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The
elevated Line 6 of the Paris Métro, near the avenue The
Jardin du Carrousel by the Louvre.
An
old, decorated shell in an antiquities shop on the rue de
On
Sunday afternoons, cars are banned from this road
On a
hot, sunny Sunday, people collapse in the shade of
Welded
key art on a locksmith’s shop door. |
Monday, July 16 I didn’t think
I’d need to write about this because I thought, “Everybody knows this,” but evidently that is not true, or else
people forget. Do not bring dollars to What we
normally do is make sure we have enough euros left at the end of the summer
to start us off at the beginning of next summer. That means at least enough euros to pay for
the taxi fare from Charles De Gaulle airport to the apartment. Then we use our ATM after that. That said,
I’ll move on to more pleasant topics. Last night we
had our second dinner en famille
since Dan and Mary arrived on Saturday.
I was the cook, of course.
(Someday somebody else will cook, maybe, if I live long enough.) Both Dan and Mary love the apartment we got
on the home exchange. It is big. We have almost 2 and a half bathrooms! There is a salle de bains, a half bathroom,
and a full bathroom. There’s a balcony
full of plants and a big living/dining room, as well as a decent-sized
kitchen. Earlier in the
day, Tom and I took our very long walk along the Tickets are
available for one day (€1) or one week (€5), and there is an annual pass
available for €29. Then the first half
hour is free, the second half hour is €1, the third half hour is €3, and each
subsequent half hour is €4. This way,
people are encouraged to make short trips.
Nothing prevents you from turning in a bicycle every half hour and
having the all the free half hours as long as you want. The bikes are
sturdy things, with Kevlar
(an American invention) reinforced tires to prevent flats. There are three speeds, and one can change
the gear even when stopped. Each bike
has a basket, and a cable lock. The project is
so popular that there were already 200,000 annual subscribers even before it
started yesterday. On our walk,
we saw many of these bicycles. I’m not sure
if or when we’ll try Vélib’. Being
from Sanibel, where we have an ideal situation for bicycling with many miles
of shared use paths and no dangerous traffic, no broken bottles on the
pavement, etc., bicycling in We come to The changes on
the rue du Commerce are another part of a city-wide effort to encourage
pedestrians and discourage auto traffic.
I applaud it, too, even though it has meant the gentrification of a
street that used to have mostly mom-and-pop shops. “Rue du Commerce” is a phrase, an idiom, in
the French language. It is not just
the name of the street around the corner from us. It means the retail business community, in
a way that is not unlike the way we might use “ As such, since
there really is a rue du Commerce in The
conservatives were wrong. Business is
booming on the rue du Commerce, and we are experiencing far less traffic
noise in the apartment. Mayor
Delanoe’s administration was right; it argued that only 3 to 5 percent of the
citizens in the city do their errands and shopping by car (they must be those
conservatives, the vocal minority).
The administration argued that most people shop as pedestrians and as
users of mass transport. That seems to
be very true. Delanoe knows
what he’s doing. Many public
transport improvement projects have been undertaken in |
