Saturday, May 25, 2013

A Curious Confluence: Chapter Five–Another Day of Image Harvest

The weather was warm and spectacular. I haven’t ever before walked through Parc Buttes des Chaumont when the air was warm so I felt compelled to take advantage of today’s warmth.

Getting there entailed taking line 4 to Gare d’Est and line 7 to Lois Blanc and a goofy little spur off 7 to Métro Stop Bozaris.

And then I plunged into the Parc.

Parc Buttes des Chaumont was built on the site of an old garbage dump by Monsieur Haussmann who re-did a large part of Paris (mercifully he left le Marias in its medieval state) for Napoleon III. The Parc has all kinds of cliffs, streams and waterfalls. Unlike most French gardens it is not regimented. It is more like Hyde Park than like Jardin de Luxembourg from a vegetation standpoint. And all the hills and stream traces and water covered cliffs are made of what was – in the 1870’s – a revolutionary new material: concrete. I think that’s chaumont.

So I took a bunch of pictures and a few movies in the parc and exited where Rue de Crimée meets the edge of the Parc and forms the Parc’s boundary on that side.

I walked down Rue de Crimée to Basin de Villette and down it to Canal Saint Martin and down the Canal until I got to Rue du Faubourg du Temple, which I thought I remembered terminates at Place de la République. It did so terminate and after some searching – huge Parisian intersections always flummox me – I found Rue de Turbigo which I walked to les Halles and home.

By the time I got there it was time to go buy a poulete for dinner.

By the time I got home from poulete shopping, grocery shopping and vegetable shopping, and had written this, it was well nigh on to wine time again.

I poured a glass of corbièrers and tried not to think about the door outside my apartment, down a few steps.

The sleep written document, it has turned out, has accurately described something of which I had not, at the time of reading it, become aware.

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