Wine Belly

I'm finally done with classes. This is very good news for the weather has turned gorgeous and I can spend every waking moment outside. Just spent the day picnicking in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. Built by Napoléon III in the 19th century, he designed the man-made park to replicate Hyde Park in London (where, in exile, he had spent his childhood).

Unlike the Luxembourg Gardens, you can sit anywhere you please in the thick and matted grass. Today's a national holiday in France so throngs of Parisians sat on blankets eating and drinking away from the tourists crowded down on Ile de la Cité.

Going to go for a run to work off my wine belly. Enjoy the photos from a few street fairs I've seen of late and have a good week.

Ghost Town

I missed the dernier metro last night. Running to change trains at Opéra, the 8 had pulled away a minute before I arrived at 2:15 AM out of breath and out of luck. While the Opéra Garnier's a gorgeous building by day, at night, all forms of life vanish and this one corner of Paris echoes the empty ghost town that many fear Paris is becoming. A living museum (or masueoleum for current Paris's vehement detractors) that when the tourists and Parisians leave for the day and go back to their homes and hotels and out to bars and cafés, the dead center of the city is deadly quiet.

So I walked down Boulevard de l'Opéra passing under the arches of the Palais Royal into its imposing (and enshadowed) courtyard, all pyramid lights off in the small numbered hours. There's a chilling quality to that part of the city at night that I hadn't felt before as I indignantly trudged across the Seine to my night bus stop. It was walking across the Seine that I realized how odd it was for me to be pissed off that I'd missed my train. Hundreds of thousands of people come to this city to see these very sights every year, to walk down Boulevard de l'Opéra, to see the Opera house framed along that Haussmannian axe and to then descend down through the pyramid into the Louvre and I, wanting my bed and toothbrush, had just marched for half an hour letting the city and one of her most beautiful and old districts slip past unnoticed.

First Day

The sights and smells and sounds of the city can be overwhelming if you try to pay attention to them all at the same time. I found
myself wandering the streets of my new home in Paris' 15th arrondisement trying to pick out each individual smell on my first damp day in January with limited success.

After spotting the Eiffel Tower in the skyline, I started walking to it, diverting course to visit my friend Napoleon at Les Invalides and then ducking along the Seine past the Musée D'Orsay and into St. Germain Des Pres, sighting Les Deux Magots, spot of my first meal in France some 11 years or so ago (and the hang out of Picasso and other luminary figures I don't need to reel off now).

Getting home, I tried to stay awake as long as I could, but my eyes succumbed to sleep at 8:30.