January in Paris: Les Halles Walk

After our marathon walking adventure in Strasbourg our aged legs were tired Saturday morning, so we stayed around the apartment and read and rested (and I suspect Dave wrote about 10 blog entries). We ventured out in the afternoon to take another Paris Walk, this time in the Les Halles district. The guide was an American woman, who, although not as entertaining as our previous guide, was very enthusiastic.

The walk covered the area which used to hold the old wholesale food market, which was torn down in 1969 and moved to the suburbs to make room for a fairly hideous shopping mall. The French have since come to their senses (actually I don't think anyone ever liked the mall) and they are in the process of demolishing the mall in favor of a park.

The area now includes a great market street, Rue Montorgeuil, with beautiful patisseries (including the oldest patisserie in Paris, founded by Marie Antoinette's baker), vegetable stands, fromageries, butchers and fish mongers, and also lots of famous old restaurants and kitchen supply stores. It was a fairly nice day, and the first day of the soldes (semi-annual government mandated sales), so the streets were mobbed with people. I couldn't get any decent pictures - the ones I include here were taken a couple of days later when we decided to wander back.

The crowds were really intense on rue de Rivoli, one of the main shopping streets, on our way back to the apartment from Les Halles, and we began seeing police in riot gear. For a moment I thought that the Parisians take their sales so seriously that riot police were necessary, but I soon realized that a huge protest march was making its way toward us down the boulevard, apparently in solidarity with the Tunisians. We had to wander down many side streets and back alleys to avoid the protest, but we made it home in one piece, without inciting any international incidents.