Canal St. Martin 12-22-25

We are incredulous that of the venues that we want to visit while we’re here it seems that all of them save one are fully booked until after Christmas. Deb spent the morning trying to find time slots for us at the various museums without success. The one place we’re able to get tickets for is the Fondation Louis Vuitton out in the Bois de Bologne. There is a major exhibition of Gerhardt Richter that we were very keen to see. But even that is causing some heartburn. We want to know if we can enter early and have lunch at their restaurant before entering the show itself. So I sent them an email asking if we could enter the museum for lunch before attending the exhibit. It seem like a straight forward question but so far I’m on the 3rd email and I don’t have any answer. Finally we just purchased the tickets and we will go out there on the assumption that they will let us spend extra money in their good but pricey restaurant before we go see their good but pricey exhibit. So that was the morning.

Later in the morning we went out to purchase the making of our Christmas repast. We won’t be cooking (royal we) but we’ll still have a pretty decadent meal. We’re planning on fois gras as the main protein served on little toasts with fig jam, a bottle of nice Champagne (not prosecco), a good farm produced cheese (Brie de Meaux?) and many fresh fruits and vegetables. You know, the sort of things that the early Christians would have been eating 😇. Unfortunately our butchers were all closed today, we have two artisanal butchers within a block, so we’ll have to wait on the fois gras until tomorrow. For our champagne we opted to go with a pink brut natural from a small producer, Georges Cartier. Deb will finally get something for Christmas from Cartier’s.

For the afternoon we decided to have a walk along the Canal St. Martin. The canal was built during the reign of Napoleon in order to bring fresh clean water to Paris.  In the last 20 or so years it has become a magnet for Parisians of all ages as a place to visit and enjoy. It begins at the Paris yacht basin and proceeds north through the city and into the countryside. Of course now the city goes so much further out to the north that the canal is pretty much girded by development for a long distance. When we lived here for a year our apartment was 2 blocks from the canal. So we became quite familiar with the entire stretch from outside the Paris ring road all the way to the yacht basin where it meets the Seine. There are several locks that enable the tour boats to traverse back and forth. And the canal is actually covered over for quite a distance from the yacht basin. When we were here they had just begun rehabilitating the canal, they drained portions and dredged up all the sediment and trash that had accumulated over many years. 

A ton of old bicycles and other debris were hauled out. Now they are repaving the toads alongside with cobblestones. I digress again, we walked down the canal and found a little brasserie where they were serving hot mulled winel So we stopped for a glass and enjoyed L’Heure Bleu. As we sat there the sun was going down and we watched a tour boat come out of one of the locks, it was very enjoyable. But part of our walk was to locate a little restaurant we found a few years ago that we really liked so we trudged further down the canal and located it for a planned future meal. It’s a local place called Chez Prune, and it was hopping when we saw it this evening. When we had a meal there last time it was also quite busy, a good sign. Once it was firmly established as still being in business we retraced our steps back up the canal and came back to the apartment. 

Due to our timing mismatch we hadn’t gotten any lunch so I quickly went across the street to a little pizza place that seems to do a thriving business. I ordered a small pizza Margarita and made sure that the crust was thoroughly baked. Within about 10 minutes I was out of there and headed back to the apartment. The pizza was only 7.50 euros and was just right for us to share along with a little Cote de Rhône as a late lunch/early dinner.