Paris city

I am about a week and two cities behind in my blog. I have a blog thing that seems to be corrupt, some dodgy connections, and I am having a really good time! However to Paris.

On our arrival in the Marais district, seeing the old scarred and bashed in walls and worn out steps leading to our apartment brought on a surge of all my Parisian fantasies and images in one intense immediate surge: climbing the stairs to be a conspirator in the French Revolution by storming The Bastille, (in reality just down the road), being the starving artistic genius whose works have become classics (I am neither starving or a genius) or an actual location of all the films I have seen where the S.S. round up members of the French resistance in the Second World War.

Open the door and you are outside into a typical Marais street scene. The streets are narrow with a typical Parisian skyline.

At night the dark, narrow, dimly lit streets look like a paperback book cover of an Amy Leduc detective story. Amy being one of my favourite fictional French detectives.

The streets during the day are lined with the little shops and cafes that Paris is famous for.

Photos.

At the end of the street in the Pompidou Centre. 

When it was built in the 1960s, it was a daring piece of architecture. Now, for me, it's just an eyesore, sticking out like a sore thumb. Maybe my intense dislike of the building is the result of my loathing of the way the man after whom the building was named treated immigrants into France when he was Immigration Minister, but that's another story.

So once we were unpacked, settled, and got our bearings, it was time to go out and about. First trip a look at this not very nice from the outside art gallery.