Walking around Paris is like a pinball bouncing off bumpers. You can hit the flipper to launch you for an approximate destination, but what you encounter along the way is random and unpredictable. That’s what makes it such a great strolling town. Just start anywhere and wander. It’s not all museums, parks, monuments, and architecture. There’s delight and goofiness in the ordinary pace of life here. We spent a lot of days with only a vague idea of an itinerary.
Public art pops up all over the place. We bumped into this outdoor exhibit on the Quai Branly, a walkway on the Left Bank along the Seine. It went on for quite a distance, with mostly avant garde (or just bizarre?) photography.
On the whole, Paris is a pretty clean city, despite some counter-intuitive accepted practices. There are lots of trash containers on the streets, consisting of a metal ring stand with a plastic bag hanging free. The key thing is that they are emptied frequently by guys driving little golfcart trucks. If there isn’t a receptacle handy, you are encouraged to throw your trash in the gutter! Yup, just toss it. The streets are cleaned seemingly every day or so, and they figure the trash will get swept up. All over town you find city employees walking around with brooms and bags, and they even have crews that hose off the sidewalks. This guy’s hose is connected to a mini water truck that is just out of the picture.
The famed bookstalls still line the promenades along the Seine, although I can’t for the life of me see how most of them make a living. These aren’t, for the most part, real antiquarian dealers. Their stock mostly seemed to be obscure tomes on anything and everything, all used and in mixed condition ranging from merely dog-eared to truly tattered. Fun to look at, though.
One of the hazards of walking around Paris is the need, already well documented in my case in our trip to Chantilly, to find a bathroom once in a while. Let’s face it: we guys of “a certain age” need one more often than we used to. Virtually no shop or eating place will let you use theirs (if they even have one) unless you are a customer. I don’t want to buy a meal just to take a leak. Paris does have a number of public “pissoires” around town; the trick is to find one when you need it. We could walk for ages and never spot one when it was wanted. Other times they popped up all over. What is truly needed is a map book that identifies the location of these salvations. None that I have seen provides this info. I went online trying to find it, but even sites that claimed to be toilette guides turned out to be useless. Maybe there’s some money to be made here. Anyway, pay attention to this procedural so that you don’t end up embarrassing yourselves like, um . . . we did. The throne huts look like this:
Each contains only one toilet, so lines frequently form. That’s the rotating door in front of Loni. To the left is a panel, explaining the functioning, all in French, of course. It has a series of four LED lights, which aren’t very visible here, although I think you can see one glowing just below the single white circle halfway down. They tell you the status of the cycle. I did not know this. When the green light is on, the unit is washed, unoccupied, and ready for use. Everything is clean, because the unit completely washes down and disinfects after every use! Did I know this? Of course not. I was second in line. The door opened, the previous occupant departed, and a yellow light was glowing. The guy in front of me didn’t move, so I was going to go around him, but thought first to motion to him that he was first and should go ahead. He looked aghast, and said “non, non!” and pointed to the yellow light. At that moment, the door revolved closed, and a red light came on. The unit was cleaning itself. When it was done, the green light came on, the guy stepped up, pressed the enter button, and voila! So that’s how it works. When he exited, I waited like a pro for the cleaning cycle to complete. Well, actually I was shifting from foot to foot while I was waiting, as it takes several minutes. You can see why lines form. Once in, you have to push the door close button (while an irritating recording in unintelligible French is telling you what to do) and you’re in business. There’s a porcelain bowl (no seat) and a counter with a small washbasin. I relieved myself (I went first as my need was more urgent than Loni’s) and searched in vain for a flush button. Nope. Nowhere to be found. But it’s all yellow. How can I leave it like that? Went over to the basin. No taps. OK, just some automatic mechanism. Stuck my hands under the overhang. Nothing. Irritating French recording is blaring away, probably trying to tell me what to do, but it ain’t getting through. Stuck my hands under again and kept them there. After about 15 seconds a small squirt of soap comes out. Lather. Keep holding hands there. 15 more seconds and some water comes out. Rinse. Keep holding hands in same place. Air jet starts. Dry hands. Now what? Toilet is still full. Then it dawns on me. The darn thing is automatic, and will flush during the cleaning cycle after I exit. Duh. Push the door open button, and exit. Doors close behind me, and the cycle begins. I gave Loni the lowdown, or so I thought. She entered on the green, and I saw her push the door close button. Then, ten seconds later, the door opens and out she steps, not exactly a happy chappy. People in line are perplexed at this rapid turnaround. Seems that after she closed the door, the darn recording started blaring and she thought she heard it say something about the porte (door), so she pushed the open button. If a buzzer would sound for a wrong answer, imagine it now. Fun and games at the pissoire. Having lost her place in line, we departed, wiser, if not comforted.
Musicians are all over Paris. They play in Metro stations (but only in the long tunnels, never on the platforms for some reason), they play and sing ON the Metro’s, they’re jazz bands on street corners, harpists on sidewalks, and singers in the alleys. Lots of them carry portable battery-operated speakers that play drum or instrumental accompaniments. It’s pretty startling to be on the train and all of a sudden it breaks out with amplified music. Accordions, violins, trumpets, opera, ethnic, you name it. It was a rare Metro trip when we didn’t hear someone doing their thing. I never saw much money being handed over, however, so it’s a tough way to make a euro. I loved the guy with the baritone horn, as I played one in junior high. The guy in the porkpie hat was really unusual. He stood in this alleyway, hardly moving, staring at the wall, and sang in the purest castrato soprano voice you’d ever want to hear. It was eerie, but he got a lot of coin thrown his way after his performance.
There’s a street just below Sacre Coeur, on the touristy side of the hill, that was absolutely jammed with humanity one Sunday afternoon. We joined the crowd, and the street was lined with tourist-trap gift shops, but the biggest impediment to the flow of the crowd was a series of six or more temporary (very) tables set up in the middle of the street with the old shell game in full swing. Both the ball under the cup and three-card monte were being played. I went to take a picture of one, and an alleged bystander started waving at me with a nasty face and saying non! Bite me, was my response. She obviously was the shill in the crowd, working with the operator, and didn’t want me recording his game.
Down near Notre Dame, on the Pont de l’Archeveche that connects one end of the Ile de la Cite with the Left Bank, we came upon this collection of thousands of locks attached to the bridge’s ironwork. They are placed there by lovers who are following the ritual of pledging their eternal connection by locking it to the bridge and throwing away the key, or, I guess, forgetting the combo. Whatever.
One day we came upon the remains of a sports car exhibition that was just breaking up. Two of my all-time wish-list favorites were still there: A Triumph TR3 and an Austin-Healey 3000. My first 360 degree spin was in a TR3 while acting as navigator for an idiot driver during a rally when I was in high school. When you’re that close to the ground, a maneuver like that seems so much more up close and personal. As for the Healey, that’s the one that got away. When Loni and I had just gotten married, I was at my first duty station in the Navy at North Island in San Diego in 1968. Our first car, a ‘67 Chevrolet Bel Air, went submarine on us in a flood of the parking lot of our first apartment. We went hunting for a replacement and passed by the local British cars dealer. There it was. A new 1967 British-racing-green 3000 Mark III. Love. Dealer said it was the last one in Southern California, as Austin had stopped exporting them to the States. We looked, we sat, we drooled. Impractical. Yup. We went home to think about it. Next day we went back to buy. Sorry, gone. Augh! I still think about that car to this day. But now I’m reduced to gazing at clapped-out 2CV’s.
A number of the parks have areas set aside for playing boules, also known as petanque, or bocce in Italian. We have a set of boules that we carry in the rig, but haven’t played that much with them. It’s a real passion over here and the skill level is amazing. We watched an old geezer who could not even stand up straight launch perfect shots that left the boule right smack against the small target ball, the cochonnet. That’s the object of the game, to get your boule the closest. The good players could unerringly loft their boule to land on and smack away an opponent’s boule. British lawn bowling is similar, but without the lofting throws. To throw, you have to stand within the ring at this guy’s feet. The games are played on dirt-gravel, not grass.
Paris is loaded with motorcycles and scooters, which are very practical as the streets are narrow, parking is extremely difficult to find, and they are allowed to park on sidewalks! Lots of streets have special parking areas reserved for two-wheelers, including our own Rue Lamarck. These are just down the block from our apartment.
If you look way down in the picture above, there’s a red awning on the left at the foot of the street. That’s the little Cocci Market where we did most of our food shopping. The veggies were outside, and the rest of the stuff within. Loni began to be a favorite of the trio of guys that ran it. They were fascinated by her fractured French.
If you must have four wheels in the city, the overwhelming choice is for a small car, as parking is virtually bumper to bumper. These guys are actually well spaced; usually, at least one bumper is touching.
One of my downfalls is a sweet tooth, not for candies, but for baked goods. Cakes, pies, patisseries, oh yes. Almost every block of the city has one or more bake shops where dazzling desserts are on display. Look away, look away!
If eating is not the national pastime in France, surely it must be protesting and striking. Not a day passed when we didn’t encounter some sort of demonstration. This was one of the more unusual. We could not figure out what it was all about, but the signage indicated that it was related to the Communist party. Don’t know whom the masks portray on all the heads.
In one of my earlier posts, I commented on the barge boats that were tied up all up and down the Seine. From what I now see, they aren’t working boats at all, but purely live-aboards. Some of them are really big. I’d love to see what they look like below decks. Most are quite nicely maintained, and whimsical to boot. The far right one is called “La Brigantine.” Given the high (think San Francisco or New York City) cost of apartments in Paris (we look in the realtor windows), and their small size, I wonder what it costs to dock one of these right here in the middle of Paris?
Although most of Paris is free of graffiti, it does exist. We saw a lot of it from the trains as they made their way out of Paris. This was probably the worst we saw in wandering on foot. Does it have a Gallic flair? Looks like NYC to me.
Well, all this walking about generates an appetite. Fortunately, you can grab a jambon sandwich on just about any block and eat it on a handy bench. Hmmm, now where was that patisserie again? Bon appetite!
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