Paris snapshots

I decided this morning to post these photos — eleven of them — not as a slideshow but as still images, partly to practice my page layout skills. The new Blogger interface doesn't make posting easy, and it's taking me two or three times as long to complete a post as it used to take using the old interface. Sigh.

The Quatrehomme cheese shop on the rue de Sèvres sells cheese but also has a cellar where cheeses are "ripened" or aged before being sold to customers. So the owners have the title of fromager-affineur. You can read more about the shop in English here.

This little pig advertises a shop called a charcuterie. The charcutier is a pork butcher who sells cuts of fresh or smoked pork, and he or she is also a traiteur who prepares and sells salads and cooked dishes that customers can just re-heat as necessary at home. So the shop is also a French version of a delicatessen.

Here's a billboard advertising the Paris public transit system, the Régie autonome des transport parisiens (la RATP — pronounce all the letters). Saint-Placide is a metro stop in the 6th arrondissement. The astuce or "gimmick" here is that if you take the metro or the bus instead of driving in Paris you will lead a more "placid" existence.

Jacques Chirac, the man in this picture, was the mayor of Paris for decades, and also France's prime minister in the late '80s. Then he was elected president of the French Republic and served for 12 years (1995-2007). In French terms, Chirac was a right-leaning centrist, which made him the equivalent of a left-leaning centrist in U.S. terms. His health declined over the past decade  (Alzheimer's disease, it was said) and he passed away in September 2019. 

"...then silence falls..." When you serve this beer people are so impressed with how good it is that they stop talking and just savor the flavor. Grimbergen is the brand name of a range of Belgian abbey beers. The abbey (monastery) in Grimbergen was founded in the year 1128. Read more about it here.

Here's that wreathed N that you see on the Pont-au-Change bridge and that stands for Napoleon III, who had it built in the late 1800s. You can read more about the bridges of Paris here. And look at this painting of the Pont-au-Change from 1751, when it was still a wooden structure with houses and shops lining it.

The window display of an antique or second-hand shop (une brocante) on the rue de Sèvres in the 7th arrondissement.... When I was younger I shopped in such places in Paris and in Washington DC, but no more... We have plenty of old stuff already.

Somebody set this set of mailboxes on fire, I assume. I saw it on the rue Lecourbe in the 15th arrondissement. Firemen (I assume) had hauled it out of an apartment building onto the sidewalk. Luckily, the building didn't burn down.

Elegant handles on a carriageway door (une porte cochère) into the courtyard of a Paris apartment building...

I think this might be a sign marking a Vélib' station, where you can rent a bicycle, ride to your destination, and turn it in at a different Vélib' station in another part of the city. Vélo means bicycle and lib' stands, I think, for libre-service (self-service).

A stair-rail ornament in the building where our rental apartment was in 2002, on the rue Mayet near Montparnasse....