A MIME!

Sunday May 15th

After such a busy late night day yesterday, we decided to have an easier day today.  We went over to the Marais section of town, between the site of the Bastille and the Pompidou Center for a walking tour.  Our guidebook to Paris has 18 walking tours of the town, and today we finished the 15^th and 16^th walking tours. The last two we have chosen not to do because one was for the Champs Elysees which we have walked several times already, and don’t need a tour of it, and the other is a tour of a typical French neighborhood. Since we live in a typical French neighborhood, again, not necessary.

We started to day at Place de la Bastille, the site of the infamous French prison.  There is nothing let of it, and the location today is a huge traffic circle with a monument in the center. Not much too see.  We walked from there to a nice neighborhood called the Marais region, which means ‘swamp”.  Of course it is no longer a swamp and in fact many of France’s aristocrats built homes here in the 1700s.  We were able to walk through Victor Hugo’s home, which was nice, but since I don’t care much about Victor Hugo it wasn’t that interesting, but it was free. Katie was interested even less.

From there we went to the Carnavalet Museum, which is the museum of Paris History.  Again, it was free, which was good, and our guidebook had a separate walking tour just for the museum. Again, it wasn’t very interesting.  But I did learn that Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were not beheaded right away after the storming of the Bastille, but four years later.

We then walked through the old Jewish Quarter, which is now lined with ritzy stores.  We got amazing falafel sandwiches for lunch and ate them in a nearby park.  While we were in the park we heard a commotion and looked up.  Believe it or not, the annual Paris waiter’s race was passing by the park where we stopped to eat.  The race was sponsored by Orangina and waiters in their full uniforms were racing by each carrying a tray with an open bottle of Orangina and two glasses.  It was fun to see. Most of the waiters were not moving that fast due to the open bottle, and we only saw about 10 go by, but it was fun.

We ended the walk in front of the Pompidou Center where we sat to watch the performance artists.  There was a chalk artist, a break dancer and a terrible act with dogs, in which he couldn’t even get them to sit on command. But then the mime started. This guy was actually really good with a choreographed routine to music. He was not in the typical mime garb, thank goodness, but intead wore a suit, a bowler hat and a bright yellow tie.  He had the entire thing – stuck in a box, suitcase too heavy to lift and a nice interaction with kids from the audience and balloon animals. It was very entertaining and he had amazing stage presence. He drew a crowd of several hundred and they all stayed for the entire 20 minute performance.  He was the first street performer that I actually gave money to  - ever.