Today was a pretty quiet day after yesterday, we went to a brocante market down in the 16th arr. near the Parc des Princes, where the Paris St. Germain football club holds their soccer matches. It's also very near the Roland Garros stadium where the French Open tennis tournament is held each year. It's in a suburb subsumed by Paris called Auteuil which was a haunt of the impressionist painters during the latter part of the 19th century. A very posh district of Paris, very upscale. We took the metro down to the Porte St. Cloud station and after getting out found the market and then cruised through it. Our idea was to see the market, get a bit of lunch and then go to the Candlelight Christmas Concert given at the American Church in Paris. So that's what we did, but we were a bit pressed at the end because lunch pushed in to our commute time back to the church.
The church was built around 1831 and was the first protestant American church built outside the U.S. and has been pretty influential in the life of ex-pat Americans since then. There was a line outside waiting to pass through security, which has become an everyday part of Parisian life now. Anyway we got into the church and our tickets to the peanut gallery didn't give us saved seats so we ended up sitting on long benches in one of the side aisles. But no matter, since it was a choir concert the view was secondary anyway. Our thanks to Mel Preusser for suggesting it as a fun holiday activity. The choirs were very good and it ended with a sing-along of about 5 carols that almost everyone knows, although with a twist as some of the carols were also sung in French.
After the concert we walked back along the quais on the left bank to our bus stop near the Louvre for the ride home. Very mild night so the walk was a pleasure as we could look in shop windows all along the route.
People get on the bus with all kinds of crazy things but tonight was a first, at Republique a young woman, who couldn't have weighed over 110, carried a Sousaphone aboard. The bell was detached but she just laid everything on the floor and people were very careful about not stepping on it. She got off at our stop and we wondered what she must have been doing at Place de la Republique.
Today was a pretty quiet day after yesterday, we went to a brocante market down in the 16th arr. near the Parc des Princes, where the Paris St. Germain football club holds their soccer matches. It's also very near the Roland Garros stadium where the French Open tennis tournament is held each year. It's in a suburb subsumed by Paris called Auteuil which was a haunt of the impressionist painters during the latter part of the 19th century. A very posh district of Paris, very upscale. We took the metro down to the Porte St. Cloud station and after getting out found the market and then cruised through it. Our idea was to see the market, get a bit of lunch and then go to the Candlelight Christmas Concert given at the American Church in Paris. So that's what we did, but we were a bit pressed at the end because lunch pushed in to our commute time back to the church.
The church was built around 1831 and was the first protestant American church built outside the U.S. and has been pretty influential in the life of ex-pat Americans since then. There was a line outside waiting to pass through security, which has become an everyday part of Parisian life now. Anyway we got into the church and our tickets to the peanut gallery didn't give us saved seats so we ended up sitting on long benches in one of the side aisles. But no matter, since it was a choir concert the view was secondary anyway. Our thanks to Mel Preusser for suggesting it as a fun holiday activity. The choirs were very good and it ended with a sing-along of about 5 carols that almost everyone knows, although with a twist as some of the carols were also sung in French.
After the concert we walked back along the quais on the left bank to our bus stop near the Louvre for the ride home. Very mild night so the walk was a pleasure as we could look in shop windows all along the route. 
People get on the bus with all kinds of crazy things but tonight was a first, at Republique a young woman, who couldn't have weighed over 110, carried a Sousaphone aboard. The bell was detached but she just laid everything on the floor and people were very careful about not stepping on it. She got off at our stop and we wondered what she must have been doing at Place de la Republique.
Happy Holidays, Ploucs!
ReplyDeleteThanks, same to the Leiggi-Wadsworths
ReplyDelete