Evening in Paris, July 14

Well, we did get to bed after midnight, but I'm betting that it was much later than that. It didn't get dark until 10:30 or so, so we could sightsee much later than while we were in Rome. It was even better in London! I could easily get used to having the sun set at nearly midnight and be up before 5, if I didn't have to work. And if I didn't have to experience the much, much shorter days during the winter.

These are some random photos I took that night. This one is an apartment building on a side street. I was impressed that many buildings had flower boxes and trees on their tiny balconies.

This is a view of streets near our hotel. The tall weird building is the Tour Montparnasse. I don't know anything about it except that it's big and evidentally not considered to be attractive by some people. We liked it because, as long as we could see it, we knew that we could fairly easily find our way home, even at night. There's an observation deck on top, but we never went to check it out. I wish I had, as it would have given us a really good view of the surrounding area.

In the next one, you can see that motorcycles can be parked just about anywhere! The street is on the other side of the motorcycles. Note to Betty: I think that the greenish-blue object in the lower right corner is a public toilet. They're a lot bigger than they look.


And here is our first view of the Eiffel Tower. Pretty exciting. I didn't realize just how close we were to it. We used the Metro to get there, but walked all around our district. You can see it if you squint your eyes and look down the avenue of trees.

This intersection is about a block from our hotel. You can barely see the Galleries Lafayette sign; it's supposed to be this grand shopping mall, but I wasn't impressed. Maybe I only found one small wing of it. I did manage to buy a pair of cropped pants and t-shirt there.

You know how it is. What's the use of going to PARIS and not buying any clothes???

It's like going to Rome and not seeing the Sistine Chapel.

Another random street. Just about all the restaurants, bars, and cafes had outside seating that took up most of the sidewalk.







This place (to the right) is called Le Nemrod. That's why I took a picture of it.

"Au Chien Qui Fume"--"At the Dog Who Smokes"? I should check some website to see what "au" means. It's only been 35 years since I took a French class; I should remember something that simple. I wish that photo was better. Usually I check them to make sure they're okay right after I take them, but we had the light and were crossing the road, so I had to move on.

And here's the obligatory shot of a Paris shoe store window. I'm sure there were some non-Birkenstock shoes in the shops.

I take pictures of dogs and shoes, Tom likes pictures of cars. Here are two leetle teensy cars (the first of many, as with the dogs and shoes).



I really like this picture. I was taking a photo of of a pretty building with nice ironwork and plants, and a man with a little girl in his arms was looking out and waved. That just made my night. He saw a tourist taking a photo of his window and he didn't shoot me. He waved.

It was wayyy past our dinner time, so we checked out the restaurants as we walked. We finally found one that looked to be reasonable, and sat down at a table right next to the curb. It seemed to be some kind of chain restaurant as we saw others on our travels, but it had good food. Or, at least, decent food.

I was amused that the restaurants with air conditioning made a big deal out of it, with hand-lettered signs in the windows. A/c? Doesn't every restaurant have it? We'd find out in a couple of days that, although a/c wasn't necessary that night, it would be a couple of days later, and the places that had it were the places to be.

Just a couple of doors down the street from the restaurant was this produce stand. They were everywhere. And the produce looked good.

These photos were taken after 10 p.m.! Look at all the light still in the sky.