Skip to main content

Friday December 22. Paris.

Happy Solstice! Today is officially the shortest day of the year, in Europe anyway. Sunrise at 8.43 and sunset at 4.55. Paris is behaving like Victoria BC with a very fine drizzle on and off - just enough to put waves in your hair…

In the morning I walked along the Canal de l’Ourcq and the Canal St-Martin, both near where I’m staying in the north end of the city. Napoleon built up this network of 130 km of navigable canals, complete with docks and locks, starting in 1802 in order to provide good quality water to the city and to bring in bread and grain shipments.  After seeing so much of Mussolini’s building and urbanization achievements in Italy, here are more reminders of what strong central authoritarianism can achieve. Not that I find tyrants in the slightest attractive!

Canals surround La Villette, a very modern park with music venues, a theatre, and various other pleasurable amenities. From the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries, this was the main slaughterhouse for all of Paris.  When it closed there were various development projects, which resulted in nothing other than a major financial scandal. Finally in the 1970s the current structures were successfully developed (by a not-so-authoritarian government).

La Villette - the nineteenth century slaughterhouse building now an arts venue.


La Villette - the gorgeous modern home of the Orchestre de Paris


Near my apartment in another repurposed industrial building there is a wonderful centre with theatre and exhibition space, but also lots of free space for dancing or whatever else people want to do. And deck chairs that anyone can just sit on. No need to pay or do anything or be anyone. At least not that I can figure out, although there must be some catch because there weren’t any obviously homeless people there, despite there being a goodly number of them on the streets.

This evening I went back to La Villette and saw a play for children, “Icare » by Guillaume Barbot. The myth of the man who built wax wings to fly up in the heavens, only to have a great tumble when the hot rays of the sun melted the wings, was used to take us into the life and imagination of a five year old learning to find strength in challenges. Beautifully acted with a full house of captivated and responsive children and parents. 

Then there was a lively son et lumière display in the La Villette park based on Salvador Dali’s sculptures. A great echo of one of my visits to a Dalí museum in Siena on last fall’s walk.  Dali’s art leaves me fairly cold - it doesn’t seem to arouse any particular feeling for me, even with the help of a lot of technological magic - although when I look at my photos now, there definitely does seem to be emotion there!




 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

September 5

 I landed at Heathrow this morning at 6 am, a very inconvenient time to get a room and rest! But my student residence accommodation includes a common room with handy couches for a short snooze. The neighbourhood abuts on Regent’s Park, complete with gorgeous flowerbeds.   The Queen Mary’s rose garden in Regent’s Park. My neighbourhood wandering took me to the Wallace House which used to be one of the homes of the marquesses of Hertford.  The Hertfords were fabulously rich, mainly from extensive land holdings, and in the 18th and 19th centuries avid art collectors.  They obviously had Trumpian home decorating tastes. Here are two of their many clocks, all of which need frequent ‘fine tuning’, it appears. I particularly liked two 18th c British paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds in their collection: Mrs Carnac and the hauntingly strange Strawberry Girl.
4 comments
Read more

Sat Oct 4. London.

19 days walking on pilgrimage paths for a total of 395 km or 245 miles on foot (not that arduous - an average of 20.7 km per day, and lots of ‘rest days’ staying put in one place).  All of that undone in 1.5 hours on a Eurostar train.  I’m not entirely sure what conclusion I’m drawing from that comparison, but I’m back where I started, in London.   On my way to my lodgings (I’m staying in a Buddhist retreat centre) I decided to visit the first visitable place to cross my path, which turned out to be the Foundling Museum.  Horrified by the sight of infants being abandoned on 18th c London streets, a prosperous seaman, Thomas Coram, spent 17 years raising awareness and funds, as well as obtaining royal permission to build London’s first children’s charity. Opened in 1739, the Foundling Hospital continued its work until the 1950s, and actually is still active as a non-institutional resource, under a different name. Here is a photo of it in 1935. So many similarities to ...
1 comment
Read more

Saturday September 6

 I have given myself today and tomorrow in London before starting the walk. A good thing because I’m having technical difficulties getting on to the AirB&B site that I need to access for my Monday night accommodation… Today I had a lovely walk to Canary Wharf along quiet streets bordering the Thames. The tide was high and the water a bit agitated, but the sun was warm and the strollers happy.  Over 25,000 bombs fell on this area of London in WWII as the Germans fully recognised the importance of maritime trade to British resilience. Some warehouses have survived (or been rebuilt) and the extensive blocks of post-war flats are very attractive (and very very expensive.) I had a pleasant break in a sixteenth century pub, the ‘Prospect of Whitby’, where Charles Dickens would come to listen to dock folk - original flagstone floors and a pewter counter on the bar.  From the waterfront balcony patrons in earlier days could watch as pirates and smugglers were hung from a gibb...
2 comments
Read more