The last week or so has been really good — and fairly different from when I’ve visited on vacation.

For one thing, since I signed the lease for my apartment, I’ve spent a fair amount of time shopping for stuff to appoint the apartment. I started with the big department stores. Each has two to three buildings with women’s, men’s, household and food sections.

I made it to four of the five. Whew! It was amazing and a little exhausting. I won’t bore you with the housewares and the clothing, but at Le Bon Marché (yes, perhaps ironically for those of you in Seattle), they have a food market called La Grande Épicerie de Paris. Just, wow!

On one floor, they have a huge food market. There is a seafood counter where you can order a dozen oysters or a seafood platter and eat it alongside a glass of wine right there. And then to one side, they have the dairy section. The butter case was eight feet long. At least.

I thought that was amazing. Until I came across the foie gras case. There was an entire case devoted almost entirely to foie gras (along with a few things you might serve with foie gras, like preserved fruits). Which I thought was incredible, until I discovered that the case next to it was also devoted to foie gras. And the case next to that as well. Yes, three refrigerator cases dedicated to foie gras. Here’s just one of them…

Definitely not for everyday shopping, but for that special occasion, it’s good to know I’ve got options!

And of course, there’s been a bunch of art this week, including the Modigliani at the Musee de l’Orangerie with Dani (okay, the photos below are from other stuff at the Orangerie, not the Modigliani), the Paris+ Art Basel art fair, and the Mark Rothko exhibit at the Louis Vuitton Foundation with my new friend Josh. On my vacations, I’ve always gone to see the art, but being able to see several exhibitions in one week, with more in the week to come (Van Gogh at the Musee d’Orsay tomorrow and Viviane Sassen or Gertrude Stein + Pablo Picasso this weekend, or maybe both), is just amazing.

And then there was the Mark Rothko exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, which I went to with my new friend Josh, whose husband is not a fan of modern art. Simply spectacular. I hadn’t ever really noticed Rothko before, but seeing his work in person and being able to see the progression of his work was really amazing. I’m including a bunch of photos, but like much abstract expressionist art, these are pieces that it makes such a difference to see in person, both for the scale and for the detail.

And of course afterward Josh and I went for aperitif afterward and ended up talking for a good couple hours.

In terms of food, I’ve been focusing on the shops in the neighborhood, buying savoy cabbage, shallots, leeks, cremini mushrooms, celery root, potatoes, and kuri squash (which the French call potimarron, or pumpkin), along with hand-chopped sausage and ham in parslied aspic, and soft-boiled egg in aspic (oeuf en gelee). I had hoped to be able to make a gratin of kuri squash, but the oven in my Airbnb doesn’t seem to work, so I’ve been making soups from the vegetables instead. Can’t wait to get into the new apartment next week!

And then I’ve also been doing some hikes. Earlier this week I hiked the Coulee Verte, which is a trail along an old railway line from the Chateau de Vincennes to the Bastille.

This afternoon I went for a hike in the Domaine national de Saint-Cloud, which lies just southwest of Paris — I took the metro to get there — and which was once upon a time the site of a royal palace, though the palace itself was burned in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War.

So yeah, it’s been a good week, and one that’s been a bit different from when I’ve stayed in Paris before. In a good way!