En directe de la Cité florale
Jan. 24th, 2006 06:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustCame into Paris from due North, and hit the moat that separates Paris from the world - a broad, fast-flowing stream of traffic, the Boulevard Périphérique. Like the walls of a medieval city, this inner ring road constricts development within its circle, and the new blocks rise high and shining along its inner edge. The twilight sky was pale and dim, and the neon made splashes of colour above the slabs of sliver-sheened offices and hotels, shiny-new annd inhuman in scale. A single brazier, a huddle of awnings looked like some post-apocalyptic settlement, but resolved into a long straggling flea market.
By the time we crossed the Seine, the sun was setting: the sky was darkening in red and blue, the neon was beginning to scream, and the tall blocks on the skyline were dark against the sky, pitted with flecks of light. The motorway exits bear names familiar from the metro lines; Porte des Lilas, Porte d'Italie, next one's ours... Down on our right we passed a park, then a cemetery, and rising from it like a flying saucer the concrete disk of the sports ground: this is our turning.
We are staying with our friend Jenny, who lives in a tangle of a half dozen streets known as the "Cité florale", because they all have the names of flowers and because they feel like the survival of a smaller, slower, older city. And that's where I am now, struggling to type this on an azerty keyboard (what sort of mentality puts the full stop on a shift key?), after a happy day walking around the Marais in the freezing sunshine, photographing the icicles on the Nikki de Sainte-Phalle fountain, lunch Chez Marianne in the old Jewish Quarter, and an exhibition of the photos of Willy Ronis at the Hôtel de Ville. Soon we will go out to eat Chinese food with friends...
By the time we crossed the Seine, the sun was setting: the sky was darkening in red and blue, the neon was beginning to scream, and the tall blocks on the skyline were dark against the sky, pitted with flecks of light. The motorway exits bear names familiar from the metro lines; Porte des Lilas, Porte d'Italie, next one's ours... Down on our right we passed a park, then a cemetery, and rising from it like a flying saucer the concrete disk of the sports ground: this is our turning.
We are staying with our friend Jenny, who lives in a tangle of a half dozen streets known as the "Cité florale", because they all have the names of flowers and because they feel like the survival of a smaller, slower, older city. And that's where I am now, struggling to type this on an azerty keyboard (what sort of mentality puts the full stop on a shift key?), after a happy day walking around the Marais in the freezing sunshine, photographing the icicles on the Nikki de Sainte-Phalle fountain, lunch Chez Marianne in the old Jewish Quarter, and an exhibition of the photos of Willy Ronis at the Hôtel de Ville. Soon we will go out to eat Chinese food with friends...
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 07:22 pm (UTC)Anyway, if you read this before you go off to points south (as if you going to Angouleme didn't make me jealous enough)say hello to Jenny for me.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-26 02:34 am (UTC)Thank you.
Nine