Paris: Actually interesting and cool stuff

You know how you always pictured Paris: the cultural-melting pot? The interesting fashions? The amazing food? the beautiful scenery? Yuh well, are you in for a shock. Most of it is fairly monotonous grey buildings with fairly monotonous Parisians grumpily going about their mundane lives, and even the teenagers wear unbelievably conservative clothes - but wait! There are two areas where all your dreams come to life: Belleville and Goutte d'or. My recommendation: Stay in Belleville, hang in Goutte d'or.

Belleville: A place for anything North African: Couscous restaurants, amazing Algerian cakes, North African goods: food, slippers, carpets. Things are livelier when the market's on but there's nothing you'd actually want to buy there (unless cheap plastic shoes and clothes are a fetish). And it's pretty lively at any daytime hour.
Funky bars down the sidestreets, High-density chinese street up one end.

Goutte d'or: Senegalese and other West African stuff happens here. If you're whitey and you forgot for a moment, you'll remember here. Rue Leon has got a very cool bar in it called Olympic cafe where we saw an amazing Senegalese band. The best chip-butty/omelette roll is to be found nearby on Rue Leon too. They get a baguette, smear it with Moroccan style tomato sauce meets harissa and fry egg with chips on the grill. Feed 2 for 3.50! Locals are friendly, but you might feel a bit conspicuous walking around late at night, if you forgot.

Rue leon is so cool it even has it's own website:
http://www.rueleon.net/

There are heaps of shops piled high with 6 meter lengths of very colourful patterned batik fabrics. Assuming these were african imports, I expected them to be very cheap, but they are all made in Holland (and claim this proudly 'guaranteed real dutch wax') and seem to be made for export - perhaps people take them back home to Africa as presents? Didn't see that many people in Goutte d'or actually wearing this kind of thing. I bought a beautiful red and blue piece with fish on it for 12 euros (see photo). There were also ones with messages marking different historical events which were cool.

Strasbourg-St. Denis: a more mixed multicultural street (go through the fake-roman arch), between the two other areas, not as fun if you ask me.

Paris first-timer

An unglamourous photo of Paris: someone's got to show it as it really is!


Yes, shocking that it is, I'd never been to Paris until recently. It all goes back to a diplomatic stand-off between France and a certain country about French nuclear testing in the Pacific (something sobering to think about while enjoying French culture). This meant some visa-restrictions that caused trouble for 17 year old girls to enter Paris without parental permission. Maybe they were trying to cast aspersions on what the girls were planning to do in Paris. The only other place where I've seem restrictions on underage girls travelling was from Burma to Thailand.

Anyway, Paris for the newbie. This Paris metro interactive website is incredibly cool and what's more, will actually help you reach your destination, if you know where you want to go that is, which is not necessarily the case for the tourist (see above for some suggestions).

http://www.ratp.info/orienter/cv/cv_en/carteparis.php

French-deaf? Well, I don't know if I can say this website helped me, but it was a lot of fun:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/lj/

Actually the French people spoke sounded completely different to what the charming Hakim speaks in the bbc videos, couldn't really make head or tail of it. But if you need the basics - like how to pick up a gay guy in a cafe - you'll find the phrases in the online bbc course.

Paris hammams

Every wondered what to do in Paris? Many people don't. They think there's too much to do anyhow. Well, when I was there I had the urge to do one thing - bathe. It turned out that hammams (Moroccan or Turkish style baths) are quite the thing there.
The Hammam de la mosquee de Paris one is easy to find and central. Most days are women only, apart from Tuesday and Sunday. It tends to be crowded which makes for a fun atmosphere. It attracts a mixed crowd so you won't feel like the only whitey.
The building is a type of fake Mosque, built by the French government apparently, to try and balance out the large number of churches in the city centre. Thus it is sort of a concrete replica of someone's generic idea of a mosque, and apparently not really used by any Muslim community. Regardless, it has a tastefully decayed atmosphere inside. Only a little light comes into the steam rooms, from small dirty sky lights. The innermost steam room is so full of such hot steam that you need to bend over to walk into it (the hottest steam goes from the ceiling down to about chest-height). Inside is a lovely cool water pool, worth crawling to.

Techincal details:
Bring friends and plenty of equipment (see http://liosliath.com/blog/?p=44 for some ideas), there's space to do your own scrubs and massage. The scrubs (gommage) given by the staff are rather short and not particularly enlightening. Everyone was wearing at least bikini bottoms, many wore tops too (French are prudish it turns out).
There's lots of info on the web about other hammams. Search 'paris hammam' and you'll see. I found some good info on the iwanttogotoparis blog, and there are millions of other local ones not mentioned in guidebooks or online. The Hammam des grands boulevards which is centrally located but unfortunately seems to have completely closed down. Be prepared for crowds on weekends and holidays. They can even get full by the afternoon and not take any more people. (Why aren't there any good sites about baths? - see http://spas.about.com/library/blguestarticles.htm for an example of a not-good site about spas - this is the biggest one I've found).