Personal Power: My Last Day In Paris, Part One

or Not My Last Day In Paris

A five-frame photographic panorama of Canal Saint-Martin in Paris's 10th Arrondissement taken from Quai de Valmy looking towards Avenue Richerand. Canal Saint-Martin fills up most of the image with only a little bit of the buildings on Quai de Jemmapes appearing at the top of the frame. Those buildings and trees along the canal appear as reflections in the water. To the left of the frame, in the foreground, is a big group of fallens leaves and some trash on the water's surface. The panorama was stitched using Photoshop's Photomerge, and because of the stretching of some of the frames necessary to stitch them, the image is not rectilinear. It almost looks like the five images are laid on top of each other, except that there are no visible signs of the overlaps, and the outer two frames (left and right) are rather distorted because of the stretching process.

Probably anyone who knows me even a little knows that I love Paris. Thanks to the generosity of several Parisians, I made my first trip there in November of 2005. I have many stories to tell from that time, but because someone posted something to Facebook this morning that reminded me of something that occurred nineteen years ago esterday, I thought I would write about that day.

First, I have to preface by saying that my trip was to last two weeks, from 1 November (when the plane left Detroit) to 15 November. At some point during that last week, I decided to make a trip to Madrid, Spain to visit another friend whom I'd met on Flickr. When I booked that flight, my plan was to go to Madrid for three days and two nights, return to Paris, take the whole next day to wander the city one more time, then leave for home the following day.

That was the plan anyway.

Everything actually went pretty smoothly, and on that last full day, I contacted a few of my friends and recommended we get together one last time at Le Dock, a now-defunct bar not too far from L'Opéra Garnier. One of our Flickr pals, Phillipe, was a bartender there, and the place was sort of the unofficial Flickr watering hole.

So, that morning, between 9:00 and 10:00, I caught line 1 at the Place Blanche métro station, which was just across the street from where I was staying, and headed to Place Saint-Michel. The trip required changing trains at Gare de L'Est (made famous in the film Amélie), and as I waited for my connection to arrive, I decided to sit on the platform for a while and people watch. In the mornings, as you might imagine, trains were packed with commuters, and as I watched them load and unload every few minutes, I imagined a series of photographs taken over several hours from the spot I was sitting, recording what each train looked like as the doors closed before departing. While I waited, a young woman rushing to get onto a train, unwittingly dropped her scarf. I hurriedly picked it up and handed it to her just inside the door, in time for the doors to close. I took but three frames while I waited at Gare de L'Est, all of the reflection in a stairwell.

Photograph of a reflection in the mirror on a stairway at the métro station at Place Saint-Michel in Paris. While the colour red-orange dominates, it also is an image that juxtaposes lines of the ceramic tiles with those of the reflected ceramic tiles and the stairs.

Once at Saint-Michel, I walked around the area looking for souvenirs for my kids (I am SO BAD at buying gifts for people), took a few pictures at the fountain at Saint-Michel as well as along the Seine, then walked over to explore around Cathédrale Notre-Dame, then Hôtel de Ville before catching another train at the Hôtel de Ville métro stop. I had arranged to meet a friend in the Belleville section of town, so I got off at République station. My route took me past Canal Saint-Martin—also made famous in Amélie—along the way, so I stopped to take a few pictures. The panorama at the top of this post was taken there. Along Boulevard de la Villette, I came upon this woman in a beautiful coat.

Photograph of a black woman walking in front of me with a coat that appears to have an African design of some sort. Her head is turned to her left and partly visible. She has corn-rowed hair that looks to be of a similar colour patternas her coat.

I met my friend Sumei, but not before getting a photograph of part of the façade of Palais des Glaces, a theatre on Rue de Faubourg du Temple.

Black-and-white zoomed-in detail photograph of a section of the façade of Palais de Glaces on rue Faubourg du Temple in Belleville, Paris. The façade has what appears to be a carving of an elephant crammed into a rectangular space. This photograph is a crop of about half of the carving, and includes most of the head and top half of its torso, looking very crammed within the space of the image's dimensions.

Sumei and I headed back to Canal Saint-Martin and we took a bunch of pictures there, me with my Nikon CoolPix 8800 (a rather glorified point-and-shoot) and she with her dSLR, a Nikon D70s.

A Prisma AI conversion of a photograph of two men talking near the middle of the Passerelle des Douanes, which spans Canal Saint-Martin. The app's Dallas filter gives the image a painterly appearance.

Sumei is another of the people I met via Flickr, and, in fact, I think this was our first in-person meeting. We stopped to have a coffee at Brasserie de l'Hôtel du Nord on Quai de Jemmapes, which runs along the east side of the canal. Hôtel du Nord is famous as the setting for the eponymous 1938 film. After coffee, Sumei had a little business to tend to. She worked for real estate company at the time, and she had to get a signature on a lease or a deed or something in the La Chappelle neighbourhood, so I accompanied her. Afterwards, we visited Église Saint-Bernard-de-la-Chapelle (Saint Bernard Church of La Chapelle), which was built from 1858 to 1861. I have a thing for religious iconography, despite my atheist ways, so we spent about thirty minutes there before she had to get on her way home in the south of the city.

Black-and-white photograph taken inside Église Saint-Bernard-de-la-Chapelle.

Part Two

Personal Power

Saturday, November 16, 2024

My Last Day In Paris, Part One

or Not My Last Day In Paris

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