Under The Paris Sky-II
Paris (http://eiffelforanaussie.com/registry)
“Under the sky of Paris / Runs a happy river / Hum hum / During the night it lulls to sleep / The poor people of the street / Under the sky of Paris / God’s birds / Hum hum / Come from all over the world / To have a chat.”
By taking a close look towards Paris I managed to discover that not only birds take Paris by assault, probably meaning to just have a good chat over a tasty coffee, a coffee being savored in one of those many cafes one may come across when promenading Paris’s streets wide and above, but crowds and crowds of tourists too. You may thus end up being one of them. And while sitting peacefully and sipping your cappuccino there you may as well let yourself veiled by the magic notes of one of Edith Piaf’s songs or perhaps start seeing “La vie en rose” or life in pink tones as the Englishman would say.
Paris cafe (http://euro-quest.tripod.com/parisnightlife/id22.html)
La vie en rose can certainly be felt while wandering having no direction whatsoever on Avenue des Champs-Elysees or otherwise known as the “Elysian fields”. Just in case you start looking for some fields there, these fields may look nothing like original ones to you, because there goes just a vast field of luxury shops, cafes and even cinemas. When there, feel free to decide by yourself if this avenue deserves the title of the “most beautiful” or “la plus belle avenue” as the French would say in “the world”. It has been called like this, yet the subject gets to be debatable somehow when considering things from the perspective of taste. After all as we all may know by now, beauty is said to “lie in the eyes of the beholder.”
And what more clear way of proving this if not by getting down from the “horse”, a horse which this time may get the shape of a car or the metro somewhere near the Louvre museum? It’s just a museum hosting some of the most important perhaps works of art the world has ever seen. The list would include Venus de Milo and certainly Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. As I’ve been there and I only managed to see part of all those works of art I would say that it takes one plenty of time to see everything there. And there are so many things to do while in Paris that you may simply end up wondering what to do first! I’d suggest comfortable shoes, a map, a bottle of water and having the words with you and all the rest comes by itself. Since I mentioned Mona Lisa I could not but observe on my visit to the Louvre that she got to be envisaged by many as some sort of a “rock star”. Otherwise I see no reason why people would get so frantic about photographing themselves with Lisa or Mona as they may prefer calling her, or as someone rightfully noticed it on a traveling blog “with the crowds pushing and shoving to get close for a “me ‘n Mona” photo with their cell phone cameras and digitals held high above the maddening crowd…” And contrary to what many may say when reading this, it was no amateur saying this but an artist, thus a person who gets to be a declared artist lover. He was the one who made me think about advising you to stay away from Paris’s Louvre when it gets simply too hot to even breath in the crowd assaulting the corridors of culture in Paris. I have been there in August and I must have been lucky since I managed to reach the much less traversed corridors, simply managing to avoid the hours when the hordes of tourists wish to see it all or at least part of what they may consider that it falls within their field of interest. Thus we may conclude the Louvre part by saying that Louvre gets to be just “waiting for a cooler day…” Why not even an April day, this April maybe?
Jardins du Luxembourg (turisteuropa.ro/tag/verighete-in-paris)
And since April gets to be a quite pleasant month of spring, a walk in one of the many parks of Paris (the officials there counted just about 400 of them!) may be just the next thing to be included on your list of favorite ways of spending your time while finding yourself “sous le ciel de Paris” or otherwise under the sky of Paris. Les Jardins the Luxembourg may be just the proper place to look for some peace and tranquility. I did go there myself and I found the above mentioned silence and tranquility just sitting comfortably underneath the gorgeous shady trees. This gets to be also a part of Paris, apart from the lights making Paris their home and apart from the crowds of tourists making Paris their home for a few days only or for an entire week as the case may be. But apart from the parks, Paris also hosts a quarter known as The Latin Quarter, a quarter of Paris located on the Left bank, a quarter owing its name to the philosophers and scholars that used to make it their home, people who refused stubbornly to learn French, yet instead spoke Latin. By saying this I may as well say what I managed to read somewhere and amused me, namely that “No one understood what they were saying, but I pretty much guarantee they got all the girls.”
jardins Paris (mondoramas.com/en/group-travel/way-of-life/gardens/paris-gardens-tour.html)
If organized according to a list of themes, there will certainly be one park for each preference; there are big parks, hilly ones, romantic ones, parks suitable for children and many other diverse themed parks.
Donald Brown once said that “A romantic trip to Paris for a week would be great for anyone. Being in a big city with lots of cultural opportunities and cafes to sit in would be very unstressful. Either type could enjoy that.” Yet, equally well there comes Chamfort referring to Paris as “a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief.” Whether so or not you may discover when making up your mind to visit Paris!
Like any other city in Europe, Paris certainly comes to hold a less strolled part, a part that might have preferred to remain hidden from the eyes of the many tourists stepping the borders of Paris. This side gets to include churches, graves of certain people, either famous or only unknown ones, some sculptures like the one known under the name of the “Zouave du Pont de l’Alma”, a sculpture well known by Parisians yet remaining among those things yet undiscovered by tourists in Paris. And just if tourists either avoided such places or simply happened to find them not interesting, there happen to be some flavors which certainly cannot remain unperceived by the tourists invading Paris. If you have like been looking for flavors your entire life then you may feel free to stop have a drink at La Closerie des Lilas, once the favorite place of Hemingway, Henry Miller and Gertrude Stein, as well as a whole multitude of other writers and poets. Where is this Closerie situated? Feel free to look for it in Boulevard du Montparnasse!
Paris (holgablog.com/2009/06/10/the-best-holga-photos-from-flickr-may-2009/)
And while in Montparnasse, it looks to me like you are just following a path once followed by the many artists carrying on with their lives in Paris. One such other place happens to be a café known under the name of Le Select. If you happen to feel like you could get tired of Montparnasse then you may as well feel free to start haunting the brasseries localized in the Latin Quarter. One such brasserie, famous for the people who step its threshold, is Brasserie Balzar. The friendly ambiance of this brasserie as well as that witnessed in Paris has certainly made its victims, not only celebrities or politicians, but also people like you and me. I know not about you, yet I know for sure I happen to be no politician, perhaps only a celebrity. Just a joke here!
No matter the social condition, race, skin color and all the rest of things it can be stated being unequivocally right that “Paris is always a good idea” and as such should be nevertheless included on the list of travel destinations, future or present ones as the case may happen to be.11
