Out and About in Paris

And this is the post I always do about odds and ends of things we’ve seen in Paris outside our neighborhood. Those little things that are not Post-worthy, but may be of interest to Francophiles. So let’s get started (or “Let’s go!” as the GPS lady always says enthusiastically).

We didn’t go to the Eiffel Tower since we’ve been many times before. But there’s something that takes your breath away every time you round a corner or go up a hill and discover it off in the distance. So I try to take a photo every time I see it.

This beautiful dogwood tree in a downtown area was the first one we have seen. Apparently it fascinated this couple too because she was carefully examining it while he was trying to identify it with the use of his cell phone. Tourists!

This housebarge on the Seine was too long to get in one shot so I took it in 2 pieces. This is obviously the home of a plant lover. Notice all of the plants in the garden on the upper deck (even though the flooring itself looks like artificial turf) and the real grass lawn on the cabin roof. I do want to know what’s in the cabin behind the curtains though. Notice the 2 solar panels with the grass between them on the far left.

Cliff took us to this great restaurant one night (trans: the Pig’s Foot). It’s a really beautiful place with amazing chandeliers that I managed to not get a photo of. And there are also dining rooms on multiple floors above the main level. The restaurant has been here since 1947 and they’re open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, even through the pandemic. Check out our desserts below.

These little piggy meringues arrived at our table while we were waiting for our dessert.

Okay, I have no idea what is going on here. There is no church nearby and it’s a Friday afternoon, Here’s the bride, but where’s the groom? And what are these people fussing over? Why is the blond girl now holding the veil that she was putting on the bride earlier? Why do all of the guys have big cameras?

Traffic! The traffic is incredible. The lanes are marked, sorta, but nobody seems to pay much attention to them. And there’s construction everywhere. It’s kind of like a free-for-all. May the best man win!

These bicycles and motorcycles are traveling in the same lanes with us and they are zipping in and out between cars and each other at break-neck speed. And a helmet? What’s a helmet?

It seems like I’ve seen fewer and fewer gas stations around. In fact I only remember seeing one that was just 2 little gas pumps on the sidewalk next to the street which is normally how you see them. But we were driving along and all of a sudden Cliff zipped down this ramp into an underground gas station. This looks more like our gas stations with multiple pumps and actually there were 2 different brands of gasoline available here. But still no mini-mart.

The Metro station for the Louvre has artwork in it so you can get a sneak peek of the art while you’re waiting for your train, although the Metro comes every 2-4 minutes in the daytime and 6-12 minutes at night so you don’t get *too* much of a peek. Cool!

Of course I never managed to get a photo of Cliff’s cute little red Fiat but it looks a lot like this one only it has a sun roof (this is a Fiat, right?). I like this construction wall behind the cars too. It looks like some kind of plexiglass and it has drawings by school children and that part of it is permanent. But then it’s also been graffitied too. You can decide which is which.

A sunny view of the Arc de Triomphe just as we’re about to go into that mind-boggling roundabout.

Interesting fountain. Moving too fast. Didn’t get the name.

A statue at the little plaza honoring author Marcel Ayme whose nearby home was in the Montmartre area of Paris. The statue is based on Ayme’s short story called “Le Passe-Muraille” (the Passer-Through-Walls) published in 1943 and later made into 2 movies. The statue was made by sculptor and actor Jean Marais.

One evening we went to a little cafe to hear Cliff’s friend play with a jazz group: “A live concert of jazz, soul, and French varieties” as it says on the board. They played (and sang) everything from Cole Porter to salsa music. It was absolutely delightful. Lots of talent among these 4 guys (you can barely see the base player on the right). We had dinner during the show and it was delicious. What a cute little French place and what a fun evening.

Raoul knows his place and looks pretty comfortable in it.

Majestic Sacre Coeur sits high on a hill overlooking a busy neighborhood below.

We met Cliff one day at the Embassy and he gave us a quick tour of his workplace. It’s a stately building in a beautiful area. The U.S.’s Ambassador to France, Denise Campbell Bauer, was out of the building but her secretary allowed us to see her stately office. Of course we had to turn in our cell phones when we entered the building, so the few photos we have are the ones that Cliff was kind enough to take for us.

Well here we are at the end of the trail once again. We’ve managed to pass our Covid tests so we’re ready to hit the road. We’ve had a good time and we hope you’ve enjoyed our trip too. We’re planning a Viking European river cruise for October and we hope you’ll join us. Until next time, au revoir.

Chuck & Joyce

Around the Neighborhood

These photos were taken as we were out and about in our neighborhood. They’re just unrelated odds and ends of things we saw, none of them big enough to warrant a post of their own.

Cliff’s apartment is very near the Seine. The land on the right in this photo is a island in the middle of the Seine.

Beautiful irises strut their stuff in the big concrete planter boxes that are scattered along the sidewalks.

This beautiful little doggy in the window is keeping watch over his owner’s gold store.

This is what I hate about Paris streets. See how this street splits into 2 streets? There’s also a new street to the left of the person in black (by the bicycle, hard to see). So both the street to the left in the Y and the street that turns off this street to the left just kind of materialize out of nowhere. Heaven help if you need to find either of those 2 streets!

This is the closest grocery store. It’s about 3 blocks from the apartment. There’s a little red sign above the light (which I managed to miss in my photo) and it says Franprix. They’re everywhere and take on many forms depending upon the building it’s inhabiting, I suppose. There’s a produce market out in front of ours. You pick up your fruits and veggies there and they put them in a bag for you and keep the bag and give you a slip with the amount written on it. Then you head on into the store and do your shopping, pay for everything including the produce, and then pick up your produce bag on the way out.

The store is small – just 3 aisles like this – but it’s 2 stories and an escalator takes you down to the basement where there are move aisles. I found it confusing because some things are repeated in multiple aisles and in both the upstairs and downstairs sections. Wine, for example. You can see there are bottles of wine on both sides of this aisle although they don’t take up the whole of either aisle. There’s more wine in another aisle upstairs and there’s more wine downstairs. And it’s the same way with coffee. – there’s coffee both upstairs and downstairs. I wish somebody would explain that to me. In English, please.

This is downstairs. This is where the frozen and refrigerated foods are, as well as meats. It smells funny down here and it’s freezing. And there’s another whole shelf of coffee. Go figure.

A couple of the meat markets have rotisserie chickens cooking right on the streets. And they look and smell delicious.

Magic happens when it comes to parking on the street. I swear that Cliff can get his little red Fiat into a space that looks like it’s 6 inches shorter than his car in less than 10 seconds. It’s amazing.

The Bois de Boulogne is the second largest public park in Paris covering 2,088 acres, which is about 2 1/2 times the area of Central Park in NYC. The land was ceded to the city of Paris by the Emperor Napoleon III to be turned into a public park in 1852. Within the boundaries of the Bois de Boulogne are several large gardens, including the Bagatelle Park we visited last week, the Foundation Louis Vuitton and Parc d’Acclimatation that we also visited last week, a complex of greenhouses, several lakes, two tracks for horseracing, the site of the annual French Open tennis tournament, and other attractions. And woods., pristine woods with miles and miles of trails through them.

Because of its size, the park is best explored by bicycle since much of it is closed to cars.

Luxembourg Gardens

Luxembourg Gardens were packed and I swear every single chair/bench was taken. We didn’t stay too long, just took a quick look through the gardens and moved on. Not many photos.

I love this pool with the boats. Kids can rent the boats and then they run around the pool with their sticks pushing them off the wall whenever they get stuck.

I love the smile on this woman’s face as she enjoys her book. It’s great to see so many people in parks reading real books rather than looking at their cell phones.

And the little kids riding ponies are adorable. And some of them look like they’ve probably done this many times before because they really look comfortable riding.

See, I told you there weren’t very many photos.

Jardin des Plantes (Garden of Plants)

We made a quick run through the Garden of Plants, 70 acres of beautiful gardens and a couple of museums. We’ve been here before but it never ceases to amaze us. Here are just a few photos of what we saw.

The Alpine Garden is a little hidden garden within the Garden of Plants. It’s always been one of our favorites but we agreed it didn’t look quite as good this year as it has in the past.

L’Atelier des Lumieres

L’Atelier des Lumieres is a unique art center presenting classic pieces of art in immense and video- and music-accompanied exhibitions. We came here in 2018 when they first opened and then also visited their sister site in Provence in 2019. Both of those shows were of art by Van Gogh and Klimt. The current presentations are of Cezanne and Kandinsky. And as always, it was breathtaking.

I love the way the art is on the ceiling, the walls and even the floor. And since it’s always moving, sometimes the movement on the floor makes you a bit dizzy.

Kandinsky

When Cliff drove us to L’Atelier des Lumieres on Sunday, we noticed that the police on motorcycles were busy closing off streets and traffic in the area was becoming challenging. Often after the police closed off a street, 4 or 5 of them would line up along the tape at the end of the street and just sit there on their motorcycles. After we came out of the theatre, we decided to find a sidewalk cafe in the area where we could have lunch outside and do some people-watching. That’s when we noticed there was a huge protest group gathering about 1/2 block down the street preparing to march. That huge ribbon of people marched through the intersection at the end of our street the entire time we were at the cafe. There were lots of people carrying different colors of flags but it was too far away to read what they said. Sometimes there were women speaking on loudspeakers and occasionally women sang songs over loudspeakers. Periodically there were loud booms and several times they set off tear gas bombs and we could see huge clouds of smoke. A middle-aged couple went into our restaurant briefly and when they came back out we could see the side of the woman’s face was very red and she was wiping it with a damp cloth. She had obviously been tear gased and was in a lot of discomfort. When then came out, they headed back to the protest. According to the news later in the evening, the marchers were protesting the government to lower the retirement age to 60, although I think there were also several other issues they were protesting too. May 1st, Labor Day here, is a traditional day of protest. My photos are too far away but here’s what I got.

If you look closely you can see a crowd of people, some with flags, moving through the intersection.

Here you can see the smoke from the tear gas bombs in the background.

Saint James Folie

Claude Baudard de Vaudesir, Baron de Sainte-James and wealthy financier, bought this estate in 1772. At this point, this land was just countryside. In 1777, the Count of Artois had a folly (a pleasure pavilion – a small house) built for himself in what is now Park Bagatelle right down the street (see last week’s post on the folly at Park Bagatelle). So Baron Sainte-James wanted to have a folly to compete with the Count of Artois’ folly. Unfortunately, after it was finished, the Baron went bankrupt and the house and grounds changed hands and the property was subdivided several times in the years after. Originally the house and all of its adjacent buildings and grounds covered 30 acres. But after the property was subdivided several times, the house, remaining few outbuildings and grounds were only 4½ acres. In 1952 the house was sold to the State and eventually passed to the city. Later the house served as the administrative building for a high school that was built on part of the property. In 2006, the gardens were opened to the public. The entire estate is still in disrepair and the house and the grounds are in a long process of renovation. But in spite of all that, it’s still a lovely little park in the center of the city.

On the side of the park next to the street is a heavily-used children’s neighborhood playground.

The Art Deco walled garden with the Temple of Love dating from 1925 at the far end.

On the left is the Grand Rocher today. On the right is a painting by Claude-Louis Chatelet of the Grand Rocher with boats when it was in its prime.

Looking through one of the archways in the Grand Rocher.

This lovely bridge over a pathway originally had a river flowing beneath it and the current renovation has plans to restore that feature. Originally the gardens included waterfalls, rivers, canals, and a pond, all a part of the upcoming restoration.

Apparently the pile of rocks on the right originally had waterfalls in it. Right now it’s just an unsightly, unsafe pile of rocks.

I love this house next to the St. James Foley, especially that little forest on the roof-top patio.

The World’s Largest Flea Market

Oh my! We made a visit to the Paris Flea Market, officially called Le Marche aux Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen (trans: the market of fleas in the Saint-Ouen area of Paris), and it’s amazing! It’s the largest concentration of antique dealers and second-hand dealers in the world, totaling more than 5 million visitors per year. The entire flea market covers 17.5 acres and includes 2,500 shops. It currently consists of 15 covered markets (Antica, Biron, Cambo, Dauphine, l’Entrepôt, Jules-Vallès, l’Usine, le Passage, Malassis, Malik, Paul Bert, Serpette, and Vernaison), five shopping streets (Rue Jules Vallès, Rue Lecuyer, Rue Paul Bert, Rue des Rosiers and Impasse Simon) and “merchant unpacking” on the sidewalks, each with its own identity. We spent a couple of hours at Biron Market which consists of 220 stores arranged in 2 huge parallel alleys totaling about 1/4 mile. Alley 1 in this market included antique furniture from all eras and origins, chandeliers, earthenware, rare paintings, mirrors, etc. Alley 2, which is covered, was more eclectic and more flea market. The whole flea market is a fabulous place and you could spend days there and not see it all.