In which we entertain, again!

Many of the people that Blaise knows professionally as philosophers of mathematics are spending at least part of the year in Paris. (Many others are just Parisian, but we'll exclude them from the former group as they're here all the time.) Since there are all these people here, and we are, in various senses more established than at least some of them, Blaise thought it would be nice to have some of them over for dinner. To that end, he invited one (Dirk) of them to come to Sunday dinner with his wife (Brigitte) about 3 weeks ago. And then Cherry spent the whole of Saturday night throwing up, and I managed to convince him that he would not improve his relationship with anyone by exposing them to stomach flu. So he cancelled the invitation and we waited for the next good opportunity.

Since Brigitte works in the suburbs (she's a computer scientist), a week day didn't work well for them, particularly given that the kids need to go to bed at a reasonable time, and we had things already planned for some of the intervening Saturdays and Sundays. So we ended up pushing things back until this past Sunday.

And at this point that was so long ago, that I'm really not sure what to write anymore.

They decided that they wanted to be adventurous and find our apartment on their own (Blaise's been meeting everyone else at the RER station), so Blaise sent them very good directions. Promptly at 5:30 (did I mention that they're German?), they rang the buzzer, and Blaise let them in. Evidently they (and we) didn't realize that we'd never told them which floor we were on until after they were inside, and so Blaise decided to send Sapphire down to get them. At that point, the elevator door opened, and they got off. Apparently they had commented to one another in English that they didn't know which floor to go to, at which point someone else entering the building told them to go to the second, which is indeed our floor. Evidently everyone knows where the English speakers live, or perhaps it was someone from our floor, I'm not very sure.

Once they arrived, I put the soup on the stove to reheat. (I made it in the morning because we were hoping to go to the playground in the afternoon, but it kept looking like rain.) We had soup and salad and bread (which Sapphire got at the bakery) for dinner, and ice cream and macarons (scroll to the bottom of the page) for dessert.