Parole sur les avenues

We’ve moved from Berlin to Paris, the last leg of this trip. I have to say that, for a capital city (and increasingly the capital city of the leader of the free world), Berlin’s Tegel airport is not whelming. It’s about the size of Hollywood Burbank airport; even so, the lack of clear signage and any type of information was aggravating.

There was a hotel-related kerfuffle with getting me to the hotel here, which I’ll write about later. But I’m here, I have a to-do list and I’m ready.

Yesterday I spent three hours at Musée Rodin; it was absolutely spectacular and I could have spent longer, but my joints wouldn’t let me. I’ve got a couple of hundred photos to sort through of the museum and garden, but until then, here are some shots of the neighborhood.

Parisians—and the French in general—love their dogs. (So, apparently, do the Germans. My hotel had several four-pawed guests; they also took public transportation with their humans. None of that service animals only stuff.) I noticed this one waiting for his human to get his hair done:

Street parking, as you might imagine, is an issue. Take a look at this lineup:

I have to say that I wonder not only how those vehicles got parked, I wonder how any of them gets out:

In this instance, that smart car probably has room to pull away; I dunno about the minivan behind it. (If you look closely, you’ll see the latter has already had some scrapes and is being held together with what looks like duct tape:

I loved this little window garden, although I suppose there’s always a risk of a passerby filching your herbs:

Paris—like other EU countries—is big on recycling. I noticed this plea on all the neighborhood collection points, asking the green-minded to also be mindful of the residents and not to throw their bottles between the hours of 10pm and 7am.

On one receptacle there was also this declaration:

Paris has a unique qualifier to daily life, something it holds onto fiercely. Here's a reminder:

A memorial to an "unknown French Forces of the Interior" (résistance) killed during the insurrection against the Germans ahead of Allied liberation. Still remembered.
 

And people slapping up bills and posters is such an old problem, I guess, that this building has “defense d’afficher” carved into the stone:

At least with some success, because I didn’t see any signs that any had been pasted up.