We (home) exchanged a spacious oceanside 4 bedroom 3 bathroom home for a tiny 1 bedroom 1 bathroom 2nd floor rear apartment in Paris for 11 days. It may not seem a good deal but it is all in the novelty, variety and choices that our spacious home in Manchester doesn’t have.
We were welcomed to our new temporary digs by Marie who showed us how to navigate 5 doors, codes and locks and all corners of the small apartment.
We are living next door to a chocolatier and glacier (which even had licorice ice cream!). We are a mere 10 steps from a fruit shop with loads of fresh figs, chanterelles, mirabelles and any summer fruit imaginable. All the best French foods (vegetables, meats, cheeses, wines, breads, pastries) are also on our block, and if we don’t feel like cooking (which we always do) we cross the street to buy our dinner ready made from a Lebanese, Asian or Greek traiteur. One block further is a fish shop and restaurant that serves platters of fresh oysters from all over France and other cru delicacies from the ocean aside from regular french fish dishes. And at the corner of the next block on each side is a grocery store. And finally, for the days we don’t feel like shopping or even warming up traiteur foods, we have a choice of 4 cafés that are within sight of our front door and open all day long.
And that’s just the food. We are a 10 minute walk from Paris big lung, the Bois de Boulogne with its pleasure chalet imported in pieces from Switzerland for empress Eugenie in 1854 and rebuilt on an island in the park’s interior lake, a little ferry taking us across the water, for free. We arrived too late for lunch and too early for the bar to open, so we sat in the sun and sketched until the bar opened.
And then there is a large collection of Monets and Morisots a short walk from here at Musée Marmottan, la maison de Balzac and a thousand things more to discover as indicated by the countless books about Paris in the apartment: Dimanches à Paris, On Va Déguster Paris, Secret Paris, A Paris Walking Guide, and more.
It is fun to be here for a while but I am so glad not to live here permanently. Weather information comes from an app rather than see and feel for oneself, the sun’s rays never come down far enough in the courtyard to feel their warmth, neighbors across the 6 meter wide courtyard are practically at one’s dinner table.
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