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Published: August 3rd 2017
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Shopping alley way
These appear behind gates along streets all over the place. The businesses in this one were all garment designers, wholesalers but no retailers. We started out walking yesterday, following a route towards the Louvre, recommended by our Intervac home exchange host that would take us past a nice variety of various little shops and cafés. It was nice just being out and about, reacquainting ourselves with the Paris we fell in love with four years ago.
Our first stop was at the Louvre metro station in Les Halles. After much online research, we decided to buy the Navigo mois decouverte Pass. For 73 Euros, plus 5 Euros for the card, you can travel for the full calendar month across all of Paris, zones 1 to 5, plus out to Versailles, Charles deGaul airport, and even Disneyland Paris should you be so inclined. And that includes travel by bus, Metro and the RER trains. You also need some photos made, another 5 Euros, and there are photo booths near most of the major metro ticket booths just for that purpose. And the photo booth can even be directed to speak instructions to you in English. Sort of.
So after 20 minutes of dealing with a slightly uncooperative photo booth, we approached the ticket booth and in my best French I requested "duh naveego
mwah daycoovairtay" and handed him our photos. Remarkably, he understood me and went about putting the things together for us. We were able to pay with Visa and he gave us our new photo IDs in a plastic case that we could now wave towards the ticket taking thingy and get on just about any transportation we desired.
From there we started out for a long walk, past the Louvre, through the Jardin Des Tuileries, along the west and east banks of la Seine, and finally into the Latin Quarter, ending up at Le Latin restaurant for lunch. For 15 Euros I had a pretty good 3-course meal of Soupe à l'oignon gratinée, Lupin a la moutarde, and Creme Brûlée for dessert. Chris chose salad with goat cheese, a vegetarian ratatouille, and the same dessert. We ate at a little table on the edge of the open side, facing the street/walkway. Hundreds of little restaurants are all crammed together here with the chairs and tables spilling out into the street. Delivery trucks and cars occasionally brave the narrow alley, crawling through while the odd table must be shifted for the vehicle to scrape by against a patron's chair!
The Luxor Obelisk
23 metres high Egyptian obelisk standing at the center of the Place de la Concorde in Paris, France. It was originally located at the entrance to Luxor Temple, in Egypt. Our meals also included a complimentary small glass of a nice Rosé and we completed our meal with espresso. The total bill was less than 38 Euros.
After lunch we continued our walk, crossing over two bridges across the Ile de Cité and past the Notre-Dame cathedral before using our new Navigo mois decouverte cards to hop aboard a metro back to home. We headed out again for some groceries at the Mono Prix around the corner, but we were still stuffed from lunch so made only salad for a late dinner before bed.
Today we wandered around our neighbourhood, discovering hundreds of ethnic restaurants, exploring the fashion district, and what appears to be a bit of a red-light district near us, then headed out further to see Canal St-Martin. The Canal Saint-Martin is a 4.5 km long canal connecting the Canal de l'Ourcq to the river Seine. Mostly large tour boats carry tourists through a series of Locks on a 2.5 hour cruise. Much of the canal is surrounded by a strip of park providing a beautiful area to walk in the shade, find a bench to rest, or lawns to stretch out and sun tan, or
just watch the Locks at work.
We stopped at one of the boulangeries (bakeries) this morning for some fresh croissants for breakfast, and chose a boucherie (butcher/meat market) on our way home this afternoon to buy a freshly roasted chicken for dinner.
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Brad Emond
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Weather and wine?
What kind of weather and temperatures are you enjoying? How's the wine? :-)