Celia Walks

 Warm wishes to everyone for a happy 2024.   Alice arrived today, and with her arrival my solitary wanderings end, as does my blog. We will enjoy the next days together, with low-key plans to visit more friends, go shopping, see a bit of Paris and (especially for the working girl) have lots of rest.  We both fly home on January 12. It has been meaningful sharing photos, notes and thoughts with you, and thank you for your friendship and encouragement.  I know that we all hope for a more peaceful, just and environmentally healthy year ahead and that we will work towards this in whatever ways we can.  Cheers to all.

 I walked to Montmartre and back, mainly to find an Italian grocery shop. The Basilica glowed white and looked lovely, but I didn’t go in because there was a huge queue to enter.  The beautiful old streets around the Basilica were also jammed with people. I am going to have to retract my previous statement about Paris having fewer tourists than Rome… they just congregate around the main sights, and I have been mainly walking around the outskirts, well away from those areas. Dominique, Alexandra and Antoine came over for the Italian dinner and it was lovely to visit with them again.

Today I had decided to take the train to Chartres, but arriving at the Montparnasse train station (south side of Paris) the crowds were dreadful - it is after all Friday after Christmas - I should have seen that one coming!  So I started to wander, following my nose again, much like I have been doing since arriving in Paris. I first came across the Fondation Giacometti.  In a small exhibition in Italy a photograph by Cartier-Bresson of Giacometti and his mother had struck me very strongly and had remained vividly in my mind.   Thinking of this, I joined a guided visit of the small Giacometti museum set up a block away from the tiny apartment he had used as his studio for some forty years in Montparnasse.  I learned that his mother, who lived all her life in Switzerland, was the fairly judgemental and controlling type. A theory about Giacometti’s frequent use of boxes around pictures or sculptures had to do either with a mother complex or else also with his sorrow abo...

After a quiet morning learning a little bit of Spanish, I headed out to walk towards what I think I’m looking at from my windows. I’m not sure if I did, but it was a nice walk! Heading north. This building was completed in 1990. I’m now in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers. Nice colour contrasts! A factory (1899, Babcock, manufactured large industrial heat vessels) being converted into an art venue - first just informally by artists setting up, but now a State project. Behind it you can see a blank wall that is part of an enormous windowless complex that you aren’t allowed to photograph.  I thought maybe a prison, but there are none listed for this area. Will try to find out! And now I’m in the suburb of La Courneuve. From a distance I thought this must be a stadium, but it is a huge data centre, Digital Realty. Here is a very large park, Parc Georges Valbon, in La Courneuve, which advertises itself as 415 hectares of nature and wetlands, but is actually pretty tame! Walking out of...

 Revitalized and recharged, I headed out in the late morning for what turned out to be a 28 km walk. It is obvious that the crowded areas of Paris are often the tourist sites. So I walked from the apartment over to the west side of the city and the Bois de Boulogne, avoiding the historic centre.   Nostalgic for an Italian cappuccino I ordered one from a local bar as I headed out. This is NOT a real cappuccino! More like a watery hot chocolate…. Sigh. Google maps described this as a ´street art’ site. Interesting modern builds. This is a subsidized housing building (HLM) made interesting by built-in pots planted with bamboo. The Conservatoire de Musique in Paris 17. I loved this church, l’église Ste-Odile, 1935-1946, built on land freed up by tearing down the last of the fortifications around Paris. This building, housing a contemporary art gallery, opened in 2014 in the large Bois de Boulogne park.  It was built as a philanthropic initiative by a conglomerate of luxury co...

 A very low energy day. After a quiet morning taken up with dawdling, learning Spanish and keeping the apartment tidy, I finally got it together to go out, mainly by promising myself to visit a bookstore. So I walked downtown and for the first time this trip crossed the Seine to the left bank and the major bookstore, chez Gilbert.  Five floors of bookstore.  Found what I was looking for ( a Spanish text) but fairly quickly exited, discouraged by the crowds of people. Notre Dame Cathedral undergoing repairs. Thanks to cranes and other modern innovations, the job is nearly finished. Next up was a visit to Les Halles, looking for a Vodafone store to recharge my phone.  Les Halles is a shopping centre, four stories of stores all underground. No luck with the phone, and again hordes of people, so headed back home. Christmas decorations at Les Halles. Distracted by a phone call from Alice, I took a wrong turn but discovered a very pleasant little restaurant that reminded m...

Paris is actually a very good choice if you want to spend Christmas by yourself in a non-celebratory fashion.  Today seemed almost like a regular Monday. Although a lot of stores were closed, there were bakeries and grocery stores open as were flower shops and occasional other stores; garbage collectors and street cleaners were at work; cafés and restaurants had their usual customers. No Christmas music blaring out, no Santas wandering around.  I walked to the Church of England/Anglican church for morning service. Predictably located in a very posh neighborhood near the Arc de Triomphe, but unpredictably in the basement of an ordinary apartment building. It was the one time when I had to choke back tears; the people I have loved and lost come back in the familiar hymns and prayers and the ache of separation is revived. St. George’s Church before the service - the small space filled up completely, and there were three priests officiating with all the “bells and whistles” of hig...

Market day!  This was my big Christmas treat of the day.  A local band was playing carols, with people dancing and smiling. Cantal cheese and farmers’ yoghurt from Brittany, tender leaf lettuce, ripe avocados, a perfect artichoke and a huge lemon, little potatoes, persimmons, shrimp from the sea, and a half baguette and little mango Yule log from the local boulangerie-pâtisserie with the longest lineup - out the door and down the street.  I am so grateful, and with all this abundance, how tragic that so many people - in Palestine, in Yemen, in Ukraine, in Afghanistan and elsewhere - struggle to find something, anything, to eat. This afternoon the sun made a valiant effort and broke through the grey for a while.  I walked downtown - about 45 minutes away - and heard a splendid organ recital at St Eustache church, three César Franck chorales played by Thomas Ospital who I think is the regular organist there. Wafts of melody drift here and there throughout.   Soft ...

Today I enjoyed a long walk from my apartment at the north end of the city’s metro lines to Vincennes at the eastern end.   The Bassin  de Villette I find the ground level of most modern buildings really ugly. Earlier  buildings would have nice looking spaces for stores on the street level, or would just have homes with doors opening at street level. This building for example is quite interesting , but I think ruined by a forbidding, unfriendly street approach. Here is a neat new one I saw on my walk. While walking I thought of some of the differences I notice between Paris and Rome. Paris seems to have a greater variety of population - more Africans and Asians for instance.  And fewer visitors/tourists. More people sleeping rough. Restaurants are a lot more varied here; the Italians stick to their own regional cuisines. The coffee is less strong here, but there is a little bit more liquid in a cup. The bread is way way better, and the croissants never have the cream...