After a good workout, so that we could enjoy breakfast, we thought about the day stretching ahead.<\/p>\n
It’s overcast, again, so a museum or gallery might be in order but, this being the 5th of March, we thought we’d head to the 11th and 12th arrs., sort of like a\u00a0Parisian Sudoku. The 11th, just east of the 3rd (le Marais), is a newly-gentrified area, popular with “bobo’s” or bourgeois bohemians as the French call them. (For instance,\u00a0a family lawyer friend of ours, who would freely admit to the designation, and family live there.)<\/p>\n
The area became popular after Mitterand\u00a0in one of\u00a0his\u00a0grand projets<\/em>\u00a0built the Bastille opera house in 1989, ostensibly to show that the Socialists cared about artistic endeavours.\u00a0It was meant to be\u00a0designed by Richard Rogers, if memory serves correctly,\u00a0but mistakenly awarded to Uruguayan-born, Canadian-resident Carlos Ott. Towards the end of his life, Mitterand admitted that the fix was in but\u00a0that the selection committee had somehow chosen Ott’s entry in the “blind” competition. It certainly did Ott no harm. Not surprisingly, this particular bit of architectural history is not mentioned\u00a0in either’s entry\u00a0on Wikipedia.<\/p>\n Despite the fact that the locals and many Parisians generally don’t like the design, find the performances inaccessible and pricey, the area\u00a0became yuppified from the 90s onwards. Not many museums, monuments and the like, but\u00a0diversely-ethnic shops and\u00a0restaurants dot the area.<\/p>\n One of our favourites, and one of Paris’s best bistros, Le Bistrot Paul-Bert, 18, rue Paul-Bert, has a sister restaurant of which\u00a0I\u00a0was\u00a0unaware until recently. L’Ecailler du Bistrot, 22, rue Paul-Bert, specializes in oysters, fish and seafood, and that’s what we thoroughly enjoyed for lunch today before a\u00a0walk\u00a0through the neighbourhood into the 12th. (An\u00a0ecailler<\/em>\u00a0is an oyster-shucker, by the way. Our server had fun repeating the word as part of her attempt to learn English and I can assure you,\u00a0it sounds better with a French accent.) For\u00a0these two places, and one or two others (Chez L’ami Louis,\u00a0pour certain<\/em>), I may have to break my self-imposed,\u00a0ridiculously rigid\u00a0“90 days\/90 different places” sabbatical rule.<\/p>\n We ended up walking along a\u00a0pleasant garden pathway, called Promenade Plant\u00e9e, through shrubs and hedges that will become\u00a0even more appealing when spring gets here. The Promenade is built on an old railway line, underneath which is\u00a0a gallery of artisinal shops, called\u00a0Viaduc des arts\u00a0<\/em>which we didn’t visit today.\u00a0The arches holding the tracks form the street-side front of some of the shops, very\u00a0appealing and a great use of otherwise useless space.<\/p>\n After a brief stop at Au Bon March\u00e9, we ended up back at the apartment, recharging our and the camera’s batteries, the latter of which I had inadvertently depleted overnight so no photos today.<\/p>\n And, Shannon, those photos of me yesterday were the same. It was my poor attempt at\u00a0blog humour or, in French,\u00a0une blague de blog<\/em>. I have\u00a0attached the “real” After photo below.<\/p>\n Postscript: We ended up going to Cafe Laurent, a jazz club in a Hotel D’Aubusson at rue Dauphine and rue Christine. Funnily enough, we had stayed at Relais Christine down the street maybe half-a-dozen times and never noticed the hotel, let alone the jazz, at least since Sandy’s become an aficianado. I did take a few photos here as I had recharged the battery by then.<\/p>\n Ignoring yesterday’s 542 calorie burn at the gym, we stopped by Yves Camdeborde’s creperie, next door to Le Comptoir du Relais, for a couple of late night crepes, chocolate-banana for me (for the potassium in the banana, of course), chocolate only for Sandy.<\/p>\n\n\t\t