We had an interesting day today. We caught the subway all the way to the end of the line out in the distant Paris suburbs. Unlike most American cities, here the city itself is the desirable place to live, and the suburbs are undesirable. The farther we rode the subway from the city center, the more diverse the crowd on the subway car became. It was interesting to watch, because while Paris is a more diverse city that Stockholm, there are distinctly fewer people of color her e than in most American cities. Recent immigration from North Africa is changing that, and North African immigrants are now 10% of the French population, but overall the city is still very white. The suburbs must be where more of the immigrants live because at each stop along the way, more whites got off and more people of African descent got on.
Why were we heading out to the distant suburbs? We were heading to le marche aux Puces, one of the largest flea markets in the world. It features over 2000 vendors and covers more than 17 acres! The market has been in existence since 1870 and is divided into 16 different subsections, each with its own specialty. It was really fascinating to walk through. The general market area featured a lot of immigrants manning stands selling sneakers, Levis, t-shirts, leather jackets, and even underwear! Katie was quite interested in a stand that she thought was selling very fancy candleholders/ lamps. I didn’t think I was going to have to explain to her what a hookah was at age 11, but there I was in the marche aux Puces explaining that they weren’t candleholders! “Oh, you mean like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland?” she asked. “Yes,” I replied, happy to have a frame of reference so we could move on.
The Hello Kitty themed stand was quite busy, but the New York Yankees themed stand was deserted. As we moved deeper into the market, we entered some of the specialty regions. Some of the markets were indoors, some outdoors and most had various streets and alleys within them. The Biron market featured Asian art and 18th century furniture. The Paul Bert market had a lot of household items and furniture from the 1920s – 1970s. The Serpette market had a lot of antique art, furniture and lighting fixtures, including hundreds of different types of chandeliers.
Each of these markets had its own atmosphere from crowded streets and people hawking their wares to refined elegance, wide passages and perfectly displayed rooms of high end antiques. Each individual stall in the Biron, Paul Bert and Serpette markets was perhaps 15 feet wide and 15 feet deep, so they were quite large. Each market had between 100 and 200 different vendors. Back in these market areas, the atmosphere was quiet and vendors from four or five nearby stalls would cluster in front of one stall, sitting at an elegant table with a picnic spread in front of them, all drinking wine. It seemed like a family gathering, they get together every Saturday, eat cheese and foie gras, drink wine and relax. Oh and it someone wants to buy something good, but if not, we’re good too.
My favorite market was the one that sold large outdoor and bulky items. Enormous topiaries 20 feet high. Full size old fashioned street lamps. Park benches. A spiral staircase. Mantelpieces. You could imagine that this is the place that movie set designers come looking for that perfect 1930s Parisian street lamp.
After while we started to get hungry and as it was quite a warm day, Katie was really in need of some ice cream. 2000 stalls, 17 acres, can you imagine the one thing that NO ONE has for sale? Yes, ice cream. We gave up after about 30 minutes of walking past 400 stalls in the general market area. We saw a dozen crepe stands, but absolutely no ice cream. We headed back to the metro assuming that we could stop at a larger train station to get some ice cream, when we saw an unusual sight – McDonalds. Paris has done a good job of keeping the American fast food chains out, and this was only the second McDonalds that we have seen. We headed right in, sure that we could get ice cream there. We both had double cheeseburgers and raspberry milkshakes (framboise frappes). Raspberry is a very common flavor here, and since we both love raspberry that make us happy. The milkshake flavors were vanilla chocolate, raspberry and pistachio (also very common here).
After lunch we went on a statue hunt. Katie thought it would be fun to find the statue of Ben Franklin. He is well beloved in Paris and lived in the Passy region, not far from the Eiffel tower. All we had to go on was that the statue is in Passy. Well, it’s a pretty big region, but off we set. We got off the metro at the Passy station and looked around hoping to see the statue grinning back at us. No luck. We walked around for a few minutes, but figuring wandering randomly wasn’t the best plan of attack, I decided to ask for directions. For those that don’t know me, this seems like an easy thing to do, but those who do know me know I hate to ask for directions. I’d much rather either find it myself or give up. But, I’m trying new things so I stuck my head into a small tailor shop and asked the older lady sewing a garment by hand “Pardon Madame, Ou est le statue du Ben Franklin?” She told me sadly that she works at this shop, but doesn’t live in the area. She comes from the metro and doesn’t know. She told me all this in French, and I understood her! I thanked her and we moved on to the stationary shop next door. The lady in this shop told me that the statue was at the Trocadero.
We were disappointed because that isn’t really Passy at all. That’s the crazy place to get your Eiffel tower photos taken. We’ve been there a half a dozen times already and didn’t see any statues. It’s not far from Passy so we walked over, looking for statues but didn’t see any. We walked through the craziness and continued to look. “Maybe it’s near the street,” I suggested, since the stationary lady told us “Place du Trocadero”. We wandered out to the street region and off in the distance saw a statue of a man sitting down. “Well he’s dressed in colonial looking clothes,” I said, let’s give it a try. We walked closer and lo and behold, it was good old Ben. That was quite the treasure hunt. We got a nice photo and walked back to the Trocadero.
The Trocadero was crazy as always with some kind of protest going on, a display of people killed at Chernobyl, a street crew dance performance, several break dancers, and a thousand tourists. We bought five more keychain Eiffel towers because I just can’t resist them and took some photos of Katie pretending to hold the Eiffel tower on her shoulders a la Atlas.
After hanging out here for a while, we decided to go find the replica of the statue of liberty in the Seine that is featured in National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets. We had seen it from the top of the Eiffel Tower so we knew just where to look. It is at the far end of an island in the Seine not far from the tower. We walked down to the Seine and had an enjoyable walk along its banks. It is lined with houseboats and many people simply live there on the water. We found the island and the bridge near the statue. However, we found that movie magic replaced the nondescript four lane bridge that we found with the one in movie. But although it wasn’t exactly the same bridge, it was the same statue and we were able to walk down onto the island and sit at Lady Liberty’s feet. This version is about 35 feet high and was erected in 1889 on the centennial of the French revolution and was a gift to the citizens of Paris by American Ex-Pats living in Paris. It was interesting to see, although we did not have a toy helicopter with a video camera on it, we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any secret message written on the torch.
When you've been buying souvenirs are you haggling in French?
ReplyDeleteYes, to a certain extent. English is pretty common here, so it's tough to conduct s conversation without the other person switching to English.
ReplyDeleteThat's really cool that you were able to understand the woman working in the tailor shop.
ReplyDelete