Saturday, January 12, 2008 – Shopping, Wheels, Madness

Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis gives us the real Paris on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of January.

Shopping, Wheels, Madness

Paris, Saturday, January 12 – I asked Uncle about the jazz he went to hear at a book shop last night but all he chose to remember was the Smoking Dog café. He said there were two customers with dogs there but they weren't smoking just like everybody else. He said Alvin told him that folks who went outside to smoke were outlaws. Alvin used to run jazz clubs in San Francisco and Detroit and whenever he felt like a smoke he'd go outside and join the interesting people.

I guess that's the best I can hope about it. Those people outside aren't wretched refugees. They are kin. We are in this together, outside like outlaws and don't give a damn. It made me feel better; the situation isn't as desperate as I thought it was. We haven't been run off the planet yet.

But there were a few other people there looking for bargains. They were all over the whole seven floors of the place and security guys were holding up the herds so the escalators wouldn't plug full. The building has stairs but they are only for emergencies, if you can find them. Hope for a long and sheltered life for the BHV.

Given the crush I didn't actually find any audio parts. I was thinking of getting some steel bolts to hold up the speakers I haven't got yet, and maybe some copper cable to wire them together. I could have looked for wood to build speakers with too. Hell, I could've shot myself in the foot as well. No rational person goes to the BHV on a Saturday at any time.

Then the métro was the same, full of folks clutching their shopping bags advertising the kinds of places you only shop at two times a year when the sales are on. Parisians do not seem to care. They seem to be content to do all their year's shopping in two weeks, and do twice as much while paying half. It's not like they can go to Macy's every Wednesday.

I decided to go to Concorde and see if I could get into the Tuileries, to get another angle on the big wheel there. The parks in Paris close early in the winter so I wasn't sure it would be open, but it was. Some of those I thought were shoppers got off at Concorde too.

Between the electric wheel and the sky Concorde was somewhere in the dusk, beneath a flag floating above the Grand Palais, with the golden Crillion overlooking the place while the Champs-Elysées emptied its blue splashed cars into the carousel of circling red lights as unlit pedestrians risked the crossings, and those already safe gathered around the waffle kiosks at the base of the wheel.

Just the kind of atmosphere that lends Paris its aspect of perpetual circus. In the Tuileries mallards were floating in the golden puddle of reflection from the big wheel and there were still a few collapsed souls in the metal chairs - alas, unheated, and few remember to carry soft cushions on a Saturday in January. I wondered, would Louis XIV have approved? Would he have said, "Let there be fireworks!" And violins.

- Ric

Text and Photos Copyright © 2008 - Ric Erickson, MetropoleParis

FYI

BHV: Idée et conseil sur la décoration, le bricolage, l'ameublement de la maison

14, rue du Temple
75189 Paris Cedex 4

Bienvenue au restaurant "Au chien qui fume" Paris

33, rue du Pont-Neuf
75001 Paris

It's been there since 1740.

The menu is traditional.

- AP

All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik