Dinner party was a great success. Food was very good, and as the cook I am allowed to say that, the wines were excellent and the guests were charming and witty, in English and in French. As the evening advanced and the level in the wine bottles lowered, we were given some hilarious lessons in idiomatic French, many of which cannot be used in polite company. Birthday cake was excellent and we sang Happy Birthday in both official languages. Party ended late in the evening ....

Weather has finally broken. Distinctly chillier, wind picking up and skies overcast for the first time since we arrived. Rain forecast for tomorrow but we have had a very good run so can't complain about our change of fortune.

Yesterday we were up early for a run out to Clingancourt, the very large Paris flea market in the northern suburbs. Since we had a dinner party planned for the evening and needed to get back in time to shop, prepare the apt for guests and organize the meal, we decided to arrive at the market an hour later than the official opening time of 8 am. Jane, V and I took the subway out and arrived shortly after 9 to find that most of the vendors did not feel the same urgency....

Arrived on Tuesday after an uneventful but pleasant flight. At least as pleasant as a 7.5 hour overnight trip can ever be; it's either 3 hours too short or 3 hours too long. Not long enough to settle in and get some sleep and too long to feel relaxed and rested on arrival.

Had plans for getting my blog posts up in a timely fashion but discovered on arrival that my laptop was unable to boot. I'm guessing that my cat Harry, who tries to help me by engaging himself in my computer activities, and who was once again sitting on the keyboard as I was leaving for the airport...

Spent the first couple of days wandering the city, and discovering new interesting spots and re-discovering old haunts. Restaurants continue to feature largely for us and we easily slid into a more local routine of lunch at 2:00 and dinner at 8:30. Only one dreadful meal to date, a dinner at supposedly hot restaurant, Zandunga which I would not recommend.

My spanish is very creaky but workable for the simpler moments in life and normally utilitarian enough for restaurant use. Unfortunately...

Oaxaca is a relatively easy run, 4 1/2 hour direct flight to Mexico City. a rather longer than desirable layover of 5 hours and a 50 minute flight to Oaxaca. First impressions didn't suggest any wholesale changes to the city and we slid easily back into remembered locations.

Our B&B, Casa Los Bugambillias is a charming, small house only a couple of blocks from the Zocalo, with three rooms only. Since it was after 8pm when we settled into our hotel we set out to find a spot for dinner and stumbled into a a very attractive restaurant...

Arrived home on Good Friday from my Scottish photo shoot in time get some laundry done and then re-packed for a 10 day trip to Oaxaca in central Mexico.

I'm still moving very slowly; we hiked up hill and down dale for most of the Scottish location days carrying a tripod and 7 or 8 kilos of equipment as well as a large Pentax medium format camera and at 71 I'm not as spry as I'd like to be. We have lots of time in Oaxaca and are staying at one hotel for the whole time so hope to slow things down a little and move to a more relaxed and unstructured daily itinerary.

We visited Oaxaca on our first trip to Mexico about 15 years ago. A significant percentage of my impressions of Mexico were formed from having read "Under the Volcano" by Malcolm Lowery and while the book was not set in Oaxaca it, like Quauhnahuac  the setting of the book, was an old colonial town in the central mountains and which shared much of the cultural context of the book....