The View From Pont Neuf

Unless you're in a hurry and can stand and do the stairs, the thing to do in a place like Paris is to ride the bus, not the Metro. The bus system is even more extensive than the Metro, runs quite regularly enough, and can be monitored easily on your phone. On the bus you get to sit, look around, discover things en route that you want to go back to, and get a better sense of the lay of the land, so to speak. So we mostly ride the bus. Our Nuit Europeene de musees timed-tickets to the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce were for 9:30PM, so we left a bit early, rode the bus to Pont Neuf and got off there to enjoy the sights and the approaching sunset. The European Night of the Museums is a UNESCO/EU-wide annual event, a Saturday night across the continent when most museums open their doors with free admission. Very popular.

From the Pont Neuf

Among the sights is the giant statue of Japanese
artist Yayoi Kusama adorning one of the Louis
Vuitton buildings (the Samaritaine department store
is on the left)

Largest handbag, appropriately, in the entire world of
sculpture

The statue and splotches celebrate Kusami's continued collaboration
with Louis Vuitton; one imagines Japan is one of their big markets;
there's an even more striking installation on their building on the Champs
Elysees, which we'll get to...

Crossing the Rue de Rivoli

The Shower Curtain, as Parisians call it, the contemporary facade on

one of the Samaritaine buildings

On Rue Berger, approaching the Bourse de Commerce;
better exterior pix in the next post

Along the way, a possible Dan Bown site

Returning to Pont Neuf after seeing the Pinault
Collection

Walking by St. Sulpice on our way home

 

Vanves Flea Market, 2023

Les Puces de Vanves--the fleas of Vanves--remains our go-to market for brocante, antiques, collectibles, junque, etc. Not that we ever buy very much: our needs are modest, our interests narrow, and our luggage generally already full. Mostly we go for the entertainment value, seeing the kaleidoscopic variety of stuff people want to sell, seeing the people themselves. Vanves, so far as we can tell, is mostly about small dealers, perhaps a few family garage sale stands, but mostly people who collect and sell this stuff for a living. The variety is amazing...clothing, accessories, books, glass, china, silver, art, musical instruments, kitchen ware, collectibles, practically anything that can be hauled there in a white van. Always worth a few hours or as long as one's bladder can hold out. With our present 6th arrondisement location, it's less than two miles away. After les puces, we took the bus to the other end of the spectrum, les grands magasins and, specifically, Galeries Lafayette's amazing food hall, Le Gourmet and its Gourmet Market. There we stocked up a bit on those things Franprix doesn't carry, had some nice pastries, but didn't take any pix. Alas. But the archives of this blog contain many pix from Le Gourmet, e.g., https://roadeveron.blogspot.com/2021/09/galeries-lafayette.html. It was a busy Saturday. After resting up at home, we ventured forth again, to Pont Neuf, past Les Halles, and a reservation at the Bourse de Commerce's Pinault collection of "art," the subjects of the next two posts. 

A saxophone, some clarinets, flutes, a violin, 
some trumpets, but never an oboe!

Thimble collector's paradise

Patches

Nice frame

Thousands of pins

She was asking €90; but you can get them for far
less on internet 

Always a fun outing

More Paris Wanderings, 2023

The next several days after Parc Floral were devoted to planning our next year and e-renting an apartment in Cary, NC. The next year will involve moving our earthly possessions from the storage unit in Missoula to Cary, where we will spend some time going through them and the usual reorganization and recovery from these months of travel; and preparations for the next travels, commencing in the spring of 2024. And, most importantly spending some time with family in Cary, daughter Rebecca and her husband Jeremy, and, most particularly, with grand-daughter Penelope. Amid all the planning and communications with the rental agency in Cary, we did undertake several walks, one for sightseeing, the others to visit favorite magasins and restaurants.

Peering into Luxembourg Garden from its westerly panhandle; the
Garden was closed that day for some sort of government ceremony
followed by, of course, a protest

We were en route to Rue Moufftarde, one of Paris' market streets,
which we'd never visited before; among the beautiful buildings 
along the way

Red buckeye trees in bloom all over the city; white
ones too

The lower end of Rue Moufftarde; turned out to be somewhat
less than a meh for us; perhaps better when the street market is
in session; we have by now seen many if not most of Paris' street
markets

Interestingly stencilled building--something not often seen in Paris--
across from...

The eglise Medard, known for "mass hypnotisms" and other
Protestant miracles in the 17th century

Other end of Rue Moufftarde; fairly touristy...

Mural overlooking an elementary school playground

New (to us) product line

Highlight of the walk for me: the Diderot family
house on Rue Moufftarde ("No man will be free until
the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last
priest"); now a Lebanese restaurant; sic transit, Gloria

Other highlight: where Joyce lived while writing
Ulysses

Right down that gated alley (does that make it a
gated community?)

A block from our apartment: the building where
Foucault did his pendulum thing, demonstrating
the rotation of the earth...

Now across the river, near Les Halles, visiting my
favorite FNAC

The day's caryatids

A new apartment building that caught our eyes

School crossing guard on Boulevard Sebastopol,
en route to our old apartment in the Marais

A building that was under wraps and scaffolds last year, now
a beautifully restored art deco

Dinner at the Louis-Philippe, which we came to like
during our stay in the Marais in 2022; onion soup and
snails; yes, we were doing a parody of French cuisine

Boeuf Bourgignon; best ever, Vicki says, so I had to try it too

Apart from the churches, it's most unusual to see
Medieval buildings in Paris (thank you, Baron
Haussmann); these two, which we've walked past
half a dozen times in previous years without 
noticing, are thought to be 14th or 15th century

Updated in 1967 (I'm getting pretty good at having
Google Lens translate these things for me)

Near our apartment, the Richard Wright Center

En route to my favorite outdoor store, Decathlon, near the Madeleine