Spending a day in Paris

Last Thursday I spent the day in Paris with my friend CHM. One of the things we did was go over to the Arc de Triomphe to take some pictures. I haven't finished selecting and processing those yet.

Riding the Paris métro. This is an above-ground station.
It's very clean, bright, and uncrowded at 9:15 a.m.

To get the the Arc de Triomphe, which is located at the upper end of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, we decided to take the subway (le métro). The trip was direct (no line changes) so it was easy except there were some long hallways to walk through and some stairs to climb. CHM is not as young as he used to be — who is? All I'll say is that I'm approaching 59 years old and CHM is easily old enough to be my father. He hired me and was my boss when I worked in Washington DC 25 years ago.

Advertising in the Paris metro. The Petit Robert is one of the
standard French dictionaries. It's revised and reprinted every year.
The ad says "We could have just changed the year and a few words.
The New 2008 Petit Robert. Constantly reinvented."

The Paris metro is a fantastic system. The stations are close together, so there's never a long walk to get to one. There are literally hundreds of metro stations in the city. There's a certain human scale to the whole system. Most of the trains ride on rubber tires, so it's not very noisy. It can get pretty crowded at rush hour, but it's usually not too bad the rest of the day. A train comes along every three or four minutes to whisk you to your destination.

The Rugby World Cup games are being played in France this month
and next. This advertising poster says "For the love of rugby, 1987-2007."
The Société Générale is a bank and must be a sponsor of the tournament.

Don't think, though, that riding the metro means you don't have to walk a lot too. If you have to change trains, making what they call a correspondance from one metro line to another, you might have to walk fairly long distances in the underground corridors between one platform and another. And there often are big staircases to climb. Some stations have escalators.

Waiting for the bus in Paris. There are not only metro stations
but also bus stops all over the city. You use the same ticket
or pass on both buses and metro trains. One advantage of
riding the bus is that you can see the sights along the way.

The metro is not a place you want to be with a lot of baggage — for example, when you first arrive in Paris from the airport. If you do that, you'll soon understand why they call it luggage. You get my drift.

A nice restaurant, le Bistrot de Breteuil,
in the neighborhood near Les Invalides.

One of the most entertaining and informative things about the metro is all the advertising posters in the stations. The current ad campaign for a dictionary, Le Petit Robert, might be surprising. I'm not sure you'd see a dictionary advertised in subway tunnels in New York or San Francisco. Maybe I'm wrong. I also don't think we have an American dictionary that is revised and reprinted on an annual basis, do we?

Take-home food for sale at the street market
on the Avenue de Saxe near Les Invalides.

The part of Paris where I took these photos is very upscale and not as densely populated as some other neighborhoods. But it's a neighborhood you can really enjoy walking around in, with a lot to see and do. It's residential but full of shops, restaurants, markets, and cafés. It's the area around the Place de Breteuil, at the border of the 7th and 15th arrondissements.