The other Paris

It is one month to the day since we arrived, it feels like six. We went to Chinatown to stock up on those ingredients so readily available in Australia like curry paste and coconut milk. On the metro, line 7 gets you there, the caucasians are in the minority and the languages spoken range from Arabic to Mandarin to Spanish.

In Chinatown itself, women speaking Mandarin greet each other in the French way. McDonalds is next to Asian groceries and the streets look like this.







The architecture is different since Chinatown is on the border of the suburbs so permission can be granted for taller, and in many cases more ugly, buildings. The area houses a lot of poorer migrants, we saw some people stealing from a charity bin. Although maybe it's not stealing if they need it.

The cherry blossoms are coming out and at 18c today it felt rather spring-y.



I like this part of the city where the shop assistants speak to one another in one language and the white customers like me in another. The immersion in the culture of another part of the world while still definitely in Paris is refreshing. And the food is so cheap. Here's a sample of some of the things we purchased including Ginger lollies from Indonesia, "Italian" Tomato paste and curry paste from Thailand.



Just finally, we saw this sign outside a pharmacy. It looked to me a lot like a snake in a martini glass, or is that just my vivid imagination?