6. Snippets from Paris

Come last Friday night, we found ourselves serenaded by a roving trumpet, a french horn and  a "mouth keyboard" (I don't know how else to describe it).  They were great.  Here is Paul leaning out our left window and me snapping a pic from the right window.  The trumpeter is in red in the middle of the circle.

This was our first Friday night on the rue de l'Arbre Sec.  The restaurants and clubs finally pulled up pegs about 3.00 am and the garbage collection didn't start till 5.00 am, so we managed 2 hours initially in what seemed like a very long night.  

But Saturday was party night!  If I was still young I would have been down there with the girls singing their hearts out at the wine bar below our window.  They seemed to have been having an excellent time.  They toddled off to the nightclub around the corner about midnight and I heard them going home with some loudmouth youth on a motorbike about 6.30am.  Oh, for the energy of twenty-somethings.    

I can hear you crying out "They must be in a terribly noisy area", but no, Paris never sleeps and we like to keep our double-glazed windows open.  Still, after nearly one week with an open window, I am considering no air and ear-plugs!

 

Yesterday we took the train to Saint Germaine en Mayne.  Here we are waiting for our train on our local metro station Les Halles.  Very quiet because it's Sunday, but the trains still run every 5 or 6 minutes and are always on time.

This is a double-decker train.  Actually it's the train we should have got on, but we were still working out how to read the notice boards (in French) and we didn't get on it.  So we had to wait 12 minutes for the next one.  We went to the National Museum of Archeology, which was about 17km from Paris as the crow flies and about 29km by rail.  It took less than 25 minutes in total.  Very quick.

For those of you who know I have a Citroen Pluriel (which I call Muriel, after Gayle Dougall's mother, and in which Paul takes his mother, Bianca shopping every Tuesday), this is Muriel's grandmother a Citroen 2CV.  The sign on the side door translated to  " an umbrella on four wheels".

We have a purchased a Paris Museum Pass which generally helps you to avoid queues (as well as to save money on entrance fees).  However, if the monument closes for an hour for lunch, you still have to wait for it to re-open.  So here we are queueing to visit Sainte-Chapelle.

And having found ourselves very close to the Flower Market (which was closed today), I couldn't resist a peek into the surrounding "garden centres".  Plants are not cheap in Paris, but no-one has a garden, only the opportunity to have a few pot plants on a balcony. 

How much do you think it would have cost Apple for this advertisement?  When an historic building has to undergo cleaning or restoration, it is required to be enclosed behind some type of safety barricade.  In this case, the building has been wrapped in some type of white fabric (as we saw done in Vienna some years ago) obviously paid for by selling the advertising to Apple.  The old buildings take so long to work on that this hoarding will probably stay in place for 4 or 5 years.

And lastly, another photo of our street.  In daylight this time.  The red sign on white background is the toy shop below our apartment, called artoyz.  We are the third level above the toy shop.  Next to the toy shop is Ristorante Fellini.  This is a restaraunt of some note, so we are saving our pennies to eat there.  And next to Fellini is the Japanese restaraunt where we are going right now!  So farewell - we are off to eat at 8.56pm.