Lyn and Leon go to ...: Cafe to Cafe

Over a hundred thousand Parisians plan to descend on Paris today to protest the latest budget. Nine unions are on strike, the Metro is closed, bus routes are affected and hotel desks are besieged by querulous Americans wanting to go home. We went for walk.

Near Trocadero is Cafe Kleber which has a constant long queue waiting to be seated. There are plenty of neighbouring cafes which are only moderately busy. What is the secret of Cafe Kleber? Apparently it is on the list of devotees of a series called Emily in Paris. The eponymous Emily ate here and so every wannabe young thing has to eat strawberries and be photographed. Mystery solved. How old and uncool are we?

From Trocadero we crossed the Seine where Lyn insisted I keep my selfie fail for this blog. The Eiffel Tower, like most monuments, was closed but Lyn wasn’t getting into the elevator anyway, so no loss.

From there we walked in search of Art Nouveau architecture - specifically apartments. Lyn felt that if she had to live in Paris then one of these apartments would do.

I did have a surprise for her. Back in 1903 a rich Parisian commissioned an architect to design an art nouveau building which was beautiful but truly shocking. To understand why Paris was shocked you need to spend a moment looking at the door.

We walked back to the Pont De l’Alma where we spied Bus 63! We caught it back to Trocadero where Lyn demanded another adventure. I took her to the Passy Cemetery via an ice cream shop. The cemetery boasted a number of famous dead like Claude Debussy, but we were there for the architecture.

If anybody ever needed to be reminded about the tragedy of the Great War in France, a place like this quickly reminds you. Again and again we found family monuments where fathers and sons, or brothers, who fell together, are remembered. The place was beautiful but sad.

After lunch and a big nap, we set off for the Left Bank to visit some churches. The first was the oldest church in Paris, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It was beautiful and Lyn lit seven candles, one for each child and their partners.

I liked the way the light from the stained glass lit the floor.

Quite accidentally, this turned out to be the church with a shrine to the philosopher Edith Stein, who was martyred in WWII. We walked outside to discover another sort of shrine, Les Deux Magots, the meeting place of Picasso, Hemingway and the existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.