Velib' Action

Managed to persuade Sam onto a Velib this afternoon: we cycled to the Butte Chaumont park up in Belleville. It's quite an exciting ride, as well as negotiating some grand boulevards and big roundabouts full of mad drivers you have to go through all these steep cobbled streets of halal butchers and asian delicatessens and things to finally reach the park. There was an african wedding photo shoot going on in the park, and also a stall doing a brisk trade in gauffres. The journey back was even more challenging - just finding a pair of free bikes was tricky. Being Sunday night, the main activity in town is trying to find a parking space - not necessarily a legal one of course - and there's some kind of constitutional right to spend as long as you like fronting and backing into an impossible space while assorted relatives make uninterpretable gestures from the pavement and other drivers prevented from passing blast their horns. We got home pretty fast though and I still think Velibs are a fantastic idea.