A Week at a Time: Feb 5-11, 2011

Since I finally finished my Paris vacation recaps, I thought it would be appropriate to post my Week in Pictures post which started the week we were there. I won’t be providing quite as many details as normal to accompany the pictures, as you’ve already heard about most of the sites.

Feb 5 - Tombeau de Napoléon

Feb 6 - Fountain at Château de Versailles

Feb 7 - Sacré-Cœur Basilica

Feb 8 - Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers

Back in Utrecht, my body was drained and I hardly felt up for any adventures after our big trip. I snapped the following shot outside our front door. By the way, you'll notice an abundance of leaves in the picture. Before it started snowing (so in November), leaves started piling up in front of everyone's door. Since we don't have a broom or a shovel, we just hoped ours would blow away. Then, it snowed and it rained, and they just sort of became a permanent fixture. Soon, we noticed that there was not only an abundance of leaves, but an abundance of dog poop on those leaves. Finally, right before we went on our trip, I decided that I had had enough and using the dustpan as a shovel, I scooped all the leaves into a garbage bag. Then, we came back to this. I'm not sure if someone dumped them there or if they just happened to blow there (there are only 2 trees on our street and they haven't had leaves for months). I wasn't up for dealing with it quite yet, though, and I left them for a few days. Then, on Monday the street cleaners came and they brought a man with a leaf blower (which they had never done before). So, now the problem has once again been solved (this time without any effort on my part).

Feb 9 - Early Shoot

As I mentioned before, I was pretty tired after our trip. For this shot, I just used what was around the house. We (Mr. Traveler in particular) go through a lot of peanut butter.

Feb 10 - Peanut Butter

Mr. Traveler decided to challenge himself to a little map drawing exercise (i.e. replicating the whole world, including country divisions by memory), which is captured in the following picture. With my lack of geographical knowledge, I didn't even bother participating in this challenge, except to document his progress.

Feb 11 - Map from Memory

So, there you have it -- Our week starting with Paris and ending with me staying mostly around the house!