Une belle place

La Place Monge. It's a small square in the Latin Quarter, but it's in the middle of a very residential section of central Paris. The quiet square transforms into a bustling market every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. I've shopped and wandered around here many times over the years.

La Place Monge on a quiet Saturday morning. The place is full of action on market days.

I don't know if Mark and Julie made it to see the market. It's hard when you're in a hotel and you really don't have a way to keep food. Everything in Paris markets is so appetizing and I always want to buy more than I need. I don't get the chance to do much shopping in Paris markets these days. But I do remember buying amazing things at the markets and keeping them out on the window sill of our hotel room during our trips, and in our refrigerator when we rented vacation apartments.

Monge, and the nearby rue Mouffetard, are great marketplaces and should be a stop on anyone's visit to Paris. Have you been?

Un premier café

I had some time to kill before meeting Mark and Julie, so I found a café on the rue Monge near their hotel and sat down. The coffee was rich and good and really hit the spot. After I drank it, I thought to take a photo.

My first coffee of the morning. There would be another.

The morning was calm, being Saturday, and the air was refreshingly cool compared to the heat of Friday. I lingered for a few minutes, enjoying watching the sun hit the top floors of the buildings around where I sat. People were getting up, opening their shades and windows, letting the sun and the cool morning air into their apartments.

The hustle and bustle of the day had yet to begin.

La Tour Zamansky

It will come as no surprise to you that I like the university campus at Jussieu. Like many bold works of architecture, the campus engendered much controversy. It was never completed as originally planned, but it has been enlarged and renovated since its initial opening in 1971.

The Zamansky Tower seen from the rue de Jussieu.

The centerpiece of the campus is the Zamansky Tower, a twenty-nine floor glass tower that rises elegantly above the grid of the laboratories and classrooms below. Unfortunately, the campus was not very well maintained and it became somewhat of an eyesore; the buildings were covered in ugly graffiti for decades. It was not a particularly inviting place when I lived nearby in 1981.

At the end of the 1990s, the university and the education ministry adopted a plan to rehabilitate and modernize the campus. The tower was totally gutted in the early 2000s to remove asbestos while the grid buildings below were cleaned up and completely renovated. From my limited point of view, looking from the outside, the renovation is a success. I don't have any experience of the place from the inside.

The campus is built on the site of Paris' old central wine market (1666), which itself was built on the site of the medieval Abbey Saint-Victor de Paris (1109). The abbey was a university of sorts in its time, training young men in arts and sciences and letters, until its decline in the Renaissance.

Paris' Fifth Arrondissement, also known as the Latin Quarter. Click to latinate.

You can see the campus in the screenshot (Google Maps) of the Latin Quarter above. The very distinctive grid of the buildings, with the tower inside, is visible in the lower right of the image. On the lower left, you can see the cross-shaped Panthéon and its dome, and at the top, just left of center, you can see the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris.

Le jour d'après

Our dinner was fantastic. The setting was nice and the restaurant didn't have a "tourist" feel to it. I know that a lot of tourists go there (me, for example), and we were seated next to a table of Germans (I think), but there were plenty of French people around and it was nice. I've been out to eat in Paris on many occasions when I was seated in a sea of fellow American tourists. You might as well eat at Red Lobster.

The campus at Jussieu has been recently renovated. I've always really liked the place and it looks fresh and new again.

Mark and Julie enjoyed the menu as much as I did. They are adventurous eaters and they enjoy wine. My kind of people. We had two wines from the Loire Valley region (bien sûr) and they were good.

The next day we made plans to meet up and go to the modern art museum at the Pompidou Center. I checked out of my hotel and wandered around for a while before meeting them. I walked by the 1960s University of Pierre and Marie Curie campus at Jussieu, next to my hotel, before finding a place to have a cup of coffee.

La dernière du jour

This is the last photo I took on this particular Friday. My walk across Paris was essentially over. After taking in the views from the Arc de Triomphe, Julie, Mark and I jumped on the subway and zipped back to our hotels on the Left Bank to get ready for dinner. I desperately needed a shower and a change of clothes; it was a very hot day that day.

Julie and Mark give their feet a break at the top of the Arc de Triomphe. That's the Avenue Foch stretching out toward the Bois de Boulogne on the left.

Dinner was at Le Petit Prince de Paris, not far from our hotels. I had reserved a table a couple of weeks prior and was looking forward to the meal. It didn't disappoint. My main course was carré de porcelet (rack of roast suckling pig), which is one of their signature dishes. Oh, yum!

But I didn't take my camera to the restaurant.

Pas très belle, mais quand même

This is not the greatest photo, but it gives you an idea of what you can see from the Arc de Triomphe. This view is toward the northwest and La Défense, the big business development outside Paris. I'm looking from the Place Charles de Gaulle (l'Etoile) up the Avenue de la Grande Armée.

Looking out past Paris, through Neuilly, to La Défense. Click to arcify.

I've posted better photos from up here before (see them here), and I didn't take many on this day, so you are spared the panorama this time.

Les mariés devant la tour

And now I present the classic shot of the honeymooners in front of the Eiffel Tower. This is probably one of the most taken photographs in the world. What makes this one exceptional is that it includes Mark and Julie.

Aren't they a handsome couple!

Of course, I took several photos of them together and of each of them separately, but I liked this one of them together the best. After our photo session, we walked across the Trocadero and up the Avenue Kléber to the Place Charles de Gaulle and the Arc de Triomphe. I remember that my feet were feeling sore at this point.

So I went to a kinésithérapeute (similar to a chiropractor) yesterday. We talked a bit about my problem, then he stood me up and started feeling around my neck, chest, and back. He said he didn't think that the problem was with my spine, but with a vertical muscle behind my left pectoral muscle (hey, I've got pecs!) that is tensed and stuck and pinching the nerve that goes into my left arm. He did some massaging and I could feel real relief, albeit temporary.

I go back on Thursday morning for another session. I get the impression that there will be multiple sessions during which he will show me what I can do myself to help. When I told him that I had just recently trimmed my hedges, he said to "look no more" for the cause. That was probably it. Repeated horizontal movements (of my arm) can result in this condition, apparently.

He was a real nice guy, relaxed and friendly. He has a fish tank in his office and some real low key new age type of music playing. He is pretty much my age. In fact, he said we were born in the same year, although he was born in January and I was born in December. Then he told me that his brother was born in December of the same year. I remarked that that was unusual. He said his parents raised them pretty much as twins. Funny, eh?