Paris street art in the year 2000

Street art because it's visible from the street. You could also call it official art, I guess. Here's another series of photos that I took on July 4th weekend in Paris in the year 2000. Some of them I can't really identify — I don't know where I took them. I could spend days walking the streets of Paris and taking pictures. And I have, over the years.



Yesterday I drove up to Blois in the old Peugeot to do some shopping and to take some photos. I wanted to buy some frozen shrimp and some fresh okra, and I found both of those at a grocery called Blois Store, which is run by a young Vietnamese man. The okra pods are beautiful, green and pristine. The shrimp are large ones — jumbo shrimp, that old oxymoron — and back in the day they used to be called bouquets in Paris fish markets and restaurants.

I haven't seen the term bouquets applied to shrimp (crevettes in French) in a long time. I just read that bouquets (Palaemon serratus) are a European species of crevettes and they've been overfished, apparently, and pushed off the market by shrimp imported from tropical waters, and often farmed. They are called the "common prawn" in the British Isles. Oh well. The crevettes I found are Litopenaeus vannamei, but the packaging doesn't say where they come from. They are farmed, it says.

There's the okra, called gombos in French. The pods are a little large, but I'm hoping they will be tender. As for taking photos in Blois, when I left home at 8:45 a.m. in kind of a hurry, I forgot to put my camera in the car. That was too bad, because the weather was beautiful — bright sunshine through a light haze against a clear blue sky. Blois was beautiful in that light. I'll have to try to go up there again next week, since the weather conditions are predicted to remain as they are for another week or even two.