It feels warm at eight degrees after Cortina, the sun is shining and we have a week of exploring Paris ahead of us. We select ‘Eclectic Marais’ and ‘Historic Marais’ from our 50 Paris City Walks, giving us something head for, and off we go.
Where we’re staying is definitely eclectic. It’s a predominantly male gay hub with many gay bars, interesting clothing stores (leather studded braces, nice leather caps and some hot looking black leather steel spike studded sluggo’s – I’m thinking of grabbing a pair for our summer) and, obviously, plenty of gay couples wandering about.
It’s a Saturday and everybody’s out enjoying the weekend sun. The morning food market around the block has fresh seafood; flathead, flounder, oysters and sea urchins, brilliantly coloured tulips, roses, hyacinths, azaleas, camelias and (interestingly enough – wattle), burst out of the florists tent, there’s a wine seller, and of course an assortment of fresh meats and sausages and a scarf shop. Scarves are definitely in. You can get away with wearing a blanket and garbage bag if you have a brilliantly coloured scarf around your neck.
We head to falafal street (our name for it) where a seemingly endless array of door width falafal vendors issue their steaming delicacies to long queues of salivating weekend wanderers.
It’s also an age old Jewish area and the Jewish sabath and we walk down a street flooded with synagogue goers as they leave the Saturday service, many with their customary kippah hats and some in all black with long grey beards. Later we see a memorial for all the French that homed and rescued Jews from the Nazis in Vichy France.
Before trying on some fun second hand hats and coats, we stop for a coffee at the famous Les Philosophes where they boast ‘le vrai fait maison’ (real home made cooking). We find a Tibetan exhibition with some beautiful timber pieces and then an exhibition on ‘nourishing France’ through history with some wonderful photographs and movie footage of early markets and soup kitchens and ration queues during the depression. On the historic walk we find the old city wall (now part of a school playground wall) and St Paul’s Village where we happen upon a ’boutique invention shop’ storing paper e-watches, ingenious shoulder satchels, strategy games, BBQ tongs and wooden clothes pegs. The French owner is very passionate and shows us his own 11 year old well used super-satchel with special expand-a-dex-folders, carbon fibre – hardcase techo wallet and…well, this guy really lives his stuff.
St Paul’s village is undergoing significant renovations, some dubious. They’re covering old stone with six inch blocks of fibreglass, sealing this with building board and painting it. Outside the square we stop to look at the building materials. A local Frenchman comes over and, hearing our English conversation starts to explain how these rennos are bad. Unfortunately his command of English doesn’t give sufficient scope to express his utter contempt for the work and he suddenly breaks into a tirade of French insults and invectives. We nod and ‘oui’ and ‘mmmm’ before heading off in another direction.
Down on the Seine people are out walking in the sun. A band plays and people gather round.
We had ‘linner’ at a Charcuterie place in the square near our unit and met Nathan, a young Parisian who did a surfing tour from Noosa down to Melbourne.
Later, much later we go to a jazz club but it’s booked out so we opt for Monday night and call it a day.
A great day had in Paris!! Enjoy Jazz club Monday!
Will do!
Jeff, the black leather steel spiked sluggos sound interesting, did you buy a pair?
Peter
When I tried them on they had spikes on the inside also which kind of took the edge off the purchase for me. But there was a nice red pair that we picked up for you.