Several years ago I read in Graham Robb's Parisians that walking across Paris was far more realistic than walking across other large cities. The city itself is relatively small, and if you start out early in the day, you can make your way across in several hours. Or probalby fewer if you didn't walk out of your way to see things, or happen to be pushing a child in a stroller.
I got to push my son across Paris, back when he was almost two years old. He was very much buggy-bound for most of the trip, and he slept through most of it. But we made our way from the northwest corner, through Montmartre and central Paris, passing Tuileries Gardens and the Eiffel Tower, among other places. We stopped for lunch, stood outside Basilica of Sacré Coeur de Montmartre (I changed his nappy at the base of the steep hill the church sits on).
He played at a playground with a couple of Parisian kids, yelled at pigeons at the Tuileries Gardens. We had lunch somewhere in Montmartre. We played football in front of the Eiffel Tower, and, tired and with extremely sore feet, made it past the soutwest border of the city at a little after 5pm.
All in all it was a beautiful day. I put together photos from the day in the video below, soundtracked by a track from Chilly Gonzales' Solo Piano I album.
I chose that song because:
- It's charming and playful
- I associate him with Paris
- All of his solo piano work reminds me of French composer Erik Satie
- I was listening to Solo Piano I at about that time
Some advice stays with you
While I was about to depart in the morning, I ran into a colleague of my wife (we were there because she had a work event in Paris, which meant my son and I could accompany her and have a free hotel room).
I was in the lobby with our son when her colleague. She happened to see me and my wife as we were checking in. My wife and she started a conversation, then my wife left. Her colleague and I said hello, then she leaned in and said, "Here's a travel tip: Don't miss the Eiffel Tower."
I didn't quite know what to think, because I wasn't sure how you could give more generic or obvious travel advice, disguised as an insider tip. She was an older British woman, clearly accomplished in her career. I was a young-ish American, pushing a stroller, with my camera at the ready. Maybe she thought I was a wide-eyed naif who had ventured far from the cornfields that surrounded my boyhood home and had wound up, against all luck, in this shining metropolitan Paris. Surely, you must be awe-struck and confused by the sophisticated big-city ways, she seemed to say.
In any case, I thanked her for the advice.
She's right, by the way. The Eiffel Tower is not to be missed.
Our Man in London, Temporarily in Paris
At about that time I was writing dispatches from London for a US website.
For a while I was the site's man in Paris, sort of a foreign correspondent, reporting back from distant lands, like reporters did in the '30s, '40s and '50s for magazines.
This is somewhat superficial but that always made me think of Dexter Gordon's Our Man in Paris. It's my second-favourite album by him but it has my favourite album art of one of his albums.
