It’s been unusually cold in Paris, mostly a dry cold though. It’s the damp cold that normally marks the Paris winter so, warmly dressed, it’s nearly a pleasure to be in the cold outside. It’s inside that things get dicey. I returned to Paris a few days ago after six weeks in the U.S. and have since spent a good amount of time winterizing the apartment: hanging curtains, plugging spaces on the edges of doors and windows, buying an electric heater.

The elderly woman downstairs used to heat a lot in winter, I could tell by the warmth of my parquet, but she now goes south for much of the winter. And a guy in his 20s recently moved next door and doesn’t need to turn on his own heat very often since most nights he warms his apartment by having a dozen friends over for a rave party. I’m left to heating my own space. So much for community.

The best place to find community these days is in the cafes and bars of the residential neighborhoods. They’ve been quite crowded, I’ve noticed, these past few days and evenings, smokers swarming by the doorways. Crisis, what crisis?

I love cafes in winter, the way people come in rubbing the cold off their hands. There’s more of a community feel to a café in winter than in summer. In summer everyone wants a piece personal joy, their own proverbial spot in the sun. You tolerate your neighbors at surrounding tables in summer, but other than the usual sexual attraction you’d rather have nothing to do with them. In winter, though, there’s more of a feel that we’re all in this together. On especially cold winter days, as in rain storms in other seasons, the café becomes a kind of genteel bomb shelter. It’ll pass, we think, or we’ll soon go out and confront the elements, but in the meantime un autre, s’il vous plaît.

I just got home from having coffee with a friend and I take back what I said a paragraph ago.

There isn’t much of a sense of community in the café after all. I now think that the difference between the winter café and the summer café is that in winter Parisians have even less of a sense of personal space than they do in summer. Their sweaters, scarves, and coats not only put a damper on the aforementioned sexual attraction but also make people unaware of where their space ends and others’ begin. Add to that the shopping bags now that the annual winter sales period is underway and oh the looks you get when you ask a woman to take her ankle-length duvet coat and H&M bags from an otherwise available chair so that you can sit down! Sometimes the bomb shelter feels less genteel, but once you and your friend have got your space it’s café society as holders of McStarbucks Cards can only dream about, even at McStarbucks in Paris.

Yesterday, after insulating window cracks in the morning, I went out to take photos in my neighborhood along the canal. There were at least a dozen people taking pictures within the same 300-yard stretch of the canal during the same 30-minute grey-day photo shoot, including a couple of guys with long lenses, one with a tripod. The thought that most of those photographers were going to put their pictures on blogs accompanied or not by text about the cold in Paris and the ice on the canal was rather disheartening. It’s one thing to compete for elbow room in a café, it’s quite another to think that we’re all competing for attention on the internet.

Truth be told, the canal is not a highly photogenic place. Oh, it’s a nice place to live, to hang out, to stroll, to café-sit, and, when the weather’s right, to picnic, but its color combination of dark green, grey, beige, brown, and black, with little sky in the frame and an uninspiring mishmash of architecture alongside, make the canal an awkward place to photograph. We all pointed our cameras towards the ice in the hopes that that would be evocative enough.

I stood on a bridge by a guy with a long lens to take the shot above of gull prints in the dusting of snow on the ice. The guy tried not show that he was annoyed by my “copying” him, but when I then followed him over to shoot a view from the side he gave me the same look as the women whose space I invaded in the café today. Why should his blog have better photos than mine just because he’s got a bigger lens?

The canal may not be very photogenic but the Eiffel Tower always is. That explains why one occasionally comes across some stunning photographs of the Eiffel Tower. Problem is, it’s hard to make the Eiffel Tower look like anything but the Eiffel Tower, by which I mean that it rarely evokes any other thought than: That’s the Eiffel Tower, I’ve been there (or I want to be there).

That’s why I love the joy that comes across in Va-nu-pieds’ Eiffel Tower photo that you can see by clicking here. In it he managed to capture the sense of ecstasy at coming upon a distant view of the Iron Lady. I’m honored that he gave me first dibs to use it on France Revisited’s Photography Blog.

A close look at the shot shows that he must have taken the picture in summer because you can see the sandal tan lines on his foot (unless those are shadows from the beams), but the Eiffel Tower is timeless enough that, unlike in my apartment, a difference of 50 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t matter.

One more winter photographic note: Not being much of a photographer myself, I do occasionally get lucky, as in this winter homage to Claude Monet that I shot a year ago.

Flowing south from the edge of Paris to the town of Massy, a distance of 7.4 miles (12 km), there’s a bike and foot path called La Coulée Verte du Sud Parisien. You can pick it up in Paris just behind the Montparnasse Train Station. Enter through an archway leading off Place de Catalogne in the 14th arrondissement and enter the peaceable world of Paris’s southern suburbs.

The first mile or so of the path progresses with fits and starts as you wind your way outside of the city and into the immediate suburbs of Malakoff then Châtillon. Little by little the path then settles into an easy-going, occasionally rolling, unhurried green (verte) flow (coulée) passing through the relatively tranquil towns of Bagneux, Fontenay-aux-Roses, Sceaux, Châtenay-Malabry, Antony, Verrières-le-Buisson, and into Massy.

Two-thirds along the way is the most well-known greenery to the immediately south of Paris, Parc des Sceaux, a delicious spot for an afternoon loll-about after a genteel ride out and before a satisfied ride home.

I pedaled in the company of Va-nu-pieds. Va-nu-pieds is the pseudonym—the lens name, if you will—of a French photographer whose unique work will soon be appearing on France Revisited. A va-nu-pieds, literally “goes barefoot,” is a vagabond, a tramp, a ragamuffin. Further explanations will come when Va-nu-pieds exclusive images begin appearing in this site.

Va-nu-pieds took his first series of photos for France Revisited yesterday afternoon while we wandered through the park. I took a few Skytree shots while there, some of which will also eventually appear on this site. We spoke of ways in which image describes place, but I’ll save that discussion for another time. (Actually, you can catch a glimpse of that by reading my preceding blog post.)

For now, though, allow me to take the tour-guide approach to tell you why, in the right weather—and yesterday certainly was—Parc de Sceaux is such a worthy destination for a traveler looking to enjoy some green time just outside of the city.

There’s also a chateau here, which one sees from the Coulée Verte.

Chateau de Sceaux, view from the Coulée Verte. Photo GLK.

 

One glimpse of it and you’re sure to want to approach for a closer view.

Chateaux de Sceaux, a closer view. Photo GLK

Entrance is free. You can walk your bikes through the park, but Va-nu-pieds would have none of that, so we attached them outside and spend a few hours wandering around.

The chateau was mostly constructed under the ownership of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), Louis XIV’s Minister of Finance. It’s a photogenic place in a post-card kind of way, but the main attraction of Sceaux is the park, created by the grandfather of French landscape gardeners André Le Nôtre (1613-1700). Le Nôtre’s work at Versailles was already well underway by the time Colbert purchased Sceaux.  Hired by Colbert then by Colbert’s son the Marquis de Seignelay, Le Nôtre designed what remains one of the pleasing and accessible noble parks of the Paris region.

As with other noble parks in the region it had its 19th-century era of ruin but has since been lovingly restored

Its trademark features are its cascade,

Cascade, Parc de Sceaux. Photo GLK.

which includes these spouts,

The cascade, three of five mouths. Photo GLK.

its Grand Canal,

Grand Canal, Parc de Sceaux. Photo GLK.

and its perfectly aligned rows of populars, plane trees, horse chestnuts, lindens, and other trees whose names I never remember.

Picnickers between closing walls of shade. Dappled sculpture. Photos GLK.

The sculptures are less noteworthy, but I like the image above right.

It’s simply a delightful place for a stroll, a picnic, a lounge on the grass (actually allowed here!), photographic explorations, a jog, prolonged conversations, a nap, romance, and, as far as I’m concerned, a illicit pee in the woods. There are snack stands and cafés in the park.

Other than biking along the Coulée Verte, Parc de Sceaux is easily reachable from the center of Paris by suburban train. Take RER line B, direction Massy-Palaiseau, directly to the Parc de Sceaux stop, a 21-minute ride from Chatelet-Les Halles. The park is then a 3-minute walk from the station.

Click here to learn more about Parc de Sceaux in French.

Here’s a Google map indicating the path of the Coulée Verte. Zoom in to see Sceaux.

A skytree is an image looking up from the base of a tree. Revealing both the tree and the sky it give a sense of place with a more or less vertical view that is naturally quite different from that of the horizontal view that typically defines place.

Here are several examples from a recent trip to Provence using the vantage point of olive trees.

The first one is from Avignon.

The second is also from Avignon. The stone tower seen in the lower portion of the image is the upper portion of one of the towers that punctuate the walls surrounding the old town.

This third is from Nimes. My shirt was getting caught in the branches as I bent down to take the shot, which caused the leaves to blur and allowed me to capture something of the mood of the park toward sunset that evening. The stones glimpsed here are those of a Roman tower.

Click here for examples of 3 skytrees from Paris in March.

Click here for 2 more from Paris, late March.

A blogload of thanks to the many readers who wrote to tell me how much you loved France Revisited’s number one musical hit of the season “She Walked Along the River, a.k.a. The T-Shirt Song”! (If you haven’t yet heard the song you can do on this site by clicking here or on Youtube by clicking here.)

Okay, it may be a stretch to say that you “loved” the song. Rather, there were three general categories of comment.

1. The “I didn’t know you sing” comment. My response: Neither did I.

2. The “You and Jordan [Zell] should write more songs together” comment. My response: We are. We’ve written five already–his music, my lyrics–and if you’re in Jerusalem on Sept. 16 you can hear some of them during Jordan’s solo concert.

3. The “I liked the song until the f-word at the end” comment. My response: I sometimes feel a little bad about the use of the f-word, but in writing the song it felt like a natural ending to the story told in the song, so there you have it. (My deepest thanks to the ambitous reader who told me I could never get the song on the radio with the f- bomb in it. And my deepest sympathy to the high school teacher who told me that she can no longer recommend France Revisited to her students.)

Some of the above categories of comment came through the post office accompanied by a t-shirt, so I want to especially thank those dedicated readers by the following photos of their generous gift.

With thanks to the reader who went to London, here I am in your t-shirt in front of the statue of Henri IV on Ile de la Cité:

With thanks to the reader who had a t-shirt specially printed in honor of the fact that “The T-Shirt Song” was recorded in Israel, here I am in your t-shirt below the Pont Neuf:

With thanks to the reader in Paris who understood the cynicism and humor of “The T-Shirt Song” as soon as he heard it, here I am in front the Paris Police Headquarters.

With further thanks to all astute readers with a sense of humor, here I am sitting by the river in a second “I love rien” t-shirt:  

I look forward to any gifts I might receive once we’ve completed our France Revisited music video about prostitution in Paris.

My favorite little shop in Paris, Plaques & Pots, one of the last living vestiges of the historical belly of Paris that was the Les Halles Quarter, will be closing at the end of July.

Been a long time coming–rather, going. It isn’t easy making a living selling enamel plaques, enamel street numbers, butcher’s paper, and pottery handmade upstairs in an quarter otherwise devoted to cafés, clubs, restaurants, and mass fashion. Owner Josette Samuel, in photo, is now ready to move on.

If you live in Paris or will be visiting in July, take advantage of a last chance to visit this authentic remnant of Les Halles, even if only for a vision of the passing of time in the quarter as it pursues its drive to urban uniformity.

The wholesale and retail food industry left this area for modern installations in Rungis, south of Paris, in 1969, so Josette’s goods long ago lost their place at Les Halles. Still, I’ve to got applaud her stubborn gumption in taking over (five years ago) the shop formerly called Papeterie Moderne and trying to make a go of selling old-fashion practical-cum-decorative products in a space that’s probably smaller than your kitchen. For more about the shop, read the article I wrote soon after Josette purchased the shop.

While at Plaques & Pots, 12 rue de la Ferronerie (tel. 01 42 36 21 72), you might pick up an antique street number for yourself or for friends.

Or a street sign (left) or even some old butcher’s paper (right) that she inherited from the previous owners.

By the time you get here there may not be any clay pots left, such as this one (photo right). Knowing that I’ve always been a fan of this shop, even before she took it over, Josette gave me one of the last pots as a farewell-to-the-boutique gift. Handmade in the Les Halles Quarter.

Several other vestiges of Les Halles from its by-gone centuries as the center of the food trade in Paris continue to hold their own. Among them:
- E. Dehillerin, a family-operated store for kitchen and pastry utensils and cookware, 18-20 rue Coquillière.
- La Poule au Pot, a bistro with a décor dated 1935, serving traditional rustic fare including one of the best onion soup’s in Paris, 9 rue Vauvilliers.

- Julien Aurouze, a family-run pest exterminator that was trapping rats around Les Halles as early as 1872, 8 rue des Halles. Those are sewer rats caught in the quarter in 1925 hanging in the window on the right below.

The oldest and most lasting of the remnant of historical Les Halles is the Church of Saint Eustache, 1532-1640, which may well be the most under-visited, touristically speaking, of the major churches of Paris. It’s a Renaissance church within a Gothic body with great accoustics for its famous organ.

The enormous proportions of its interior are worth a look, but I’ve come here today to photograph one of the most endearing church sculptures in Paris, “Departure of the Fruits and Vegetables from the Heart of Paris 28 February 1969” by Raymond Mason.

“Departure” (completed in 1971) is so fitting at Saint-Eustache not only because the central food market that had existed since the Middle Ages was the raison d’être for the church but because this is a wonderful sculptural retelling of Paradise Lost, the departure from the Garden of Eden. (Having recently written an article about musicals in Paris, I note that it is also reminiscent of the departure from Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof.) Or, as the sculptor has written of that departure 40 years ago, “It’s the man of the Middle Ages that’s leaving.”

Plaques & Pots, formerly Papeterie Moderne, now joins the procession in the departure of signs and numbers from the heart of Paris July 2009.

Wishing Josette all the best in her future endeavors.

No offense to writers who claim to get significant work done in Paris cafés, but that’s an urban legend as far as I can tell. Editing, maybe; a blog entry, I suppose; observational notes for future work, possibly; a flash poem, perhaps; mental notes that soon evaporate, definitely; inspirational pages spilled out in 5 minutes, why not? But writing as an extended activity of wording, sentences, paragraphs, construction, ideas, and story while the coffee gets cold or the beer warm. Nyet!

Entrance to les toilettes at Les Parigots.

Nevertheless, if I were to write in a café it would be a place like Les Parigots, a bistro/bar/café just off Place de la République. (Parigot is slang for Parisian.) There’s a back area with books on shelves that’s fairly calm but with enough distraction to remind a writer that he or she isn’t at home. The writer would also be well placed to watch food coming from the kitchen and clients going into the rest room, which could be just the spark needed to further some important work.

Here’s a picture of the door to the toilettes at Les Parigots. I took this picture as an inside joke (inside France Revisited, that is) referring to my article about French cuisine in Philadelphia. In that article I take Olivier Desaintmartin, the owner of Zinc, to task for spelling toilette like a Belgian. I wonder if he ever got the new French sign he promised?

I imagined this blog entry there while watching the waitress pick up two plates of hamburger-and-fries from the kitchen ledge, but I wrote it at home.

Les Parigots. 5 rue Château d’Eau, 10th arrondissement. 100 yards north of Place de la République, Metro République. Tel. 01 42 00 22 26.

One afternoon last weekend, while visiting friends in flat, damp Vendée, south of the Loire by the Atlantic coast, I abandoned them to their napping 2-year-old, their coughing 4-year-old, and their 6-year-old having a brat attack because she didn’t want to do her homework, and I borrowed their car and went to the beach, about 6 miles away.

There I took a picture of the sand:

Sand during falling tide, beach in Vendée. Photo GLK

I then walked along the dune:

Over the dune, Vendée. Photo GLK

The sky changed as I then drove inland. When I think of Vendée, at least southern Vendée where my friends live, I think of this flat, damp landscape.

The flatlands of Vendée. Photo GLK

Near the end of the afternoon I was driving back to my friends’ village when I stopped to admire this path:

Path between yellow trees, Vendée, Feb. 09. Photo GLK

By the time I returned, the 2-year-old was awake and tearing apart the dress of the doll I’d given her, the 4-year-old was sucking two fingers while watching “Les Simpson,” and the 6-year-old wanted to show me something she’d written. It went something like this: ANDndeMmleNdrEaAeasssdNrea.

Her name is Andréa.

I just caulked the windows in my living room/office so that I don’t have to type with gloves on.

With gloves that sentence reads as follows:

IO ujuts cqgulKEFD TQEHW qioasdddnows ioh ny sdl;aingvv toomoffaciw asto thath ia asdotnta; ahvae to aryttg wqthh fpobes pon,.

Actually, I sort of like the like the “fpobes pon,” at the end of that sentence, got a nice rhythm to it.

Meanwhile, the ice thickens on Canal Saint-Martin,

and city works don their gloves to put up a sign warning us from trying to walk on it.