18. Porte Maillot 19.Porte des Ternes
The idea was to take a friend to the Ryanair bus at Porte Maillot bus station and then walk back through the city. ‘Paris’ seems to me to be the second biggest fraud in the hapless Ryanair scheme of things, in that you must bus 85 kilometres into the edge of the city from their designated airport, really Beauvais, but with the generic name of Paris. The first is the amazing 100 + kilometres to ‘Frankfurt’ from somewhere in the middle of the Mosel, near Trier, but in reality it is Hahn. Until very recently they would pick up their passengers at The James Joyce Pub, just to show a little national pride, but now it has moved to the soul-less windswept bus station just round the corner.
But enough of that, and but for a slight swing north to take in the Porte des Ternes in the same breath, we would not have seen it, but by doing so it gave us one of the great straight-throughs of the Paris walks. The Avenue des Ternes turns into the Rue de Faubourg Saint Honoré, and leads all the way through the 8th arrondissement into the 2nd, under its own name, before losing the ‘faubourg’, as by now as we are in the middle of the city.We are soon back on very familiar territory and crossing Centre Pompidou yet again, we are in the streets of the Marais, and home. SC
notes from an urban hibernation 