Paris, je t'aime

With some friends, I've just watched a film called "Paris, je t'aime", which is a series of vignettes of life from the various districts of Paris. An ensemble cast and 18 different stories makes it an interesting and enjoyable kaleidoscope of Paris, the city of romance. One of the more obvious pursuits is recognising places in Paris that you have actually visited.

I've been to Paris a couple of times, and we were just saying as we were watching this film that it's high time that we went again, because it is one of those places that you do not want to become unfamiliar with. This picture was taken during my first visit there many years ago. The weather was absolutely ghastly while we were there, except for this one beautiful day when we visited the Eiffel Tower. This picture shows the Pont d'Iéna (more bridges!) and the Trocadero, with the shadow of the Tower stretching across the Seine.

Unfortunately, it reminds me of the mugging that we experienced a few days later when our friends had their movie film of this day taken from them, never to be seen again. The mugging was the result of a misunderstanding, where some "ladies of the night" thought that we were filming them as they stood in doorways in Rue St Denis. We weren't actually - but we couldn't convince them of that, and sacrificing the movie film seemed worth escaping from what may have been an ugly scene. And, this occurred in broad daylight, not late at night. As novice tourists, we didn't even know that we had ventured into that sort of area until it was too late.

Still, no-one was hurt; and now it is a story that has been told many times over the years. As often happens on holidays, it is the things that go wrong that provide the longest lasting memories.

TFF