It seems the City of Light has developed a bit of a dark side not readily visible to the casual visitor. Lovers still stroll hand-in-hand along the banks of the Seine, ignoring the obvious signs of pollution. They share drinks at sidewalk cafes (the tap water is still fine) and embrace in doorways and on the grass in every park.
And the parks are still beautifully kept, lawns mowed, hedges clipped and flowers to die for. Any Brits who think their island has a lock on prize gardens should take a walk through the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuilleries or Parc Jardin des Plantes (more of this later).
Paris in summer is notoriously steamy, but in this year of unprecedented rainfall (the worst in 128 years) heat is not the major source of irritation. Parisians are blaming the new municipal government for unbelievable traffic jams, but ‘tourists add few vehicles to the mix and most residents enjoy their famous long vacations in July and August, taking their cars with them. Well, the city fathers, or whoever, thought this would be a swell time to shut down about three miles of a main artery running through the heart of the city on the Right Bank of the Seine. The bright idea was to give skaters, joggers and dog walkers free rein on the expressway, which is kind of like turning the Sepulveda Pass portion of the 405 over to hikers. Popular with the Greens maybe, but hardly the way to win votes from thousands of motorists forced onto surface streets. They crossed the river en masse, ground to a halt on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and clogged the Champs-Elyses, and that’s before the Tour de France cycled into the Place de la Concorde Sunday (Vive Lance Armstrong).
Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, instead of chucking a bad idea before it blooms, is digging his heels in, saying the plan just needs to be better explained. I think this is like launching a P.R. campaign to explain the benefits of genetically engineered food–it will work when pig genes fly. And now that the weather is heating up, it will be hard to explain to thousands of sweaty kids why 42 of the area’s public swimming pools are closed during July and August. Couldn’t they repair them after school starts in September?
But these inconveniences pale in comparison to pipe bomb attacks on police stations and blazing cars set alight the past two weekends in the Seine-St.-Denis district (just outside Paris proper). This is not the work of terrorists, authorities say, but mischief by gangs of poor youths. However, the area is the site of the Stade de France, which would have featured prominently in the 2008 Olympic Games had Paris not been passed over in favor of Beijing, which is, of course, the final ignominy for the mayor and his city.
Still, it’s a great place to visit, even in the rain, even when it sizzles. After you’ve done the Louvre, the Muse d’Orsay, the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, watched the artists doing charcoal portraits by the bridge opposite the cathedral, checked out Shakespeare’s book store and the shops on rue St. Louis en l’Ile, work your way to the outskirts. There are huge, magnificent parks everywhere: Parc des Buttes Chaumont, Parc Zoologique de Paris, a clean, densely landscaped animal park on par with San Diego Zoo, and adjacent to miles of jogging and bicycling paths, boating, ponies at the Bois de Vincennes. The Jardin des Plantes is the place for die-hard garden lovers. An adjunct to the school of horticulture, plants are clearly marked as to species and variety, not that one could find many of those varieties here. But the techniques used to lay out the flowerbeds wouldn’t be too difficult to follow. We had taken the train to Giverny to see the famous garden created by Claude Monet, but it was such a riot of color and texture and so densely planted that it was impossible to figure out how it was done.
Our last evening before leaving for Clermont-Ferrand, our hosts drove us out to an amazing place called France Miniature. It didn’t sound too exciting in the Periscope, so we were surprised to find a finely detailed scale model of the whole country: the sea, rivers, mountains, chateaux, trains, dams, roads, cathedrals spread over about 10 acres. At dusk, the paths are lit, and the castles and churches, ports and boats are illuminated by candles. Lessons in architecture and history.
Magnifique!