Day 43 – Nanoo nanoo

Our last full day, and another sunny one at that. Something different today (as it turns out in more ways than one), a journey to some areas and sites we’ve always talked about but not yet seen.

It’s just as well, as there’s something rather melancholy about the last day of one’s travels. Not like the leaving day, that’s all bags, and trains and schedules – things to do and to think about. The last full day, the last day before everything goes back to normal. We’ll be different of course, just a little; a little older, a little more knowledgeable, a little more full of experiences and yarns. And perhaps we’ve formulated some new idea to be a little more French-chic or to adopt some new habit or direction that, in the contemplation space provided betwixt mountain and vale, we’ve decided might be a better way to live. Maybe. But by and large we’ll go back to was. So, somewhere different.

We jump on the Metro at Hotel Deville, a block from our home, and jump off five minutes later at Botzaris. Parc des Butte-Chamont. It’s a remarkable park, a remarkable vision. Refered to as ‘bare-hill’ because of it’s poor soil, it was once where they displayed hung criminals, till 1760, then a refuse dump after the revolution, a place for cutting up horse carcasses and sewage pit. Later it became a gypsum and limestone quarry to supply the rapidly expanding city with building materials, the function that gave the park its bones.

It took two years to terrace the parks 61 acres (1860-ish) dumping two hundred thousand cubic metres of topsoil there in the process. From the quarry they build a grotto and a waterfall and an island on which stands the impressive 50m high butte. Unlikely most other Paris parks, it’s not ordered and geometric but rather a wilderness.

We spend a couple of hours here walking about, enjoying a hot chocolates at the little kiosk by the lake, and watching the joggers and walkers steaming about. We see some green parrots – it’s nice to listen to the bird song in the sun.

It’s an easy tube ride from Parc des Butte-Chamont to Republique and we surface from the Metro to a square full of clacking skateboard riders bunny hopping on the big open concrete square. A short walk gets us to the canal Saint Martin.

It’s a working canal and we watch (old boat hands ourselves now) as the boatman easily maneuvers his long gravel filled barge up through the locks.

At close quarters the first lock is unusual. By design or gradual decline, the downstream end is lower than the upstream end by maybe six inches and if the flow over the lower closed gate is too high (like when we were there), the water rises up over the edge of the lock and flows down the stairs and gardens into the street. Cars slosh through the pools as they spread across the road and rats come running from the flooded gardens and rocks.

We’re hungry and find a creperie by the lock called “lulu’s”. They only use buckwheat flower (farine saracin) and have the most amazing combination of meats and cheeses. Di has camembert and cherry jam and I have prosciutto, cabbage and potato….but then, because they’re so good, we indulge in their homemade butter caramel and nut crepes with whipped cream. Oh my.

Di says to the owner ‘c’est tres bonne’, to which he relies, ‘my wife said that to me at 2am this morning’. A risky little joke I thought, but he managed to pull it off with his French accent and his number 2 salt and pepper goatee. ‘Don’t tell anyone’, he says, as he ducks back to the kitchen with a grin.

I decide to walk back into town and see Di off on the tube (each of us managing the pancake overload in our own way). We meet back up at ‘The Little Café’ near our place a couple of hours later and decide to head over to Shakespear’s to enjoy its wonderful book-lined spaces in quietude – Aggie is waiting for Di.

Later we wander down the tourist lanes to a little piano bar where a man plays and a lady in a Russian fur hat sings and plays the crowd. We sit at the bar and the wiry, pointy faced bar man with a permanent ‘v’ of a smile talks incessantly while making cocktails. He tells us that humans have telepathic ability, that teleportation technology is available today (because some American scientists at the bar told him so), that there are life forms from other planets living amongst us and that, finally, he is an alien…aged one hundred and ten.

The alien pours a generous glass and gives us samples of the cocktails he’s making, so he’s alright by us (although his single minded adoration of America and dislike of blacks is a little disturbing). Later he introduced us to Savanna from New York and Owen from Florida. Savanna is also an alien. Weirdly the piano man and the Russian bash out some song about…aliens.

It’s a nice walk home in the cool foggy night. We’ll pack tomorrow.

We packed tomorrow….Singapore as we send this – almost home.