I was taking some photos at the Cimetière de Montmartre just before sundown this evening, when suddenly a small murder of crows (wow, how often do I get to say that?) alit on some tombs right next to me! Talk about creepy! Finally, there's the Halloween vibe I've been desperately searching for over here. Unfortunately the photo's no good with the sunset in the background, which I realized at the time, but I couldn't resist at least trying.

Hey folks, today I'm unveiling a new project I've been working on for a few months now, a tourism site for cool, weird, and unusual things in Paris. It's called, simply, Cool Stuff in Paris.

I'd been wanting to make a site like this literally for years, as I realized I was becoming a sort of expert on a lot of Paris stuff that's not in the guidebooks. I answer a lot of e-mails from visitors to my LiveJournal and photo galleries who have questions about Paris and other places I've traveled, and I've found that I really, really enjoy sharing this kind of information with people. I personally try to find the weirdest stuff everywhere I travel, and it's a great feeling to be able to help other people who're looking for the same sorts of things. Of course there are a zillion guidebooks and websites about tourism in Paris, but they all cover basically the same stuff, and I wanted to do a project that focuses on the lesser-known things that appeal to weird people like me. All the e-mails I get tell me I'm not the only one!

The website is still very much a work in progress, and I'm currently working on tons more articles that I'll be adding every day for, well, for a long time, really! The site feels pretty empty right now and that's giving me tons of motivation to fill it up quickly. Today and all this week a lot of little things will be changing, like some formatting tweaks, addition of lots more photos, etc. I promised myself I'd launch the thing today no matter what state it was in, so this is it! I think it's in pretty good shape, I just desperately want to get a lot more content in there as soon as possible. If you happen to notice any weird layout errors, I would be eternally grateful if you'd e-mail me at manning@manningkrull.com. I'm on a PC and have had limited chances to check the site on a Mac, but so far so good.

Please feel free to send the link to the site to anyone you know who's going to be visiting Paris any time in the future! And you can subscribe to the blog and or Twitter to be notified of all new articles as they go up.

Enjoy!

I took a walk around the neighborhood yesterday to take a bunch of pictures for a new Paris-related website project I'm working on. I also took a few pictures of weird stuff that has nothing at all to do with the project...


Welcome to beautiful Paris!
I found this KFC bucket right in front of the Fontaine des Innocents. I nudged it with my shoe a little (I guess you could say I kicked the bucket, ho ho) to try to get it to turn to a side with French text on it, but it turns out there wasn't any!

( Public art, dead rats, etc... )

Two recent pieces of public art in my neighborhood that I've enjoyed...


This is a brand new piece right outside my front door! It makes me smile every time I come home. Poe is basically the only American writer that most French people know of, and they only know of him because they think he's French.




"Happiness." Beautiful. I took this a few months ago and forgot to post it 'til just now.

Here's me and my friend Anne at le Chalet des Îles last Friday night.


Anne and me
Marjorie and I attended a soirée at a swanky nightclub on the outskirts of Paris with her friends Anne and Aurelie and sister Deb. It was crazy expensive — 45 Euros for dudes! — and the club itself is situated on a tiny island so you have to take a ferry over to it in groups of about 20; pile into the boat, cross the tiny river in 30 seconds, file out of the boat. It was a crazy scene, preppy and rich, people's outfits getting inspected at the door, guys getting turned away for not bringing girls, etc, and Marjorie and I were the only remotely weird people, but we had a lot of fun even with all the squares. At some point in the night, everyone from our group but Anne and I were in the ladies' room, and two people came up and asked if they could take our picture for some sort of website/magazine thing. We said sure, they took our photo, and then wrote down our e-mail addresses. I just received the photo, along with a note saying that it would be in Infrarouge magazine and on their website for the month of September. (I clicked around a little but haven't bumped into the photo yet.) Anyway, I ended up getting really drunk on tons of free champagne and gin and tonics, and escaped the party to wander around in pitch blackness on the wooded path that surrounds the little island. I inadvertently startled the hell out of about half a dozen different couples who were feeling each other up on benches and in the woods and on the banks of the river. At some point back at the club I had a very drunken conversation with two nice Serbian girls in the men's room. And from there it just gets blurrier and blurrier. It was a really fun and silly night overall, and reminded me I need to do that more.

Here are my other photos from my sister's visit! I only took a dozen or so photos during the rest of Amanda's stay, because we spent most of our time in Paris, which I've already wandered and photographed pretty extensively, and she was snapping lots of pics with her own camera. They're a pretty crazy mixed bag...


Paris Plages! This is a pretty silly thing, and I love it. Every summer, the city of Paris creates a fake beach along the banks of the Seine, complete with real palm trees, real sand, beach umbrellas, beach chairs, ice cream stands, bands playing, bocce ball courts, etc. This stretches for one or two kilometers of the river, with different sights and activities set up in different sections.

( The rest! )

Hey, the half torn-down building with the graffiti saying "NO FUN - FUCK YOU - SHITT" on the door is currently being fixed up and turned into a bakery! I walk by that spot every day, and I will forever pretend in my head that the place is called the No Fun Fuck You Shitt Bakery, or Boulangerie No Fun Fahck You Sheeett.

There's something going on outside my living room window right now...


(Click to be confused)

... And I have absolutely no idea what it is.

My friend Laura is in town for a few weeks, and there was a small outdoor get-together for her birthday last night. She told everyone to meet up at the Canal Saint Martin (where Amélie liked to skip stones), the banks of which are completely mobbed with young people every night of the summer, hanging out, drinking, flirting, playing guitars, etc. It's a very pleasant scene, but the crowd makes it difficult to find your friends; at any given moment half the people you see are sitting and relaxing and the other half are pacing, talking into their cellphones, and craning their necks to look for their friends. I arrived a bit early and Laura was running a bit late. A guy I'd never seen before came up to me and asked me in accented French if I was Manning. I said yeah, and he switched to English, hearing I was American like him, and explained that Laura had told him to look for the guy with the crazy blond hair. Ha! Other people were showing up, but still no Laura, and a few minutes later a young woman came up to me and asked me if I was Manning — same thing; she was told to look for my hair. I am a walking Parisian landmark.

Maybe it's really small?

While I was half asleep in bed this morning around 8 or 9am, I heard a weird sound of bells ringing, coming all the way from across my apartment over on the street side. It wasn't the usual clanging church bells that I'm used to hearing all over Paris, but a lighter, jingling sound. I asked Marjorie if she knew what it was, and she told me it was probably just some cows heading out to pasture (haha). I got out of bed and went to look out the living room window, and I saw an old guy pulling a small cart with one hand and swinging a handbell with the other as he slowly made his way down my street. I had no idea what he was up to, until another man and his young son came out of the building across the street and waved to the old man as they approached him. The father had something in his hands... a bunch of old knives! The old guy is the local knife sharpener!


Man, so cool! What century do I live in?!

It's unusually cold and rainy in Paris today, so I'll post some pictures from a really beautiful day last week. A little background: I live in the Marais, in central Paris, on the North side of the river; just North of the Centre Pompidou to be exact. When I go running, I usually run straight down to the river, cross over to l'Île de la Cité (the larger of two small islands in the middle of the Seine, with Notre Dame on it), run all the way around the perimeter of the island, then cross back over and head home. That makes about three or three and a half miles total.

I usually cross the river on the same bridge both going and coming, a bridge I just now learned is called the Pont d'Arcole, just South of l'Hôtel de Ville, aka city hall. There's nothing particularly beautiful about the bridge, as bridges go, but I always notice that it puts me right in the middle of a lot of really beautiful views. So the other day when I was out and about with my camera (and not out for a run) I decided to put myself in the middle of the bridge and take four photos facing North, South, East, and West.


This is the North(-ish) view from the Pont d'Arcole. That big building is l'Hôtel de Ville, and you can see a tiny bit of the Centre Pompidou (modern art museum) on the left between the trees; those little red boxes are the external elevators. I live just beyond this museum on a tiny residential street.

( The rest of the pics are here, along with some bonus stuff! )

I just had one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I swear this wasn't a dream...

Just now, walking through my neighborhood, it was sunny and raining at the same time, and I stopped at a crosswalk to wait for the light to change. Next to me was a short, very well-dressed, very pretty young Asian woman. A garbage truck passed by slowly and the driver leered at the Asian woman and said something gross to her (I didn't quite catch it, but it was obviously gross). I shot the driver a dirty look and then glanced at the woman to see her reaction. She had none; either she didn't hear/understand, or pretended not to. The garbage truck now gone, the woman suddenly belched extremely loudly and abruptly, startling herself (and me!), and she quickly put her hand over her mouth and looked mortified. At the same time, a bicycle chained up next to us fell down with clang. And immediately after, an approaching tourist dropped his digital camera and chased it as it bounced down the street.

I think this is French for "Penis Coffee."

(Not really!)


Of course I see a lot of innocent butchering of the English language in France and in my travels around Europe, and usually you can see where they went wrong, but sometimes it's just downright baffling. How many S's can you cram into two words?

What did the guy say when this store fell on him?



Longtime readers of my LJ might remember that my favorite dumb joke of all time, told to me by a very funny and not very bright back kid in my highschool theater arts class, is:

What did the guy say when two houses fell on him?
Get off me, homes.

I've cited this as my favorite joke every chance I've had over the years, it's gotten retold a lot, and at least two of my standup comedian friends have used some form of it in their acts. This joke comes up surprisingly often in my life. So you can perhaps imagine my delight when I ran across this store in central Paris the other day.

Interesting artwork pasted onto the wall of my building this week:



It's about six feet tall! No idea what it's about; maybe the little kid is the lady on the left? Anyway, it's definitely not a picture of my building. My street is tiny, and it's very dark and quiet here at night, so this secluded wall is a popular spot for graffiti artists and other people who wish to express themselves. Also, guys peeing.

Totally by coincidence, I happened to step outside to take this photo right when the shadow of the building across the street covered half of the picture. I didn't even notice that 'til resizing the image in Photoshop just now. You can really see it in ( this wider shot... )

I finally visited the Musée des Arts et Métiers after living practically nextdoor to it for over six months now. I'd been dying to go for a long time, mostly because lord_whimsy once told me it was his favorite museum in Paris. The place is amazing, and while I didn't take a whole lot of pictures, I absolutely had to try to get a halfway decent shot of Clément Ader's incredible bat plane.


There was no way for me to get far enough away from it to get the whole thing in the shot or get a decent composition. Still, I think you can see how beautiful the thing is even from this cramped shot (not to mention the building itself!). I'd heard about this plane so many times before I saw it with my own eyes, I'd sort of forced myself to imagine something much more practical-looking and less fantastical, but I was very pleasantly surprised by how ridiculous and dramatic the design of the thing actually is.

( Two more shots of the bat plane )

Bumped into this today around the corner on the Rue des Rosiers. From a distance I thought it said "No More Warhol!!!"

Okay, now that all my La Réunion updates are out of the way, it's back to business as usual in Paris. I've lived in my "new" neighborhood here (the 3rd arrondissement) for over six months now, but it's so full of tiny, winding streets I feel like I'll never get acquainted with all of them no matter how long I live here. Whenever I'm out for a walk I try to find new streets I've never seen before, thereby lighting up squares in the Legend of Zelda map in my mind. This morning I was out and about, trying to get lost, and noticed a statue I'd never seen before! I approached to investigate...



The Turenne Enfant! I've never heard of that! This bright sunlight isn't ideal for pictures on this shady street, so let's get a little closer...




Hmm. I wasn't able to find much about this guy online; not even a Wikipedia entry! Maybe I should get that going...

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Turenne Enfant
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The Turenne Enfant loves vodka.^[1] He is gay.^[2]

This Turenne Enfant article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.