Open Your Eyes

I want to encourage you to open your eyes and look around you when you visit Paris. There are two kinds of tourists I see: those who are herded around in groups by tour guides and ferried from one stop to the next in coaches, and those who explore the town by themselves.
This is for you, those who don’t follow a tour guide. Who walk until your feet hurt instead of taking the metro so you don’t miss out on anything.

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Look at that red brick building! It says on the façade “Bains douches municipaux”. These are public baths and showers, provided by the City of Paris, with individual cabins. You have to bring your own soap and towel, though.

Look down! Isn’t that a magnificent hopscotch mosaic?

Have you seen this building? It’s the narrowest house of Paris. Can you imagine what the rooms inside must look like? I wonder how much space is allocated to the staircase.

When the Grand Mosque of Paris meets Haussmann buildings, the contrast looks like this.

The Mosque is located in the 5th arrondissement. It was building about one hundred years ago in the Spanish-Moorish revisal style, and it’s minaret is 33m tall.

Sometimes it’s just another Haussmann façade. Remember Baron Haussmann and his transformation of Paris, liking to the kind-of-uniformized façade style? If you look closely, you’ll see the little differences even between two neighboring Haussmann buildings.

Sometimes, you just turn into a street, and there’s this totally not Haussmann building with huge stained-glass windows, but definitely not a religious building, and when you read the inscription above the windows, it says “Compagnie Parisienne de distribution d’électricité” – Paris Electricity Distribution Company.

You never know what you’ll find next.

(Or maybe yes, sometime you do.)

Welcome to Paris!

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