Montmartre Wine Festival

Montmartre has a tiny vineyard and early every October they have a wine festival to celebrate the grape harvest.  Today was the first day of the 2013 festival, so that's where we went for lunch.  There were lots of food and wine vendors representing many regions of France and a few other countries.  In addition to French vendors, we also saw a booth selling Senegalese food and another one selling saki.  The festival is held on the plaza in front of Sacre Coeur, perhaps the highest point in the city.  It was cool and a little windy today so I had the perfect lunch for that sort of weather:  potatoes, melted Mont d'Or cheese and ham.  Bill had a similar dish but it had duck breast, cèpe mushrooms, and potatoes.

 We saw people wearing costumes that we didn't understand.


















I bought a slice of artisan nougat with pistachios, almonds, and hazelnuts.

After eating, we went to an art gallery to see a show by Miss Tic, a graffiti artist who has been accepted into the commercial art world.  We saw lots of her work on the walls in the Butte aux Cailles neighborhood when we stayed there earlier.  According to the brochure about the wine festival, the anti-graffiti brigade of Paris has chosen to preserve her work rather than remove it from public places.







Due to a problem with the washer in our apartment, yesterday we met an expatriate plumber who seems to enjoy exploring Paris as much as we do.  We told him about some of the things we had found and he told us that near Pere Lachaise Cemetery he'd found a marker for the site where a guillotine had once stood.  He described where it was and late this afternoon we went to look for it.  Unfortunately we had no luck, but I think there's information on the Internet that will help us find it.  Our Internet connection is slow in the evenings and I can't seem to get to the website, but am optimistic about tomorrow.  We did see this graffiti on our walk to Pere Lachaise.