Bridges.28
Bridges.27
Bridges.24
Tap or click the individual images below to see them full size, if you want to make more sense of it. And since I’m linking Paris & Amsterdam in one post here and it’s the 750th anniversary of Amsterdam, we’ll do a wee historical ‘did you know?’ By and large NL (and trade-wealthy Amsterdam) managed to remain free of French dominion for hundreds of years, once in fact by purposely flooding fields to keep the ‘Sun King’ out. Only once did they succumb, to iced-over fields and Bonaparte. Who was himself beaten three times later on, first by the self-liberating humans formerly called slaves in Haiti, and then twice a decade and more later, by the English-Austrian-Dutch etc. coalition. Ah, the wheels of history.
Islands.79
Last entry was light in the darkness, this entry is islands in the city of light :-). Above you see both Ile de la Cite (with the towers of Notre Dame shortly before its formal reopening) and, if you look closely enough, the northernmost bit of Ile St Louis, both floating in the splendid early dawn still of the Seine, back in late October. All the images below show one or both islands as well.
Ah, Royalty.45
Bridges.3
Bridges.1
I decided while in Paris that this’ll be my first new series in a while: Bridges. Appropriate, for Paris — but there’s a backstory. These images were all taken my first morning in Paris nearly two weeks ago, when I realized upon waking up that I’d need to get out in order to have tea (no kettle in the room grrr nor even anything available at the hotel at all double grr). Checking my handy Paris guide and my map, I realized there was a well-respected park nearby that I’d never yet been too called Parc de Bercy, so I grabbed my handy go mug and headed out for tea and a stroll (and, of course, a croissant, pain au chocolat and I think even something else…).
Unfortunately I made the wrong turn when I got there, so ended up royally annoyed at the pedestrian-unfriendly entrance and signage b/c I was walking around a big stadium or big walls, looking for an entrance to a park but instead I was on a narrow side walk next to noisy morning traffic on a major artery. When at long last I found my way into the park, I found it as delightful as suggested, and I even found the foot bridge across the Seine – named after Simone de Beauvoir – that you see above. These photos are all taken in the park, from the Passerelle Simon de Beuavoir, or of foot bridges that connected the two parts of the park to each other, over those busy streets.
I’m also happy to highlight infrastructure built for pedestrians first and foremost – usually an afterthought in too many places I’ve lived, and nice to see here, though they could improve their pedestrian-oriented signage up by that major commercial auditorium for us visitors 😊.
Islands.73
Notre Dame of course sits on Ile de la Cite, with Ile St Louis nested upstream and next to it. You can just see St Louis’s tip in the photo at the bottom, to the left. Why oh why did it take me more than three years of living in Amsterdam to finally just hop on the train down here? I’d forgotten how much I love this city.
City Lights.73
Yes, we’ve made it back to the City of Light for the first time in — wait for it — fourteen years. Today I’m heading on towards Switzerland after three days of getting reacquainted with this unique city in which I spent a fair amount of time between 2005 and 2010. These are all from an evening walk along both banks of the Seine and around the Marais on my first evening, last Saturday.
(so much world, so little time....) 