Montmartre, Metro, Marais and Les Places des Vosges

Most of Paris is flat and easy to walk around but it gets hilly just north of our street as one enters Montmartre. The streets narrow and become cobble-stoned and it all reaches a zenith at the Sacré-Cœur Basilica, a gigantic, ornate church built on the highest spot in Paris by the French government in the 1870s after the misery of the Franco-Prussian War, when thousands of Parisians starved to death after the Prussians laid siege to the city. The people ended up eating the edible animals in the zoo, including the elephants! Montmartre had also been the scene of the worst excesses of the government’s suppression of the Paris Commune, which had come into being after the removal of Louis-Napoleon as emperor.

Montmartre is a bit of a tourist trap and the touts at the entrance to Sacré-Cœur are persistent (though still nowhere near as aggressive as the ones I encountered in Bali 13 years ago). A young Senegalese man blocked my path, immediately started attaching some coloured twine to my wrist and proceeded to braid it, all the time keeping up a steady patter: “Where you from? Australia? Kangaroo! I am from Senegal, my name is Daouda. Do you like football? Ah, rugby? No? Ah, rugby league! Yes! Do not be concerned sir, this will not hurt you..” When he finished his handiwork he suggested that his remuneration could only be in the form of a Euro note and not any coins. The smallest denomination of Euro in notes is 5, which is a bit steep for some twine in the colours of the Senegalese flag braided round one’s wrist. Luckily I only had some coins so he had to be content with them. Annette managed to resist the efforts of all the other touts plying the same routine, mainly by being very adamant in her refusals.
We started to climb the steep steps but it was warm and muggy again so we thought the funicular would be fun (it would have to be, given its first three letters). The church is spectacular inside with a huge undecorated dome, the exterior of which can be seen all over Paris. It looks like a strange, Romanesque-Byzantine structure and its colours - a sort of beige or off-white - are the colours of Paris itself.
We wandered the streets below randomly, while still heading in the general direction of Rue Cadet, and stumbled across Le Bateau-Lavoir, so-called, in the early 20th century, because the houses there looked like old washing boats. Some of the famous painters who have lived around this place include Picasso, Gris, Matisse, Braque, Dufy, Derain, Modigliani and Utrillo; also writers such as Jacob, Reverdy, Apollinaire, Jarry, Cocteau and Gertrude Stein.

On Boulevard Clichy is the Moulin Rouge, which was worth a corny photo or two. Plenty of other tourists were taking snaps of it as well. The streets of Montmartre are full of interesting sights such as an old guy with an organ grinder singing Parisian-style songs.

The florists in Paris all have stunning wares to sell so I took a photo-op while Net bought some trendy sandals in a nearby shop and made friends with the Algerian lady serving her.

Many of the streets of Paris are named after famous artists, writers and musicians. Just near our hotel is Andre Breton Place - he's the bloke who founded Surrealism:

Apres dejeuner we caught the Metro down to the Marais district, which we’d explored yesterday while approaching the Pompidou Centre. We got off at the Bastille Metro station but there’s no sign of the prison whose destruction by the people in 1789 sparked the French Revolution. We wanted to see Les Places des Vosges, a charming little park with some of the only public lawns Parisians are actually allowed to sit and lie on. The park has a statue of Louis XIII and is surrounded by the houses of the super-rich, including DSK, who’s been in the news somewhat in the last few months, much to the embarrassment of the average French person.

It’s a trendy area with expensive arty shops full of expensive artworks for rich people to decorate their homes with. We saw quite a few impressive small sculptures using all sorts of media but most of the paintings were pretty woeful. As we headed back to the Bastille Metro via the narrow and medieval looking back streets I took a photo of a house front and one of those funny tiny cars one sees a lot in Paris and an elderly gentleman, walking with more purpose than us, started to engage us in conversation. He could see we were tourists but for some reason thought we were Spanish and wanted to tell us a bit about the building I’d just photographed. Eventually we conveyed our Australian-ness to him and I asked him if there was any part of the Bastille left and he said “no, it was all made into rubble in 1789”. Another encounter with a really nice Parisian! We’ve only got two days left to find an archetypal arrogant Frenchman! Maybe we should provoke one.

The Metro was extremely crowded on our trips to and from the Bastille. It carries almost 1.5 billion people a year, the busiest in western Europe - only Moscow’s metro carries more. There are so many different types of people of all ages and many are representative of the countries France used to rule in its imperialist heyday: Africans and Indochinese especially and probably some Polynesians as well.

Tomorrow, Versailles and Giverny.