A week after our Budapest trip we were in Paris for an extended weekend. We stayed in the Voltaire/Bastille neighborhood again. We found street after street lined by “boutique shops”, run mostly by Asians and selling the most horrendous outfits for shockingly low prices. Some of them had particularly creepy mannequins, one of the creepiest pictured below.

We found ourselves at FrogBurger for lunch — a place we bumped into on our previous visit only after having lunch at Indiana Café, which, by the way, has nothing to do with the state of Indiana, nor American Indians despite being pictured in their logo. FrogBurger also makes their own beer, Frog beer. We had their pale ale and black IPA. Yummy goodness!

The main purpose of our Paris visit was Patti Smith’s concert at Olympia music hall. The tour she is on commemorates her debut studio album ‘Horses”, which was released in December 1975. I am not good in writing concert reviews, but it was probably the shortest two hours in my life.

After the concert we had the most bizarre dining experience in the nearby restaurant Pizza Firenze. Based on the memorabilia and the photos on the walls, the place clearly had some history. Now it was run by mostly Indian(?) staff who had no idea what they were doing; they mostly stood at the back of the restaurant staring at people dining. The food was not good either. Check Tripadvisor reviews and choose another place!
		In the following morning we headed out for a run on Promenade Plantée, an elevated railroad structure turned into a pedestrian path. It is popular among photo shooting tourists as well as exercising locals. It also has some neat tunnels.
We visited The Museum of Modern Art for the exhibition “Warhol Unlimited.” The exhibition was divided into several themes ranging from self portraits to “shooting stars” to repetitive wall papers (e.g., featuring Mao or a cow head), each occupying a room. Only in one room, with the work “Shadows” consisting of 102 paintings, or according to Warhol one painting of 102 parts, the photography was allowed.
For lunch we found a cool little organic bistro on rue Bichat (we were trying to go to Triangle Microbrewery but it was closed). The bistro had a single concepts for lunch: a rice bowl with one cooked and one uncooked vegetable side, and a protein of our choice: chicken, beef, mackerel, or tofu. Very tasty! Then we walked a long way to Paname Brewing Company at Quai de la Loire. The lovely, fluent English speaking bartender gave us small tasters of all their beers including saison, märzen, IPA, American IPA, and porter.
		Next morning we headed for another run on Promenade Plantée, but this time we ran all the way to the park Bois de Vincennes, Paris’ largest public park. The Western part of the park closer to the city was well groomed, but the more East we ran the more natural state forest with comfortable wood chip trails we found.
On our last day we strolled around the Le Marais and Les Halles neighborhoods. We had a plan to visit Picasso museum, but after seeing the lines decided that we can come back any time we wanted. The market at Boulevard Beaumarchais was a bit more crowded, louder, and aggressive than ours in laid-back Grenoble.

I have still not fallen in love with Paris, or even remotely learned to like it. It is simply way too crowded, and not only by Parisiens.