Shakespeare and Company 2 Following a Maritime Tour

I have to work backwards again, and in a twisted circle will start with yesterday's visit to the Museum de la Marine and a return to Shakespeare and Company.

I have a thing for boat models, so this was a lot of fun. Apparently the founder of the museum, François-Edmond Pâris, did as well, and his worldwide travels resulted in a collection of boat models and lovely watercolors that appear in the current exhibit Tous Les Bateaux du Monde. Having learned a lot about Pacific Sailing vessels when we went to Tahiti, it was fun to be able to recognize some different types and also to see the star charts made from reeds and shells. The english language audio tour was a little wordy, with a character pretending to be the admiral. But at least the audioguide worked!!

After a long tour of all the boats of the world, we headed to the city center and had ice cream (don't tell anyone) and spent an enormous amount of time at Shakespeare and CO. There is a children's room upstairs, just as tiny and well-loved as the other nooks and crannies there. Joshua bought The Underneath and Rachel bought A Fool's Girl (which is a children's book that takes place in Shakespeare's time). (Rachel also reminds me to tell everyone she is working on a story called Once Upon a Fairytale. Marketing lessons have not been lost.) I bought a beautifully produced book about Beirut called White Masks also available at Amazon.

So why am I telling you that you can buy this at Amazon. Because for several weeks I had been wondering about the idea of loud Americans. Really I thought that scenario only happened at the Eiffel Tower or Versailles, the part with loud Americans. Oh we are quite obvious regardless if we are being silent - I've decided it would take 3 years to learn to dress with the aplomb of a Parisian. But I really thought the loud part was unfair until yesterday when a woman was talking to her 20 something daughter who was recommending a book and, I will add, hinting that she wanted it for herself and the woman, who had been speaking loudly about whether or not to buy a signed James Frey book (really?) said in her really really loud voice forget it, she could order that, or any of these, from Amazon "for half the price. Really, for half the price." Which isn't even true because the books at Shakespeare and Co. are not overpriced. I couldn't even look, her daughter appeared to want to melt into one of the crevasses in the floorboards. I was thrilled to buy my kids a book at Shakespeare and CO. Or the Red Wheelbarrow. Or any Paris bookstore. Am I just delusional? I don't want to make fun of her - it just made me really sad. Maybe she had buy-me-mommy fatigue. Maybe she lived alone and had lost her job and used her savings to visit her daughter and things in Paris were a lot more expensive than she had thought they would be.
The killer was that the daughter was holding a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Irony: discuss. What would it have meant to give all that bound between two covers, plus a happy memory of tooling around St. Michel on a perfect day and looking at books? I hope I get to come back to Shakespeare and Company in 10 years and buy my kids another book. But who knows, I might have shopping fatigue and try to weasel my way out of making a purchase...
OK, I'll save the rest of the catching up for later.