Day 37 ~ No Malaise in the Marais

WOW! Okay, Paris is a really neat city. Did you know that? People should come visit this place, it’s fun.

For today, we headed across the Seine from our apartment to explore the Marais. This is a neighborhood that’s full of beautifully dressed hip young things, fashionable boutiques, and some of the best shopping districts we’ve ever seen.

And there are some good old fashioned French monuments; we started our day with a stroll through the Place de Republique, with its giant statue.

Stately streets lined with grand old buildings radiate out from it, and we headed to Canal St. Martin to see what there was to see there. Turns out, there’s a beautiful canal to see there!

From there, we headed to la Marché des Enfants Rouges, Paris’s oldest covered market (that’s a niche for you), which was absolutely packed with Parisians buying meat, cheese, bread, and produce, and lounging at the restaurants.

We bought some cheese and blackberries, and headed to a park. After a lil snack, we made our way to the beating heart of the Marais, the shopping districts around Rue Vieille-du-Temple, Rue des Francs Bourgeois, and Rue des Rosiers. We are not big shoppers, but this was unbelievably fun. It was a very lively scene, and many of the storefronts were just so lovingly and appealingly made up that it was fun to just see the outsides. The streets were narrow and charming, and we seemed to be the only tourists around.

One of the best moments, though, was stepping into a courtyard to find that it was a lush garden that folded back, and back, and back, and even had play stuff for kids in the very back. It was a wonderful surprise.

Look at this library we found!

The books here were old.

Bizarrely, we only came across one church, so of course we had to check it out.

At the end of our tour, we stepped into a very Parisian park being enjoyed by the locals.

We headed to Place de la Bastille, which of course looms large in history, but today is a long plaza with a statute marking the spot. There was a small rally there today for Nigerian independence – apparently independence from democracy, but I hope they find liberation in some form.

And this classic example of a Metro station – I love how goth these look:

We had remarked a few times on how it seemed France hadn’t embraced Vietnamese food the way the Netherlands has completely fallen in love with Indonesian food, but to prove ourselves wrong, we found an inviting Vietnamese restaurant with the outdoor seating our contagious selves needed, and had a very good early dinner.

Then we wistfully cruised the outside of a cat cafe – this one looks really special, with many comfortable cats and food that’s more than an afterthought. But we really can’t be inside around that many people until we both test negative, so maybe we’ll make it by the end of the trip. For today, we admired the kitties from afar.

We retraced our steps to Bastille, and went a little farther to see Canal St. Martin – we’d started our day with this canal, then it goes underground for a couple of miles, and pops out into the light again closer to the Seine. This was a really fun walk, with happy little moments of joy for us to discover.

We were very excited to visit the Coulée Verte René-Dumont. We are people who love parks, and a railway line turned elevated park is one of our favorite kinds. This one was exceptional, with everything well grown-in and lots of interesting zones with their own character.

Seeing the surrounding buildings from above street level was also a welcome perspective.

We had actually kind of a frustrating trip back to our apartment, with a bus that never showed, a completely baffling effort to board a different bus, and success in boarding a bus that sat in Paris traffic for 20 minutes, but we did eventually make it.

Today was Stef’s introduction to Paris, and our first foray in together. It was a wildly successful day, and we saw so many wonderful things. There is a lot to look forward to, and we are so pleased to be doing this together.