Don’t you wonder about the story behind this bike with its flat tire? I wonder how long it has been there.

Just about everything, in some way, is different in France. Now, of course, their beds are similar to ours, there are just differences. They don’t have box springs, for instance, but flat, narrow platforms with small wooden slats that are convex and it seems to do the same sort of job to me. There are no wheels underneath, but straight legs. I brought some of my box springs with me to France and they all have wheels. I used to think this was great but here they slip and slide all over the place, moving even when you sit down on them. I had a horrible time finding some sort of flat little rubber containers to go underneath and, in fact, finally had to buy some in the States.
The French aren’t as big on dust ruffles either and I ended up bringing those back from the States as well. I will say that they can be a little difficult when the matress moves around when someone sleeps in the bed and, when the duvet cover is tucked under at the end, everyone but me also tucks in the dust ruffle at the end of the bed-not a pretty site.
I had never used duvets before I came here. They are fluffy bed coverings, very warm in the winter, that are tucked into large envelope type covers, rather like putting a pillow into a pillow case, and that becomes the bedspread. I bought some, in Paris, for our two twin beds and they are too small. There are little drafts of cold air when you are sleeping in either twin bed when you turn over and the narrow duvet doesn’t quite cover your whole body. I should have gotten one size larger so they hang over the edges of the mattress more. They are a pain to get the duvet into its cover-it takes all sorts of pushing and pulling and fluffing.
When I moved here, I put a top sheet underneath as this was the way I was used to doing things-putting sheets under bedspreads. The French don’t do this, but just use the duvet. The problem with this is that the duvet cover has to be washed and then you have to do the wrestling thing again getting it all put together. I do see people, usually on the week-ends, with their duvets laying across the bottom of the open window being aired. I haven’t done this as of yet as my windows are filthy on the outside frames. I do know that it is the habit here, and in other European countries, to pull back the duvet and open the window for a while every morning so everything airs out. Some people even put a mirror on the bed to see if it fogs up, a sign that it hasn’t aired out enough. I must admit, I never thought of this. I just washed the sheets when I thought they needed it. I’ve been trying it, just so everything thing is as dry as possible every morning.
I have returned to putting a top sheet under the duvet on our queen sized bed. I like keeping our duvet cover as clean as possible so I am not always washing it, and when it gets too hot, the sheet is nice when we push the duvet to the bottom of the bed.

This is the metro entrance at Palais Royal at Place Colette. It was done for the Millenium and is made of hand blown glass from Murano Italy.

Ground-Less in France

The metro stops in Paris always, for the most part, fascinate me. I often sit there on the train as we come to stops and wonder how they came up with some of the names. Most, as you would think, are named after the street they are on or a major site nearby and the names are so interesting such as Stalingrad, Chemin Vert, Télégraphe, Picpus, Chateau d’Eau. I often want to get off and look to see where the names have come from. I’m sure French people know all about the history behind most names. I believe there is even a book out that would increase my knowledge, I just haven’t found one in English yet. It is part of the charm of Paris to see these names and be intrigued by them.
I have a few favorite metro stops. The Louvre Rivoli stop is full of carvings and sculptures such as the ones you will be seeing if you proceed inside to the museum. It is very classy and cultural and I’m wondering if they are copies as they are exposing them to those monsters that do the graffiti in the metro lines. The metro stop at Hotel de Ville at one time had a lot of interesting copies of paintings and photographs done through the years of events occurring at the Hotel including a beheading. I like looking at copies of paintings or drawings done many years ago and look at the style of clothing they wore or what transportation was being used or how the area surrounding the Hotel de Ville has changed. These pictures show pieces of history of this interesting and sometimes brutal city. Then one day, they were all gone and replaced with the history of many of the names of metro stops. I just have to remember to take my French dictionary so I can translate it all.
At Gare de Lyon, a metro stop for a train station, the stop has been made of gigantic columns of iron riveted together and painted bright yellow. It was designed by Eiffel, the man responsible for the Eiffel Tower. I don’t like this metro stop as it is very large and getting to another line always involves a long walk, but I enjoy going into the train station and looking at all of the trains sitting ready to head off into other parts of France and I love a restaurant here called Le Train Bleu that is a step back in time when people who traveled by train wanted luxury as they waited. This restaurant has high vaulted ceilings with scenes from all the parts of France that Gare de Lyon services. There are also gilded cherubs, lace curtains and bathrooms with dark wood doors and old marble sinks. A resident cat who usually sleeps in seldom used rooms. I like to take friends here for a drink and we all sit there amazed at the beauty of it.
One line, number 14, doesn’t have an engineer driving the train. It is all done automatically. The train track at the stop is covered over with a glass tube so people can’t get to the track (there are suicide attempts occasionally on the train tracks). You can get in the front car and sit at the window where the engineer once would have sat and watch the train whiz through the tunnels. The stops themselves are all new and clean with pink marble floors and what looks like tropical gardens behind glass. There is always a bad odor in the stops and in the trains on this line. I’ve heard it’s because the line is so far underground and near “wet” smelling soil and that everything mildews in the moisture or that it is so far underground it is near subterranean gas pockets. I’ve heard it is the fuel used by the trains. I don’t know. It’s just part of the experience of riding on line 14.
My favorite stop of all the Arts et Métiers on line 11 and which is lined entirely with copper. At first I thought it had been constructed to look like a submarine because there are round “windows” and rivets everywhere but above the track are gigantic models of gears and I found that it was supposed to be similar to being inside an engine. The stop is named after a fabulous and interesting museum, one of my favorites. I also like the Abesses stop for all of the wall paintings done by local artists. If you are feeling energetic you can climb the extremely long curving flight of stairs and be charmed by the art work. I delight in the metro entrance there, too, as it is one of two original remaining done by Guimaud in the art deco style.
I have seen a few fights on the metro lines. Twice I have seen men get into fist fights but they aren’t brutal. I guess, in the phrase I’ve heard my son use, they fight like girls with slapping and flapping their hands, but no fists. The most frightening time was when a homeless man boarded when I was on a train one morning. He was one of those scary ones who make eye contact and are belligerent. A young black man sat across the aisle from me and didn’t seem to be bothered by what the man was saying to him. I say he didn’t seem to be, but that was wrong as he suddenly stood up and did a karate kick right into the man’s head. The man went down in the aisle and the young man continued to kick him. Finally, someone got up and talked to him and he stopped. When the train pulled into the station he got off and went to a car several cars down. The homeless man stood up and actually looked around for his assailant hoping, I assume, to resume what he was saying. I was glad to get to my stop.
There are turnstiles to get into each metro station that require a ticket to get through. I often see young, and not so young, people jumping the gate. Sometimes someone will ask if they scoot in behind you and get in on your ticket. Sometimes they don’t ask and suddenly there is some guy behind you with his body pressed against yours which can be startling. Occasionally, there are security police waiting out of sight to give tickets to those not having tickets and the guilty are given large fines. If you let someone go through the stile with you, you get a fine, too. One time a young man in his 20’s tried to get through the gate with my husband and Maurice told him to go and buy his own ticket. We went on down to the waiting area for the train but soon the guy showed up. He had been drinking and started yelling at Maurice. Maurice told me later that he was threatening to push him in front of the train when it arrived. Maurice stood up to him, though, because he feels like people like this get away with threatening and the other person backs down. I was afraid the guy was going to attack Maurice and I got my purse ready to swing if he did. My purse is not a small dainty thing but back pack size and I have it loaded with so many things that I could do serious damage by using it as a weapon. Luckily, I didn’t have to. The guy eventually moved on down the line although he continued to yell things at us.
There are several metro stops that I hate and I often get out my metro map to see if I can avoid them. One is Chatelet which is huge, dirty, filled with people standing around looking like drug dealers to me and lots of teen-agers heading for the Les Halles shopping mall. If you don’t know which street exit you need you can be doomed to roam about for hours and start wondering if this will be another stanza in that song from the 60’s by the Kingston Trio in which they stated, “He Never Returned”. I was once looking for the St Eustache exit and found myself in the shopping mall when I took the wrong exit. Roaming around looking for exits, or sorties as they say here, I finally saw the cathedral through a window and was able to make my way there some time later.
I hate the Franklin D. Roosevelt stop as well. It looks like it hasn’t been touched since the 50’s to me, either by designers or cleaners. It is always dirty with water stains running down the walls and sagging ceilings. They were doing some sort of work there for a while and dozens of black electrical wires were just hanging there all within reach of anyone wanting to touch them. The ceilings are really low and give me a feeling of claustrophobia although I have never experienced this before in my life.
Montparnasse is a huge underground space. I think most of the population of Paris could use this as a bomb shelter if the need ever arose. One day I had an appointment on Blvd. Montparnasse. I thought I had given myself plenty of time. I got off of line 4 and started walking. And walking. After a while I came to one of those moving sidewalks. I was really running late by now so I moved to the left and started walking as fast as I could. I came to the exit I needed 10 minutes later. The area I came out to was also huge and confusing and I couldn’t even tell where Blvd. Montparnasse was as there were so many roads taking off from the roundabout. Luckily, the person I was meeting for my appointment was running late. After that, when I had to be at Montparnasse I took another metro line that involved changing twice so I could arrive closer to the exit I needed.
Then one day I read that a new “moving sidewalk” had been installed under Montparnasse. They were calling it the TGV People Mover. Well I thought this could be interesting. It apparently had been under study for years and had cost a fortune to build. As I had yet another appointment that day I decided to give it a try. Before I reached it I still had a ten minute walk but then I came to the old moving sidewalk area I had used before. And there it was looking rather like something out of Star Trek, all gleaming silver metal and flashing blue lights. At the entrance stood 8 young men there to help the uninitiated. I didn’t see them say or do a thing as the poor naive people about to launch themselves into the unknown went to the entrance.
I saw, at my feet, about 20 feet of thin, metal rollers whirling and turning. I stepped on and immediately grabbed the handle strip on the side as it was like suddenly being on skates. I wobbled and slipped around like a 5 year old on skates for the first time. A woman was in front of me and as she approached the flat rubber moving sidewalk there was a little hump. She almost went down. I decided to hop over the hump and as I landed the fast moving surface I came close to going down myself. Thank God I was wearing jogging shoes. I hoped if anyone approached this thing at the beginning wearing high heels that those helpful young men would direct them to the still present slow moving sidewalk.
Soon we were whizzing along. It was rather cool to pass the people slowly moving along side us like a Mercedes passing a Deux Chavaux on the motor way. Maybe this wasn’t so bad. Then I saw another little hump coming up and there were signs flashing in red and yellow to stop walking. I saw the same lady in front of me wobble and clutch the side. My heart started beating as if I were on a roller coaster getting near the top of the hill knowing that a horrible drop off was on the other side. I grasped the side handle with both hands deciding to “take” the little hump instead of jumping it. I went over and suddenly it was as if I was on ice. I gave a little scream and hung on tightly. A man next to me was doing the same thing and we exchanged glances that said, “Can you believe this?”. He said something in French but I have no idea what he said. Probably it was similar to what I was thinking - never again.
So that was it. My heart beating in my chest I staggered up the metro steps into the sun thankful to be alive. I plan on making two metro line changes the next time I come to Montparnasse. Maybe they should call this thing the TGV People Eater. The next time I was in this metro stop the “People Eater”had been shut down, and continued to be so 3 months later. I think I was not the only one to feel it was dangerous.

Right behind the Palais Royal, is a restaurant that most people are familiar with. It is the Grand Colbert which is the restaurant in the movie, Something’s Gotta Give with Jack Nickelson and Diane Keaton. It is the scene in the last 20 minutes or so of the movie in Paris. Earlier in the movie Diane’s character say’s to Jack’s, “If we still know each other in January, let’s go to Paris and eat at le Grand Colbert. It is this wonderful little bistro and they have the best roast chicken in the universe!” This, of course, has lead to many Americans wanting to go here when they visit Paris.
It is a lovely place in the Belle Epogue style. The staff there will glady talk about the movie and when it was filmed. I was told that they closed the bistro for two weeks to do the filming and that some of the waiters got to be extras in the movie. The booth that the actors sat in in the last one in the back and is often asked for. Many people order the roasted chicken there as well. I’ve had the onion soup there which was very good and the salad is very good. I’ve never had the chicken. When I was there with some people we were asking about the movie and they brought out a scrapebook of the movie being made and some photos. There was an article also about the house used in the movie on the Eastern coast of the States that, to my surprise, wasn’t a real house but a movie set. I loved that house and the decoration. You can also buy an apron there with Grand Colbert on the front. In the window is the newspaper ad for the movie as well as an article about the large amount of chicken now ordered there.
I loved the movie-it’s a chick flick-but really, would you choose Jack over Keanu Reeves? Not me.

Conceptual art at the Palais Royal.

A window at a bar in Paris that you wouldn’t have seen years ago.

They really don’t get Halloween in France, from what I can see. Americans have made this holiday, like Thanksgiving, completely their own. I’ve been asked by several French people exactly what we do on Halloween and what makes it so great. I tell of the excitement of picking out a costume as a child, filling bags with candy as we go trick or treating and the French seem a little puzzled by it all. They do now get little costumes for their children but even if they went door to door yelling, “Trick or Treat”, I doubt that they would get much in the way of candy. They are starting to have parties where everyone dresses up and in the Marais you can usually find people walking around in costumes and celebrating, although not with candy. The shops have discovered that it can be another way to make money, so now sell cute ceramic pumpkins, and the like, and there is Halloween style candy now seen in windows.
What the French do, and I’m sure most other Catholic countries, is celebrate All Saints Day on November 1st. In fact, florists sell more flowers on this day than any other. It is the custom to take flowers to the graves of departed friends and relatives on that day. May families even make it a sort of party and you can see little picnics going on in various cemetaries. I went with Maurice one year to clean his mother’s grave and leave the usual mums. I like to visit a few cemetaries around Paris just to see all of the flowers left.

A view of some great stairs I saw the other day.

I took a photo of this paste up grafitti because it looks like my cat, Elliot.

One of my favorite things to see in Paris are the leaves changing colors and the floral arrangements done by the many florists using the hues of Autumn.

Here is a lamp post on the way up a hill in Montmartre. I especially love these red leaves.

Some more great leaves in front of an old shutter. This is in a private courtyard off of Cour St Andres in the 6th.

Some yellow flowers with autumn vegetables at a florist on Rue du Buci.

There was recently an article in the New York Times on a walk in a neighborhood and the street that runs through it, Rue des Martyrs. It is an area usually skipped by tourists and one usually walked and shopped on by locals. The blog, Chocolate and Zuchinni-http://www.chocolateandzuchinni.com also wrote a little about a few shops found there. One of these is the Rose Bakery. It is owned by a married couple, one of which is English, so the whole shop has an English ambience and sells English products.

This is their sign on the side of the building. I would have walked right passed the place as the sign is very discrete. There are a few little metal tables outside for days with sunshine.

Cans of English baked beans for sale. I remember people often ate these on toast in England. Another one of those cultural things.

The shop has a nice selection of baked goods. I tried one of their scones which was really good but I was disappointed that they didn’t sell that famous, artery clogging clotted cream that the English do so well to go with it. The next time I go, I am going closer to 1 PM when they sell really good looking small pizzas. The little quiche looked good as well. There was a really long line of people waiting to buy lunch as I left. It’s a very small place and many were waiting for an available table.
By the way, while the street is fairly interesting with some boulangeries along the way, I enjoy other streets more as far as having places to eat and an open market “feel”. I think the nearby Rue Lepic (of Amelie’s cafe fame) is much more interesting and lively as is Rue des Abesses taken to reach it from Abbesses metro in Montmartre.

A view of the column with Napoleon at the top on Place Vendome. Napoleon had this column made of the melted down cannon balls and cannons that he captured during his military victories.

Ah, The Joys of Apartment Living

We own our apartment, which is what they call them here in France. I suppose it would be called a condiminium in the States but there isn’t any separation between units. I think this is one of the reasons I never bought a condiminium when I lived in the States-I just couldn’t see paying all that money and then hearing my neighbors through the walls or walking on the floor above my head. Well, that isn’t an option here-no free standing houses for sale in Paris. We are on the 3rd floor-4th if you are an American-and we have neighbors.
We share a wall with only one person, but she isn’t very happy with us. It isn’t that we are having wild parties until all hours, playing loud music until the sun comes up. We just don’t have that exciting a social life and we go to bed fairly early. The problem is that we occasionally rent our apartment, let friends use it, and an occasional relative will sleep in our apartment when we aren’t in Paris. When over neighbor lady moved in, we endured a week of what sounded like jack hammering as she did renovation. Then I heard days of work with a hammer and chisel. It turned out-somehow-that she was turning the bathroom into her bedroom and was getting all of the tile off of her wall. There was such work going on, that I took a framed photo off of the wall so it wouldn’t come crashing to the floor with all of the vibation.
So, it isn’t our fault that her bed is up against the wall of our bathroom. This isn’t usually a problem. We aren’t in there very early and don’t take showers at night. However, this hasn’t proved to be the case with others who have stayed here. One guy is a real music lover and goes to clubs very late, as in at 2 AM or so, and he takes a shower before he goes out. We have heard about this each time from our neighbor. At first I thought we should ask him to take showers earlier, but come on, its his life too. She also reported that one night someone was having sex in the shower-she could clearly hear this in her bed. I have no idea who this was. All I know for certain is that it wasn’t me. The days when it might have been me are long past. I’m old enough that it seems like a real good chance you could seriously hurt yourself trying this. After all don’t most accidents in the home happen in the bathroom? Anyway, we hear about each shower taking place at such an hour as it awakens her.
In the apartment above us, lives a cranky little girl with her parents. I hear her whining and crying as the mother tries to coax her up the stairs. The little girl wants to be carried but the mother usually can’t and is trying to teach her to do it all on her own. I have never exchanged more than “Bonjour” with this lady, but this is what I think is going on. In any case, this little girl is one of those kids who whines and cries when she wakes up. And, God forbid, if she is awakened in the middle of the night, she screams and not for just a short time, either. I hear one of her parents get up, walk across the floor into her room and try and calm her. It doesn’t help that the father works until 2 AM every night. How do I know this? Because he drops his shoes into his closet when he get home. Thud, Thud. I hear it each night. Many times he wakes up the little girl when he comes home. Sometimes, when he wakes me up closing doors, dropping shoes, etc., I turn on my TV to try and get to sleep again. A couple of times, the noise from my TV, wafts its way through my ceiling into the little girl’s room and wakes her up. Once she is up in the mornings and through crying, she is extremely active doing her renditition of a pony running back and forth across the floor for what seems like ages.
Incredibly, at five in the morning, I can hear the RER-a metro train that goes outside Paris into the suburbs-go roaring on its way deep underground from the station as the first train of the day. It isn’t extremely loud, just a distant rumble.
In the summer, I have an electric fan going in the bedroom and don’t hear as much noise. It is when I put the fan away, that I become an unknown listner of the goings on of my neighbors. I hear people clumping down the stairs in the morning on the way to work and the reverse in the evenings. I hear water trickling down pipes as showers are taken. I smell what our neighbors are cooking for dinner. I don’t smell cigarettes in our apartment but do get that strong smell at the bottom of the stairs where the apartment owner does his smoking. The whole area outside his door reeks of cigarettes. This is the same guy who has put plants all over the interior courtyard where the residents all go to put their garbage in the green containers. He even had an aquarium out there for a while but I think it was too cold for the fish and it has been removed. His window opens right out onto the courtyard and I think he likes it to look like his own private garden.
I do occasionally wear earplugs but I can’t when I have my clock set for an early morning wakeup. Maurice usually sleeps through everything. I guess I should look at it all as a sort of social experiement, a look into the lives of a group of Parisians living in an apartment building in the 12th arrondissement. I don’t find people friendly here. We all say “Bonjour” when we pass on the stairs but no one goes out of their way to speak to each other that I can see. All of my information has been gathered by my ears alone.

We are back in Paris and, on a busy Sunday afternoon, I dropped in at the Louvre to take a few photos. There is always something of interest there, even if you have seen something a dozen times. I kept trying to get a photo of the Pyramid Inversee-of the Da Vinci Code fame-but there were so many people that it was difficult. I finally managed to get rid of any people nearby by using photoshop.

See, no people! The magic of photo shop.

The Louvre has finally realized that tourists, especially Americans, are really interested in anything having to do with the Da Vinci Code. This display was in the window of a gift shop at the Louvre.

This is what you get if you stick your digital camera under the apex of the inverted pyrmid and shoot up. I rather like it.

Flowers in market in Aix.

This Chapter was written about a year ago. Problems still loom.

Chapter 12

Brown Water and Backs

Maurice continued to have very bad back pain for months. It was so bad and he had so much trouble sleeping that the doctor put him on a prescription of morphine tablets. Now Maurice doesn’t react to medication the way that most people do. Sleeping pills that will knock me out for ten hours don’t phase him. Antibiotics seem to be the only medication that work on him as they should. The morphine turned out to be one medication that affected Maurice. The first night he took a tablet he slept like a baby for eight hours, something that hadn’t happened in several weeks. Of course, morphine isn’t something that you can take indefinitely and the time came when he had to stop. By this time he had been having some physical therapy and, what seemed to help the most, an injection of local anesthetic and cortisone in his spine at the point of injury. We had also been to a spinal neurosurgeon who told Maurice that his back would slowly return to normal if he kept up the physical therapy and didn’t overdo it with physical activity. Surgery, thank God, wasn’t going to be necessary.
The problem was getting off the effect of the morphine. Maurice tapered down taking less each day and then went through months of disturbed sleep. The morphine seemed to have affected his system and he couldn’t get to sleep without it. Most nights he could sleep an hour or two, if he was lucky, but then spent the rest of the night tossing and turning, finally falling asleep around 8 AM and sleeping until 10 or so. Some nights he would get up and watch TV for several hours. I had nights where I would go and sleep upstairs in the guest bedroom because his thrashing about in bed gave me sleepless nights as well. We had several very bad months for a while there. Eventually Maurice returned to his usual sleeping paterns. Some of his sleepless nights, of course, was due to the stress and worry of the plumbing.
Our shower finally ended up being pulled up three times before, and we still aren’t sure about this, the problem seemed to be taken care of. Luckily, the expensive shower covering survived being removed so many times and all of the tile that had been damaged was replaced. We could now use either toilet or bathtub. Maurice is puzzled why I remain negative about the plumbing, very suspicious anytime the toilet doesn’t flush with vigor. It may be years before I don’t think twice before flushing one of them.
One day I filled the tub with water and used some new bubble bath. I got into the water and then noticed that the water seemed reddish brown. For a minute I thought that perhaps the color was due to the bubble bath. It was lavender in color and I thought perhaps the formula dissapated into a brownish color when it dissolved. Just then Maurice came in and said the water in the toilet was brown. I had an awful feeling that the color could be due to some plumbing problem and wondered what I was sitting in. When I let out the water, a red-brown ring remained in the tub. It looked and felt like dirt. This was when I resolved to start drinking bottled water while in Provence. I could almost hear my poor kidneys making grinding noises trying to work all of the grit through the delicate little tubes as they did their cleansing thing. It turned out that it was due to the water and old pipes in the area, not our plumbing.

One thing I find interesting in France is how little they use cinnamon in their recipes. I think Americans are much more fond of this spice that the French, at least from my personal experience. I offered to make Maurice’s son some of my famous-in my family-cinnamon toast for breakfast and he almost gagged. He can’t stand the taste. Maurice is the same way and when I am making yams, I make our two servings separately as I love not only cinnamon but sugar in mine along with butter. He only wants butter and salt and pepper. You should see his reaction to Thanksgiving yams when I also put marshmellows on top. He has an aversion to tropical fruits as well and doesn’t like pineapple, bananas, coconut or papaya. He does love grapefruit, however.
Maurice will eat my apple pie. I have to have cinnamon with apples. They just go together so well. One French guest, after having a piece, asked me if it had cinnamon in it. It must have seemed unusual tto her. The famous Tarte Tartin is a sort of upside down apple pie found all over France. I’ve never had any with cinnamon in it. I like it as there is sugar that has carmelized on the bottom of the pan and, when it is turned out onto a plate, looks really great all brownish black and gooey. It tastes great with vanilla ice cream as well, although they usually serve it with whipped cream. I did notice that Julie Child, in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, adds a little cinnamon to her recipe and I wonder if this was an American addition on her part. Just think of all of the desserts with apples in the States and I bet all of them have cinnamon in them. Then there is apple butter. I haven’t looked for it here in France but I bet I couldn’t find it.
I think it is interesting that when Americans are trying to sell a house they are told to cook something with cinnamon in it to make visitors feel at home. It has really become a part of American culture and subconsciousness. One wiff and I am a little girl again eating my mom’s cinnamon toast. I took a pumpkin pie scented candle to our neighbor as a thank-you gift. Naturally, I bought it in the States as there is no way I would have found that scent in France. Afterwards, I wondered if she would enjoy the fragrance, being French and all. I noticed that she had lit it on my next visit, so I guess it was okay.