Somewhat Solo Saturday

So Saturday. I've been sleeping later than I usually do at home, but not by much. Ronnie and I are a little freaked out at how well we made the transition across 6 time zones and what the ramifications will be when we return, but it's not like there's anything we can do about it and I'm certainly not upset that I've been sleeping well here.

Today I headed in the same general direction as yesterday, but by a different route. I can't say I saw anything amazing, but it's always fun walking around a city and the weather was spectacular. We've been very lucky here in general but today was perfect. This time, before I started walking, I went to the Velib stand and got a ticket for a day's worth of bicycle rentals. They have a very popular bike sharing system here, with stations every few blocks. It costs a couple of euros per day but that's for unlimited access for short periods of time (there's an extra charge if you keep it more than 30 minutes, at least on a daily ticket).  I wasn't going to ride just then, but I wanted to make sure it worked so I could do it later.

After I'd walked for an hour or so though, I decided that I'd rather ride back to the hotel than take the metro, so I picked up a bike near Pont Mirabeau and rode myself to Boulogne, where our friends live and our hotel is located. There isn't any place like Boulogne near Philadelphia; it's indistinguishable from Paris in many ways and one can easily walk from parts of it into Paris proper- it's adjacent to the 16th arrondissement. But it seems like a nice place to live; our friends have a great 2 bedroom apartment in one of the many multi-dwelling buildings in the city.

There was no market today but there was a customer waiting.

Anyway, Ronnie went to meet her friend to have some "girl time," and I set out once more on another bicycle. My plan was to ride along the Seine and just kind of check things out. I wasn't really thinking about how crowded everything was going to be, but I found out soon enough. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and there were throngs of people everywhere. There are bike paths for most of it, either on sidewalks or dedicated space in the streets. The street parts were okay, but the sidewalk parts were not particularly respected by pedestrians, even though there were plenty of other places to walk. Yes, walking people! That sidewalk looks clear of people because there aren't supposed to be people walking there!

The most blatant place was on a bridge with a nice view of the Eiffel Tower, which seems to be the preferred place for non-Parisians to have wedding photos taken. Here. the bike lane was criss-crossed with long veils and trains. I thought briefly of riding over someone's train but decided not to.

Once I got a bit past the tower, it got so crowded as to be difficult to ride, so I turned away from the river to find a place to return the bike. In my effort to avoid crowds, I somehow ended up on the Champs-Elyssé, not a place noted for desolation. At this point I was just trying to find a return station, and Google Maps, which was a total fail on this entire enterprise, was trying to route me to a place a kilometer away. I got absorbed by watching a truck try to squeeze through a space about 4 inches wider that itself and once it squeezed through, there was a docking station about 50 feet in front of me.

From there I took a metro a few stops east to an area I wanted to walk around. Still very crowded, but eventually I got to a nice, busy but pleasant area by the river, where I strolled for a while.

This route left me in the 5th, near what had been just the Sorbonne but now seems to be called Sorbonne University so that people know what it is. It's a cool area- hilly with lots of small streets meandering around with nice shops. Eventually I wanted to find the Metro, and when Google Maps failed again, I had to use, wait for it, a paper map. Much like the Cassini technical team at NASA, I used outdated technology to find the Metro within a couple of minutes and headed back.

I bought some chocolates for souvenirs, and then went back to the hotel. Ronnie wasn't back yet, so I graded Calculus papers in the garden.That was kind of entertaining in a grading papers sort of way, but at least I got it done. Eventually Ronnie returned and we changed and met up with our friends for dinner. The meal, at La Table de Cybele on the other end of Boulogne, was excellent- creative mixing of ingredients and interesting flavors and textures. And it was a warm, fun way to spend our last evening. Not only do they have bike sharing in Paris, they have little electric car sharing as well, so we took a little car, the 5 of us crammed in, back to our part of town. Then we packed and went to bed, ready to leave in the morning.