably past it.
We staggered out into the warm evening, and Chris led us to the nearby Buddha Bar -- an incredible dark cave lit entirely by small oil lamps, like butter lamps in a Tibetan Buddhist shrine. A giant Buddha presided over the diners who were eating on the main floor. We remained in the balcony cocktail area, which surrounded the dining area. We certainly had champagne. A fantastic appearing place, although the irony of the contrast between the sybaritic experience of its clients and the Buddha's exhortations to live a simple life were not lost on me. (There's always one moralist in the group!)
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These lines are an excerpt from one of my travel journals. Not one of my typical journals, most of which were written sitting on a rock somewhere during a mountain trek, but a journal from the aftermath -- having returned to Paris -- of a private guided canoe trip that seven relatives and friends and I enjoyed on the Dordogne in France in 2006. I just read the journal today, for the first time in years. I was reminded of endless details I never would have remembered if I hadn't written them down.
For a number of years, I kept such journals on a number of my travels. I believe this journal from 2006 was my last one. On many of my other trips, I instead prepared a summary of my experiences once I returned home, a summary that I sent to family members for their edification -- summaries similar to the one by Pascal that I published last month, but generally not as detailed.
I wrote my journals by hand in notebooks -- not always daily, but at least every two or three days, bringing the trip up to date. As with this journal from France, I typed most of them up shortly after returning home.
Since 2006, I've been on a number of interesting trips, but for some reason neither kept a journal nor wrote a summary at the conclusion, although I did write abbreviated descriptions of many of the trips here in my blog. But I have to rely primarily on my many photographs to remind me of the details. Obviously, photographs would not do justice to the dinner experience memorialized above -- although I suppose some of the dishes were fairly photogenic.
My trip to India in two months should be filled with interesting sights, sounds, smells, and experiences, whose details I really want to preserve. Rather than once more writing daily reports with a ballpoint pen, however, I think I'll try doing it digitally, posting each day's report on this blog.
My entries won't be nearly as detailed as the one above -- I don't think -- because I'll be forced to compose them laborously on the tiny screen keyboard of my cell phone. But I'll avoid abbreviations, and I'll avoid sounding telegraphic. I'll post all the entries under one blog post caption, using each entry's date as a sub-title.
This plan may not work out, but I think I'm going to give it a try. Even if you, my long-suffering readers -- don't find my thoughts and observations irresistible, I'll at least be amusing my future self. Just as I now find myself amused reading about my experiences back in the France of 2006.
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