Fête des Jardins

A festival every weekend! That's our impression of Paris so far. This past Saturday and Sunday (Sept. 26-27) the city celebrated its many parks and gardens with the Fêtes des Jardins. Because Maggie wasn't feeling well and because we had a lot to do at home we didn't stray very far from Belleville, but we still got to enjoy the Fête. Saturday afternoon, I brought Panda to the Parc de Buttes Chaumont for her afternoon constitutional and got to hear a "Joystick Orchestra" "warm up." As part of the festivities, an interactive electronic music group called Puce Muse had set up an array of 24 Play Station 3 controllers, all of which were connected to computers and big-screen monitors, and all of which could be used to make electronic music. Pretty nifty.

Sunday afternoon, Maggie and I took Panda back to the Parc de Buttes Chaumon and went on a hunt for festivities. All we found was a different Puce Muse set-up in the same spot, but we also traveled across a foot bridge that had been closed for a while, which Panda did not like one bit:

Poor P-Face! After subjecting her to this injustice, we dropped her off at home and hit up the Parc de Belleville. Technically, this park is closer than the Parc de Buttes Chaumont, but we've never been inside because dogs aren't allowed! It turns out the park is beautiful - loads of flowers, a "Maison de l'Air" (basically a museum for children about air), lots of terracing, greenspace, bamboo (???), you get the idea. And for the Fête des Jardins, they installed something special in the most beautiful section of the park:

Sorry for the terrible video quality - I'm out of practice. To recap, the Fête des Jardins was great, we love hitting up free events on weekends, and we wish we could have brought Panda to the Parc de Belleville. The end.

Journées Européenes du Patrimoine

I know it's normal for a blog to hype current or future events, but I'm having a hard time staying ahead of the curve, so you'll have to be satisfied with finding out about things you should have gone to after the fact. For example, last weekend you would have been granted access to various buildings, free of charge, in an event called "European Days of Cultural Heritage" (loose translation). I first heard about the event through Invisible Paris, but even if I hadn't known about it we couldn't have avoided the masses of people waiting in line just across the street from the David Lynch window displays last Sunday afternoon.

Or the line wrapping all around the Opéra Garnier, or the band taking advantage of the captive audience to promote themselves:

Instead of waiting at the Opéra for hours, we hopped into a much shorter line in front of a much less famous site: the headquarters of Société Générale, a French bank. We had no idea how awesome it would be.

The glass ceiling you see towards the beginning of the sideshow is 50 square meters (huge!) and is protected by another glass ceiling above it, which also helps to keep the heat in. The building was one of the first in France (or maybe the world?) to be constructed with reinforced concrete. There are five basements, the first four of which contain safe-deposit boxes, all secured by the massive double safe you see in the slideshow. The fifth basement produces heat which rises up through the rest of the building through grates in the floors of each level - another innovation in its time. These trivia items and more did we learn on the 30-minute tour we took through an officially-certified historic monument we never would have known to visit, if not for the Journées Européenes de Patrimoine!

FFF: "Floating" Food & Fun

On Saturday, Maggie, Robert, Panda and I headed down to Quai Montebello, just across the river from Notre Dame de Paris. There, we experienced a heightened version of traditional French food-shopping: Les Marchés Flottants du Sud-Ouest. Imagine a single row of 50 merchants selling cheese, wine, sausages, foie gras, preserves, chocolates, ice cream, dates, smoked duck breast and more - all products of three départements in the southwest of France.

(Tarn-et-Garonne, Lot-et-Garonne, and Gers are all located within the larger region called Midi-Pyrénées.)

We got to taste a number of items and beverages, we listened to a rag-tag marching band seemingly composed of merchants (which reminded us of the Hobo Band), we people-watched on the Quai, which justified the "floating" part of the market's name, since it sits right on the Seine. Robert bought a bottle of red wine and I invested in some duck rillettes. So delicious! So unhealthy! 

Afterwards, we treated ourselves to Berthillon Glace (only the best ice cream in the world), walked around the Centre Georges Pompidou to see an exhibit celebrating 60 years of the RATP (Parisian public transport, see pictures from the exhibit here), then eventually sat down at a bar in the Marais for a drink. Quite a full afternoon, and quite a fun one!