De Bercy aux Grands Moulins

Saturday, 1/17/09

One of the buildings where wine was sold:

building

Comment se construit le Paris de demain (Paris' Modernization in the East)

For our last tour of the trip, Vincent took us to neighborhoods in the outer regions of Paris that are still being constructed- the future of Paris. We started our tour by visiting Bercy Village. In the nineteenth century, “bercy” was a popular slang word for “drunk,” and this village in fact sold lots of wine to Parisian drinking establishments. Now the village has all different types of shops, but some of the old structures and railroad tracks remain.

We also saw Bercy Park, which was full of people even though it was cold out. There were many dogs playing in a nearby field- even one who played soccer!

Some scenes in the park:

house

On our tour we crossed the passerelle Simone de Beauvoir, a new bridge which has a very fluid structure with two interweaving levels. Vincent told us that the final assembly of the bridge (which was constructed far from Paris) blocked river traffic for only half a day- quite a feat in comparison to the amount of time the Seine had been blocked for the construction of older bridges.

A view on the bridge:

Then we visited the National Library of France, which is huge, with four main towers. Inside one of the towers is a permanent exhibition of terrestrial and celestial globes that were a gift to Louis XIV. The craftsmanship was very impressive. If the edge of a landmass had not yet been discovered or explored, then the artist simply blurred the edges. There were also depictions of the native people of every continent. At the end of the tour we passed many new 'housing projects' built by the city, but these were extremely nice buildings with attractive, inventive, and often whimsical architecture.

The celestial globe:

Click here to hear Vincent talking about the BNF!

Sophie's new apartment is not far from where we ended the tour, so afterward we stopped by for tea. Sophie and her husband Grégoire had just finished tearing down a wall to make their dining/living room larger, and we were the first to get to see it! We had tea and cookies and talked about how much we had enjoyed our two weeks in Paris. We could not stay for too long, though, because Sophie and her scientist husband were on their way out to attend a lecture about magnetism aimed at the general public.

Click to hear some conversation from Sophie's apartment!

M.D.