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This is the Roman arena located just up the street from our hotel. You can see the kids playing football and the old men bowling. The backs of a row of houses can be seen on the left side. We entered via Rue Monge, which is the street the houses on the left face. We walked down a narrow accessway and ended up right in the stands directly opposite where I took this photo.
The alley way at 38 Rue Francs-Bourgoisie. This photo was taken a noon on a fairly sunny day. It really was that dark in there.
This is the house at 3 Rue Volta. I am standing in front of the laundromat (my pack was resting on the window ledge). You can see a Chinese take out restaurant right next door (the dark red storefront). The blue one next to it is a convenience store. The street is literally no more than 10 feet wide right in front of this building (remember what I said about the zoning laws?)
These are the two half timber houses we discovered in the 4eme one morning. Most of these have been destroyed by fire over the centuries. They're made of wood, with plastered-over straw which is the traditional material for the walls, and which makes them fire traps. Apparently (according to the sign attached to the one on the right) the fire department had a lot of the surviving structures demolished a few hundred years ago for this reason. The status of Le Marais as a historical district must have saved these two.
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This is the lily pond in Monet's gardens at his house in Giverny. It was a cloudy, semi-rainy day but the flowers were beautiful and the garden quite lovely. Too bad there were at least a million people there.
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