Riders on the Storm

The weather has been cool, rainy, and windy here in Paris, but we are not complaining. I would much rather be cold than suffering through hordes of sweaty tourists here in the summertime, which I imagine could be really unpleasant. There are certainly enough tourists here now. However, as cool as it has been, the trees are leafing out like crazy, and flowers are blooming all around us. Every park, every fruit tree, every flowering plant is coming alive in this overcast, cool environment and, in those brief times when the sun comes out, makes this city so utterly beautiful.

Yesterday we took a boat journey along the St. Martin Canal, a man_made supply tributary to the Seine built on the orders of Napoleon himself. The journey was only a couple of kilometers long, but it took two and half hours due to the locks through which the boat had to pass. On our way down to the boat dock, however, we were treated to a sight which was so somber, so heart-wrenching, that it was hard to keep a dry eye. At the Place de Republique there is an impressive monument commemorating the heroes of the Revolution,

with bronze relief vignettes of important scenes of the struggle. It has now been completely defaced with graffiti and hand painted banners, some of which are perhaps of unrelated political events, but the majority are to remember the victims of the terrorist attacks nearby in November, 2015 and the Brussels attack just last March. It was so sad to see a city's grief all on display, and especially touching were the images of one of the youngest victims, a 17 year old girl whose only crime was wanting to go see a rock concert on a night when some murdering sons of bitches decided to strike. I had to take my hat off and observe a moment or two of heartfelt silence.

We went from that somber location past the Bataclan Cafe where other people were killed, and made our way to the boat landing. The canal boat first enters the canal by means of a two kilometer underground passageway that was delightful to cruise through. Seeing the dark, brick lined ceiling

overhead, and the greenish, none too clean water below, made me think of the sewer pursuit in Les Miserables. Totally cool. Once we emerged from the tunnel we went through four double locks that helped raise the boat about twenty feet each time. It was slow going, but the boat was comfortable, the narration by the guide in English, and there was a bar on board. What more can you ask?

Today we had a totally different experience. We started out by taking the Metro to Rue Clar, a market street adjacent to the Eiffel Tower area. We went on the advice of several people, including Rick Steves, but found it underwhelming. Our old neighborhood was near Rue Daguerre, a real lively market street that, unlike this one, was truly a pedestrian zone. We had breakfast in a bistro, but then quickly left with a nice pair of eclairs to go which we ate while sitting in front of the Effiel Tower.

Next we took the city bus number 69 through the heart of the city to the Père Lachaise Cemetery, a labyrinth of stone monuments and crypts, home to about seventy thousand dead people including a few famous ones. We saw Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, and of course, Jim Morrison. However the most touching of them all was the fairly recent gravesite of cartoonist Bernard Verlhac,

known as Tignous,. Bernard was shot in January 2015 by some other lunatics for nothing more than the crime of drawing a cartoon of Muhammad in the magazine Charlie Hebdo. His grave was covered with tributes, including a jar full of pencils and pens, and no doubt the tears of the people who live in this great city.