14 Juliet

The festivities just didn't seem quite as festive this year. Perhaps it was because the holiday fell on a Sunday this year, and it usually means a 3+ day weekend to celebrate. The dances that the fireman put on the night beforehand were packed (I had to tell a french friend please not to refer to them as "fireman's balls") and the crows and pigeons around town felt slightly ill at ease as fireworks and firecrackers were lit off all weekend.

Decided to forego the parade down the Champs-Élysées in favor for a BBQ in the suburbs. However, plans were derailed by the train wreck on Friday, and the train out to the 'burbs would not be running. Scrambling last minute for something to do, I packed a picnic and headed out to the Parc de Flora for an afternoon at the Paris Jazz Festival.

They do love their jazz here in France, and most artist who get very little love in the states will draw adoring crowds in Europe. Trombone Shorty was no exception. A real New Orleans style funk jazz band got everyone on their feet and dancing for hours. No matter that he ran out of material when they called him back with rabid enthusiasm for his fifth encore. The spirt was there, and he was loved. Leave me alone, I'm a throwback and I love the Jazz Music and my grandfather and I will sit around and listen to Pre-war jazz on the turntable and he tells me about the bad old days and I actually listen. This is my music.

The Parc is also a lovely place to meander around. Lots of gardens and bees and butterflies and quiet wooded paths.

They keep a small herd of Ouessant sheep to keep the lawns trimmed. They were quite warm and just sleeping in the shade. Lazy, good-for nothing lawnmowers.

When the sun started to set, we headed off to watch the fireworks. Not wanting to be elbowed to death again this year, we opted for a posh party from a hotel room with a view in Montmartre.

The show was spectacular. What a gorgeous city.

La Butte Montmartre

One of my favorite neighborhoods to wander around is Montmartre. There's lots of stairs and twisty steep streets to wind your way up to the top, where it is crowned with a big white basilica.

The neighborhood wasn't always part of Paris proper, so it became a place of bars and cabarets outside the high taxes and rules of the city. Artist gathered here, and it grew into a fantastic art scene that is still apparent. It still harbors a red light district that gets a little sketchy at night, but is generally an ok place to take a stroll. The hip bars are starting to move in anyway.

Every October, they have a weekend-long wine festival to celebrate the harvest. Montmartre produces the only truly local Parisien wine.

Bees!

There's also a great little fabric district at the bottom of the hill. There's a few really high-end shops and a whole lot of discount ones that you really have to wade through the piles to find a couple of treasures.

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.