Carlie may have left the hustle and bustle of downtown San Francisco last summer, but her new life in Cole Valley has been full of nice surprises and influences of the French kind. The evenings here in Cole Valley can get quite foggy and breezy. On a recent stroll up Cole, Carlie’s brown beret (purchased last year in her favorite part of Paris-the Marais) flew off her head and landed near an iron-gated entry to a flat. After retrieving her beret, her eyes focused on the upper section of the gate. To her surprise, the design had incorporated one of Carlie’s favorite symbol…the fleur-du-lys! “Oui Oui, ce qui est beau!!”, she shouted in her fractured French, and drew quite a bit of attention from passersby before managing to snap this photo.

Carlie thought how fantastic it would be to capture more French iconography and compile them into a pictorial book. Her smile was as wide as the Seine!