Michael and Ruthie's adventure in Paris
Walk Along Canal Saint Martin
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Weather
A little poem to the weather of Paris
whatever weather hither-wither-we whatever weather!!
Our days begin - After breakfast
Ruth Anne looks at our books and maps
while I look at the weather forecast for the day.
With this information she plots out our days adventure - which are often modified by the real weather which we assess by looking out our window into our courtyard.
Today February 5th we looked out the window and saw a blue sky with bright white clouds floating in it.
The light, that deep saturated winter light with that golden, yummy, rich, color. Today as we walk down the Parisian streets, sometimes sharp shadows strike the buildings, and sometimes the clouds shadow areas with beams of light striking through the clouds, illuminating rooftops and buildings.
Walking through the streets, we've noticed that even though there are many small one block streets ( so many that all of them aren't even on our large map!) - that with all these streets, crooked and jammed into this lovely city, that there still aren't enough to satisfy the French. I suspect this because any street that runs more than a mile seems to acquire a new name and sometimes several! Maybe it's the Gallic desire to honor as many people as possible by naming a rue or a Boulevard after them. And just because they've run out of actual streets, there is no reason not to add another name after a block or so. This may serve a historic purpose as well. If invading armies (there have been a few) get lost as quickly and as often as we do, they might start on rue de Belleville and end up in Switzerland! Another thing we found astonishing, especially to someone from the US, is that our second class citizens - the artists and the philosophers - get streets named after them too! There's rue de Balzac, Foucault and Piaf among many others.
Since this evening we planned on having a friend over for dinner, Loïc Merel, a mathematician who teaches at the Sorbonne, we decided to have a walk in the hood 'The Belleville' along the Canal Saint Martin which is about a mile east from where we live on Rue des Pyrénées.
We decided to take a different route through the Belleville and veered off heading toward what looked like an interesting neighborhood including a large hospital called Hôpital Saint-Louis.
It says over the entry 'Liberte Egalite Fraternite'
This, like everything older than 100 years, has a history! (The younger things are growing histories of their own, but these haven't fully ripened yet.) It, Hôpital Saint-Louis, came to be there primarily because of the plague (they've had several since). On Friday 13th, July 1607 King Henri IV set the first stone of the chapel in place. The hospital, named for Saint-Louis because he had died of the plague, was built to handle the overflow of the plague stricken from the Hôtel-Dieu Ile de la Cité. (The only other hospital in Paris at the time) Walking through the Belleville, we walked by the walled hospital
grafetti trash can on one of the walls of the hospital
Hôpital Saint-Louis
and around to the Canal Saint Martin.
We walked along the Canal's banks heading to the north for about a mile. The Canal is open to the north of Rue de Faubourg, but to the south, the Canal goes under ground and becomes a park.
This is part of the canal systems connecting to the Seine. Where we walked the canal is bordered by Quai de la Jemmapes and Quai de la Valmy.
Along the canal we saw a couple of fisherman but no fish being caught.
This part of the canal has locks and seems to be operational, but we never saw a boat here. Further upstream there were barges.
Lock on the canal
Lock detail
We walked home
Where we made dinner.
Loic brought the desert.
After the wine and the after dinner coffee and brandy it was midnight. It was a good night, a good day!