Today we had to make a quick trip to the centre of Paris for some emergency camera repairs. If you ever need a sensor clean in Paris, we highly recommend the relaxed (2 hour lunch break), friendly (gave us blueberries) team at Mat Photo. And the area around the shop – République – is a good spot to hangout while you wait. It is just how we hoped Paris would be, little streets with cafes, art galleries, fromageries and fancy tea places, with ladies on bikes riding passed with baguettes. We don’t have many photos of this, of course, as we were one camera down. But we did get this lady sunning herself on the République statue.
In the afternoon, we visited The Tours Aillaud, a housing estate in Nanterre. Also known as Tours Pablo Picasso or Tours Nuages (clouds), the towers are located just outside La Défense, which is the Parisian equivalent of Canary Wharf. The main architect was Emile Aillaud and they were built in 1977. WE LOVE THEM.
We parked under the Grande Arche de la Défense so it would be easy to find the car later (under the ginormous arch) and walked, quite a long way as it turned out, to the estate. We first had to cross a busy road with a rather scary looking multi-storey car park on the other side. Ah, we thought, the view must be good from the roof of that car park! So up we went. The roof was deserted and completely overgrown with trees and discarded sofas, a perfect spot for some filming and a picnic. Big shout out to our guide Judith who it turns out is 18, not 19. She got us out of quite a few sticky situations and didn’t mind scaling a graffiti covered concrete monstrosity that reeked of piss for that all important angle. Merci beaucoup. It was a bit overcast today and when the sun did come out it was rather inconveniently pointing in the wrong direction, so we are planning to go back one morning to stake it out again.
We took our lives into our hands driving home on the Boulevard Périphérique (you should hear the satnav trying to say that one, bless her), a rather hair-raising experience. Nutjob Parisian drivers, sci-fi tunnels and deeply confusing signposts. Not aided by the schizophrenic satnav asking us to keep right and then immediately deciding we should keep left, which is not easy on 8 lanes of traffic. We were relieved to make it back to the Chateau for a well-deserved lager.
We are eagerly looking through our footage now and tomorrow we will try out a few edits with the audio of the bells to see what works.
All in all, a good day, apart from forgetting to get Hermine the 2kg of apples she requested. No Tarte Tatin for us tonight! Bugger!
