But we just got here!

These photos are of the studio that we're staying in right now.  We've been here for almost 2 months, and are leaving in a week and a bit...but thought I'd share some Parisian studio-living pictures with you:

It's the nicest place, besides our little place in Toulouse (*heart), that we've lived in during our time in France.  The studio comes with its own lesbian art photography, full views of the Eiffel Tower and the Beaubourg, and too many flights of stairs.   It's in the 20th arrondissement, a few blocks away from Belleville, primarily a working class immigrant neighbourhood that's beginning to gentrify.  Thanks to the immigrant population here (a mix of north and sub-saharan Africans and Chinese) we've been "eating local", making tagines from meats bought at one of the many halal butchers,  and digging into algerian almond-based pastries with hot mint tea in the evenings.   

It'd be hard to tell from our apartment, which happens to be one of the few Haussmanian buildings about halfway up a hill from larger block-like apartment complexes, that the neighbourhood itself is a little rough around the edges.  Although it might not be what one might envision as the postcard perfect Paris, in some ways it reflect a more accurate Paris - a large cosmopolitan city where people live, work and go about their daily business without having to step aside every 2-strides to accommodate a map-wielding tourist.   Walking around here, you see kids on bikes, families on errands and old men hanging out at cafés.  Hookah and moroccan cafés are tucked right up alongside french neighbourhood bistros and bars, their patrons sharing the same sidewalk and a mix of 2nd hand cigarette and hookah smoke.

 There's this café a few blocks from us that's undergoing renovations.  At its most stripped down stage the doors were still wide open  (actually, there were no doors) with nothing but unfinished surfaces, a bar with a man behind it, some stools and the beer tap still in operation.  We've walked by this place almost on a daily basis, and it's fun to see the progress take place around the cast of regulars that seem to be permanently camped there.  It was like time-lapse footage where people are the fixed elements and the constructed environment transforms around them.  Seeing this made me understand café culture in a different way - that it really is an old school, hardcore dedication to your café and the social life in your community.  Floors or no floors.  

Vegetable plants for sale at a florist in our hood.