Sunny Montmartre

I stand by my decision to not live in Montmartre.

It's lovely, for sure. Picture-book pretty. The hilly streets with adorable shops and cafes and charming old apartments, everything winding up to a glaringly white and ornately scalloped basilica.

We worked our way towards the top, getting very lost in the process as the streets here are a little skewed...but we weren't in a hurry and there was lots of good stuff to see along the way. As long as you keep going uphill, you really aren't that lost.

There was a small but good Dalí museum. They had a lot of his later work, wonderfully weird sculptures, doodles,illustrations and a great deal of intimate photographs taken by a close friend. Not as nightmare-inducing as the R Crumb exhibit we saw at the Modern a couple weeks ago, but spend too much time in a surrealist's mind and you start to get a little weird yourself.

There's flea markets that you actually want to buy stuff, more Grand Prix de la Meilleure award winners than any other neighborhood, and a tiny vineyard right across from the Cabaret where Picasso and his cronies were known to spend a great deal of their time.

They have also apparently declared Miles Davis as their patron saint. Nice.

Its a bit of a zoo here on the weekends, with some streets nearly impassable and clogged with tourist getting their caricatures drawn by street artist. The musicians and street performers do make for a lively and fun scene.

It wasn't an orignal part of the city plan, but rather a town on the outskirts that got absorbed eventually as Paris expanded. It retains the feeling of a village within a city.