Odds and ends in the 7th.

This morning I went by train to Neuilly, a suburb just outside the Periferique to the west of central Paris.  I walked around a bit then caught a bus to the Champs de Mars, another of the big open spaces in Paris. I walked aound for  a bit, then walked along Rue de Grenelle to see if I could decide where the elegant hedgehog lived. I stopped for a bit in a cafe in Rue Cler, a street full of cafes and nice food shops, a bit like rue Montorgueil. I walked on to an old Lutheran church that had a nice little garden that I had read about. Trouble was the gate was locked.

I continued along rue de Grenelle  and then stopped a little way off it at a shop called Dreyolle. I have never been anywhere like it. It is a taxidermy shop. My favourite was a lion, for 32,000 Euros. They get dead animals from zoos and other places, stuff them and sell them.  There were all sorts of things for sale. There was a giraffe for 20,000, down to some ants for E5. I saw people buying butterflies and beetles. No red-back spiders for sale.

 I walked  to a place for lunch. I wasnot going to have desert but realised I had had no icecream this trip. A few weekends ago, when it first warmed up, before it got cold again a few days ago, all the cafes had their icecream freezers out on the pavement and were doing a brisk trade in icecream cones. I could not go home without havig some icecream.

I walked home by a rather more circuitous route than I had planned, but did not care.