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.

2 thoughts on “Around the Neighborhood”

Denise says:

May 5, 2022 at 10:55 am

I remembered wondering about the parking in Paris too. I wondered if they had to go get the owner of one of the cars to move so they could get out or just how they did it. 🤔

You said the grocery was small, but I remember seeing a few that were unbelievably smaller. There was one close to our hotel where I bought fresh fruit a couple of times and it was real good and fresh and real small! 👍

Gotta love the French! 🙂

Pam Jaffe says:

May 5, 2022 at 3:10 pm

I hope that that you and Chuck I saw on those bikes going through the woods!