Paris and I ~ 'Je Soy Ein Edinburgher'

iPhone Photo Chronicles ~ Je Soy Ein Edinburgher ~

Je Soy Ein Edinburgher, originally uploaded by Paris Set Me Free.

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Deep in the dark of olden-times Paris your intrepid tautologist seeks out hidden quarters and corners which you probably wouldn't have the time to discover yourselves if you didn't devote a ridiculous amount of time to doing so, to the detriment of your social life and sanity. My advice would be stay sane and leave the loitering lunacy to others. I'll do it for you.

Here we are somewhere near the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine in the 12th, or was it the 11th.., in one of the numerous little passageways that seem to have remained virtually unchanged for centuries.

Tucked away here are artisanal ateliers and olde shoppes plying such obscure trades they make you wonder just how they manage to keep going. Then there's the odd fancy/cute hotel of the type guide books to the 'hidden Paris' would wet themselves over, and you'll cross the locals who take these passage as a habitual shortcut where you'd rarely see a tourist, as well as the occasional cat and nocturnally rat, no doubt, to represent the neighbourhood wildlife collective.

The word faubourg originally meant 'outside the town', when the areas so designated were just that. Now, effectively, it just means suburb, except of course that these 'suburbs' have been swallowed up by the outsplurging metropolis and haven't been real suburbs for centuries.

Apparently, the land of my birth, Scotland, in hating the English like most other people around 500 years ago and therefore getting on quite well with the French, has retained more of these French borrowings than the south of Britain. I've just read that faubourg is still in use in Scotland (my parents could put me right on that if necessary) and even in New Orleans in the USA because of its French origins. I was born in Edinburgh, true enough, but then again I grew up in the London Borough of Enfield, so bourg, at least, is pretty well entrenched all over the place it seems.

I remember once trying to find out what people from the city of my birth are officially called, and it wasn't at all clear, but that's another story. At least people from Hamburg don't have such existential conundrums to mess with their digestive processes...

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