There has been a shooting in Paris. A policeman is dead and two others are injured. In an email to a concerned friend, Dave has responded:

We had been to the Bois de Boulogne park, on the far west side of Paris, before going to a museum that was not too far from the park. After leaving the museum, we saw that we could walk to the Eiffel Tower before getting a metro back to our neighborhood. We were around the Eiffel Tower from around 8:30 to after 9. It is only just beginning to get dark at 9:00 here. We walked to the metro station and rode the two lines to get home. We stopped for some groceries and were home at around 10:15. After eating a little food and having a little wine we checked into internet stuff, and I saw the news of the shooting online. Then we turned on the tv to watch reporting. So, we were at the Eiffel Tower at the time of the shooting, 8:50, but had no idea of the event until getting home and seeing it online.
While at the Eiffel Tower, there were some speeding police cars, sirens on and racing around a corner to get somewhere, but that seemed normal to me because we’ve seen speeding police cars every day, racing to get somewhere. Normal in a big city, but I would bet those police were headed to the scene. While waiting for our metro train, we saw our approaching train coming through the tunnel, but as it came into view we could see all the lights off and the entire train was empty and it slowly rolled past without stopping. So, that was strange.

I’m mostly feeling sad.

The bright side is that Paris is awesome, and there are a lot of people here. The parks, the tree lined streets, the architecture, the history,the river, the cafes, the metro and street musicians, the ENDLESS beautiful things behind glass windows on sidewalk streets, from the chocolatiers and patisseries, to every conceivable type of art object, to all the garments and shoes and bags. All the open food markets, to the mind- blowing grocery stores with only exotic products that I can’t imagine being available anywhere else, it’s all amazing………a feast for the eyes.
People are happy to live here and people are happy to be visiting here. That is not going to change.

I feel very sad for what’s happening in the world, but the weather is perfect and I’m going to go out soon and enjoy the day. The chance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time is minuscule.

Dave