Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

The other day I was walking through the edgy, regenerated Villette area of Paris, and on one of its busy streets, I stumbled upon something that felt like a gap in time. I went through an unassuming gate and walked down a narrow, semi-private alley. Just like that, I was out of the noisy present and inside a hidden, completely quiet garden. It turned out to belong to the Saint-Serge de Radonège Russian Orthodox Church.   Photo: SortirAParis The whole scene looked like something out of an old nineteenth-century novel. Orthodox priests with long beards and flowing black robes moved slowly among the flowerbeds, and a group of elderly people sat on rickety chairs, chatting in a mix of Russian and French. The sudden shift from the bustling street to this completely quiet sanctuary was so strange that I almost felt out of place with a smartphone in my hand. In fact, I kept my mobile firmly in my pocket. For once, it felt a bit wrong to pull it out just to take the usual snapsho...

  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 a couple of years ago, when we stayed on his houseboat a bit up the Seine. Captain Bob. He arranges these gatherings on the Pont des Arts every month, apparently without exception, come rain or come moonshine, which is actually a better expression here than usual. The bridge is mercifully free of love locks these days. In their place: about fifty people with wine glasses, speaking in what sounded like most of the languages of Europe simultaneously. French people and expats from many corners of the globe were just standing around and talking, and the mood was actually quite infectious. I accepted a glass from a Spanish astrophysics student who seemed extremely pleased with himself and with life in general, and I stood there for a while trying to work out what exactly was happening.  The answer, as far as I could tell, was: nothing in particular....

For a long time, Rita and I have dreamed of finding a small, affordable pied-a-terre in Paris. This September I am finally in town to chase that dream. The city is full of estate agencies. Their windows are plastered with images of quaint apartments, and one might think that in a city teeming with agents immobiliers , securing a modest little place would be as simple as ordering a pain au chocolat. One would be wrong. At my first agency, the door was marked Ouvert but remained stubbornly locked. At the second, a bored receptionist informed me that all agents were en réunion . At the next several, the apartments in the windows had already been sold. How long they had been sold was not mentioned. By the umptieth agency, I had developed a theory. Parisian estate agents with actual apartments for sale exist in a condition much like certain particles in physics; present and absent at the same time, collapsing into definite existence only when observed by each other...