A Visit to Bellville

There is a street running east off Place de la Republic that eventually becomes Rue de Bellville. This is a section of Paris that gets "down and dirty" so-to-speak.  No, it's not a slum, but it's where those Parisians who don't fit the idealized Champs Elysee idea of a Parisian (the ones from 1950's Hollywood) live, work & play.  Multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-everything. It starts at the Metro stop Pyrnees and runs downhill to Republic.

It's another place to get the real feel of the city.

At the top, the upper Eiffel Tower way off in the background is the only hint of this city.  That separation exists in distances other than miles/kilometers.

You start by taking a stroll through mostly Chinese restaurants & shops selling cheap, er, I mean bargain goods.  Mostly the tastes don't coincide with ours but on occasion there's something to be grabbed up economically.

Susanne did a better job of shooting the place.  Here are some people pics.

Staring into one's palm is definitely universal.

Some of my stuff is a bit more on the abstract side...

 Colors...

 Patterns...








 

 Bottles...

It seems that after the store closes & the shopkeeper goes home, these guys beat up on each other.  What a couple of dummies!!!

As we approach where Canal St. Martin crosses under the street & we get closer to Republic, it morphs back into a French environment.  We can see the difference in the cultures by the eating places.  Chinese & other Asian eateries jam diners inside, no tables outside on the sidewalk.  But starting with the first French café we encountered, there were oodles of sidewalk tables.  In fact, there were two restos side-by-side, one French, one Asian.  The former had crowded sidewalk tables, the latter had tables that could've been on the sidewalk but were enclosed...inside the restaurant, not crowded.  I thought Susanne shot a pic of that Chinese resto but she didn't...the frustrations of a tourist/blogger.  The local bloggers just go back & re-shoot.

The Canal is an oasis of calm that runs north to south through the Right Bank.  It is now THE developing place with restos & bars opening and where the "bobos" hang out.  That's the local's term for "bohemian bourgeoisie", what we'd call yuppies.


Last year we took a Canal cruise...it was delightful...slow moving, going through the locks (see above foreground), a green tree canopy overhead for much of the way.

Here is a vid of Place de la Republic, late in the afternoon with more shadows than I'd like. Email subscribers click on Steve's Travel Blog to see it on your browser.