Tresspassing into the little belt

-



Michael has a dream of exploring the catacombs below Paris - but his dream doesn't include standing in a long line of tourists waiting at the official entrance. He wants to find a secret manhole somewhere, which leads down to some of the 300 kilometers of labyrinthine tunnels, which lie below most of central Paris.

People called cataphiles are actually exploring these labyrinths - but I have nightmares about him climbing down into slimy darkness and perhaps on his way back finding out that the manhole he entered had been closed shut from the outside.

No way!

Luckily he found another way to be a trespasser and explore  hidden parts of the city without going underground

The Petite Ceinture (“little belt”) is a disused railway line which traces the 32-kilometer perimeter of Paris. It was built about 150 years ago and now long abandoned.

Today most of the tracks are quite inaccessible and off limits, overgrown  and forgotten, but Michael discovered a way in through a hole in a fence deep south in the 14 arrondissement


While I was exploring the nearby flea market at Porte de Vanves, he walked for a few miles along the tracks and came back and told tales of hidden gypsy camps and dark tunnels so long you couldn't see the light at the end. And lots of rats.

I'm happy to have done what I did in the meantime. I do prefer flea markets to rats nests!

Later that day we explored a part of Petite Ceinture, which was much more to my liking.



We went to Porte de Clignancourt, where the former Gare Ornano station of the Petite Ceinture has been transformed into a very interesting restaurant, La REcyclerie, where the concept is that everything used is found, not bought. 




The place serves nice food and being a guest is really 'Eco-fun'. They even have a small urban goat and chicken farm outside on the platform.

Popular posts from this blog

Night under the full moon: A unique Parisian gathering

-
Image
  The other night I was invited to a so-called Full Moon Party in the center of Paris. The host was a guy Rita and I met, when we, a couple of years ago, stayed on his houseboat a bit up the Seine. He arranges these casual parties at the middle of the Pont des Arts and he has done so, come rain or come moonshine, every month for the last many years. As I approached the iconic bridge, now mercifully devoid of its plague of "love locks," I was greeted by a cacophony of excited chatter in a United Nations potpourri of accents.  French people as well as expats from many corners of the globe mingled freely, their laughter and chatter forming a symphony of human connection that was actually quite infectious. As I accepted a glass of wine from a beaming Spanish astrophysics student, I pondered the curious phenomenon before me.  Here we were, a motley crew of strangers, united by nothing more than our shared presence in this city and our willingness to gaze skyward toge...
Read more

Stumbling into serenity: The secret garden of Saint-Serge

-
Image
The other day I walked the streets of the edgy, regenerated Villette area of Paris, and here, on one of its busy streets, I stumbled upon what seemed like a portal opening into another time. Entering through an unassuming gate, and going down a narrow,  semi-private alley, I was transported from the frenetic present into a hidden,  quiet garden that turned out to be the garden of the  Saint-Serge de Radonège Russian Orthodox Church.    Photo: SortirAParis Before me unfolded a scene that could have been plucked from a 19th-century Russian novel: Long-bearded orthodox priests wearing flowing black robes and cylindrical kamilávka hats, moved unhurriedly among the flowerbeds, and a group of elderly parishioners sat in the garden, on rickety chairs, chatting in a melodic blend of Russian and  French. The abrupt transition from bustling street to  tranquil sanctuary was so jarring that I half-expected to find my smartphone transfor...
Read more

Entering the Boros bunker - A mind-altering artistic journey

-
Image
Walking into the massive Boros bunker in Berlin's Mitte is like walking into an ancient, alien tomb. This forbidding concrete monolith, built by the Nazis in 1942,  is now the home of an eccentric private art collection.  Inside the building's almost anthill-like network of  underground corridors and crypts, numerous swirling shapes and colors spark the walls into lurid illuminations.   A flood of phantasmagoric images washes over the senses - kinetic sculptures twisting with reptilian menace, multimedia installations flickering with layered meanings. Each new room opens like a portal into a new creative artistic mind - and the story about the building is as exciting as the art which is  displayed inside it. During the war, the bunker sheltered several thousand  civilians from the massive, nightly bombings that hit Berlin. In 1945 the Red Army repurposed the building for prisoners of war and it later became an East German warehouse. After the wall tumble...
Read more