The case of the abseiling plumber. Plumbers are clearly a different breed in Paris. The apartment manager had emailed me to expect the plumber at 8am this morning to check the water leak in the apartment. The plumber not only arrives, but arrives 3 minutes early. He doesn’t stay long, and I assume that it’s safe to head out to the bakery for my daily order of baguette blanch and two croissants.
I find the plumber in the building lobby on the way back. He speaks a little English, but not much. With a bit of pantomiming on his part, I work out that he wants back into the apartment in order to get to the outside of the building. So now I have a plumber abseiling outside the building by jumping out the kitchen window (on the 4th floor) with two of his apprentices hanging on to the rope braced against the kitchen counter! Try getting a Melbourne plumber to do that!
I’m not entirely sure what he did outside (something to do with the join between two buildings) but apparently he got done what he needed to do without falling onto the road that runs to the underground carpark. Au revoirs all round and off they go…
Val-de-Grace Redux
It is a stunning 30 degree day in Paris today, so perfect conditions to walk back to Val-de-Grace to redo the shots I stuffed up on Sunday. I stop for a picnic lunch in at the Medici foundation in the Jardin de Luxembourg, where it’s so cool and shady I don’t want to get out of the chair. Distracted for a while by the size of the fish living in the fountain – one has to be 75cm long, and looks like the mother of all of the smaller variations swimming around in some pretty murky looking water.
Arriving at Val-de-Grace around 3pm, I survive the usual round of challenges from the security staff. I’m still the only visitor to the church, which is light, cool and silent. The musuem guard seems to be happy with someone to follow around.
Numbers double when a young man arrives, but he only stays five minutes, and doesn’t venture past the altar. I do a slow wander back through the museum…by the time I leave there are two more visitors.
Such a shame for an interesting museum – one that shows that (a) I should be grateful that I’ve never had to fight a war in a trench or be dragged out of one with limbs missing and (b) the impact that the virulent diseases of the 19th and early twentieth centuries had in accelerating the progress of medicine in the military – from a doctor with a saw to modern field hospitals, and the downstream benefit to the general population. There is an entire wall dedicated to honour boards in the cloisters of the building that memorialises the military doctors and pharmacists who died either in combat or as a result of typhus, cholera or yellow fever in the 19th and early years of the twentieth century.
On the way back, I track too far south-east, and find myself at the rear of the Jardin des Plantes. Full of locals and tourists dodging the sprinkler system, the iron fences are also hosting a photography exhibition dedicated to all things amphibian.
It’s a hot early evening in Paris. Passing through the Tuileries on the way home I spot these kids playing in a makeshift pool, rolling around in plastic balls.
(18.16km = 25, 439 steps travelled today according to my Fitbit Flex)
