Rain Free in le Marais

The rain finally eased up today and I met my friend Pascale this afternoon. We ate a salad on rue Montorgueil and then walked to the Marais. It's still not that crowded, luckily. We stopped at a cafe for happy hour (mojitos) and then walked some more, eventually heading back to the Bastille and then to my neighborhood. Along the way, I snapped a couple of photos: first, of two Smart cars sharing a single parking space (note: there's no room to navigate out of the space again), and a small synagogue near rue des Rosiers where we heard people chanting inside....neither of us had ever noticed it before.

And finally, there are hundreds of Parisiens out on the new rented bicycles...so many, in fact, that as we passed through the Bastille, people were asking us if we wanted to rent one because they were trying to return theirs to an official drop-off point, and all the stalls in the Bastille were full. People are riding these bicycles everywhere to do their errands....you often see them ride by with a baguette sticking out of the basket on the front of the bike. It's a brilliant idea...it costs just a euro to rent one for an hour, drop it off at a station, and not worry about it again. The bike system has only existed for a month or two, and already Paris is starting to look like Amsterdam!