In Paris, December 3rd

In the mirror of a French café near the Seine,
photo by Chris

On all three evenings of our weekend in Paris we took a walk (near our hotel) around what the Chinese would call the CBD of Paris, La Défense, with its architecture de qualité supérieure and quirky sculptures. We liked it and appreciated the vision behind the erection of La Grande Arche lining up with the Arc de Triomphe in the distance across the river.

It rained for most of the weekend, with a real downpour at the end after supper on the Sunday evening, but this didn't interfere with our enjoyment of the city. On Saturday morning, having taken a metro train to the Place de la Concorde, we strolled through the deserted Tuileries (I like deserted city gardens!) under our umbrellas then crossed the Seine to the Rive Gauche and St. Germain-des-Près district (where the writers Paul Guimard and Benoîte Groult used to live ... not to mention Pablo Picasso, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Henri Matisse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald) where we found the requisite artsy cafés, little high-end galleries and a well stocked, Canadian second hand bookshop, to which Chris had found a signpost. We also went into a photocopying shop where we got talking to a young British landscape architect (working on his portfolio) who'd been living in Paris for a while and could speak excellent French.

A view from the Batobus

From there we explored as far as the Monde Arabe on the river bank (we'll have to go back––a new museum is due to open there next February) before returning to the quais to board a batobus. I was flagging and needed the hour's sit down on its round tour as far as the Tour Eiffel and back. Back on land, we crossed the island bridges and wandered west of the Seine through the Marais, veering off down side streets to the Centre Pompidou, eventually. By this time it was dark; Christmas shoppers were swarming. It reminded me of Barcelona. Chris was determined to find Les Halles, the sleazy setting of some Maigret novels, and we did so, but it has been radically updated and cleaned up, the forum being reconstructed and landscaped, in the process of being transformed like Berlin's Potsdamer Platz or the People's Park in Shanghai. It's going to be huge and very impressive.