Wiping the butter off the camera

Made it to Rennes, and back to work - questioning waitresses, hounding bartenders, running around. Rennes is a medium-sized city with serveral universities. It's an old town, Celtic then Roman, with medieval houses on the crooked streets. However, most of Rennes burned down in the 1700s - which they remind you often around here. A decent place to visit, but most likely tourists will stop here on their way to the rest of Brittany.

Found some excellent sweets here so far. One shop that makes 22 kinds of macarons (not macaroons, they're a light cookie sandwich pastry thing). And another chocolate shop that was pretty wonderful. The owner makes only chocolats with ganache inside (chocolate cream), which are labeled 1-30 on the top. She doesn't use any essential oils or extracts - all the flavors in the chocolats are real ingredients. And the combinations shouldn't even be legal they're so good. Dark chocolate with elder blossoms, chocolate with absinth (leaves of wormwood), chocolate with Espelette pepper (a basque thing) and bitter Corsican honey, chocolate with basil and lemon. She laughed at me when I asked if she had a specialty.

Toby thinks I have a pastry problem, which probably is true. This morning we got some lackluster pastries, so I went to two other patisseries to find something good. I had kouign-amman - a traditional Breton pastsry that's super buttery. Anyone have suggestions on cleaning butter off a camera?

We went on a tour of the Parliment building, which was built in the 1600s and somehow escaped the massive fire in the 1700s, only to be ravaged by fire in 1994 when striking fishermen accidentally launched a flare onto the roof. A lot of it was saved, including the Versailles era ceilings and paintings. The tapestries also survived, and were sent to Paris for repair after the fire, but then another fire in the Paris workshop destroyed them. It would almost be comic if the French didn't take these things so seriously.

I think we're in the only part of France that isn't having a massive heat wave. But I think Californians have it worse. Back to learning more vocabulary from the tv show "Qui veut gagner des millions?" Comment dit-on "final answer" en francais?