My advice for the down-at-heel in Paris. Step one, purchase a “what’s on in paris” booklet from a street news vendor (40 centimes). This will inform you of all the cool free happenings around town, including funky music at the new fake Paris-Plage (sand, palm trees, tonnes of people, no surf) by the Seine and the funky free WiFi in the Parc de la Villette.
Secondly, when you find a bar advertising music you like (seven piece band from Guinea fusion sound with “soul jazz americaine” according to the blurb), but it’s €8, go anyway. By the time you’ve spent the money on your “cheap alternative” (€1,30 on the funicular railway up to Montmartre, the €3,70 on the red wine you have there and €1,30 on the funicular railway back down), you may as well have gone to the music. Montmartre will still be there the next night. Mind you, if you’d gone to the cool but expensive bar, you probably wouldn’t have found the ultra-cheap vietnamese take-away, so it’s all swings and roundabouts, really.
Point three: it’s bloody amazing how fast even a person with a bum hip can run when the last train from Montmartre arrives at Saint-Lazare at 12.51am and the last train from Saint-Lazare back to the almost-at-the-end-of-the-line Porte-Bagnolet where you’re staying leaves at 12.55am and you know you have no money for a taxi. There’s a*lot* of corridor in the Paris underground. Even if the bum hip can take it, your out-of-practice lungs won’t thank you. Training for six weeks in advance on the hills of Toledo is a good idea.
Note the fourth: a journalist card will get you into many places for free. Centre Georges Pompidou – the modern art place – is one, as is the Cite des Sciences et Industrie.
For the record, my Saturday spent bumming around the Jardin des Tuileries, followed by lazing on the Paris-Plage listening to jazz, followed by a free massage at the fake beach, followed by cheap dinner on a balcony overlooking Montmartre with an Aussie living in London, followed by wine in a little bar in Montmartre was pretty damn fine (they didn’t have absinthe; I asked). I’d still like to actually get in touch with *any* of the people I actually know in Paris, and that little seven piece would have been great with, say, Narelle or Chrystele, but you take what you’re given.
Sunday, I wandered around Pere La-Chaise Cemetery in the morning, said hi to Edith Piaf and Jim Morrison and Proust, and then there was another little free concert-in-the-park thing at a different park, with French hip-hop and DJs, from 2 in the afternoon till 11-ish. The headline act was DJ Vadim, and it went off. Thank you little Pariscope guide. You’re my bestest bud.
Today was a workday, which effectively meant an interview with a guy from a WiFi project, an interview with an amazing woman experimenting with soundspace, more time wandering around the Pompidou, and now writing this at the WebGazon experiment at La Villette. It’s a hard life.…