Memories

While going through my old photo albums to find images I wanted to scan as digital images I came across this image. It was one I took early one Sunday morning around 6 AM in summer in an area on the west bank of Paris known as the "Parisian Narrows". It would have been around the summer of 1959 as I  found my way home after working all night in the scullery of a French restaurant - (spewwww!).

It was taken with a pocket Minolta and shot on an automatic setting. I had to play with the 'effects' a little bit when loading it as a digital image and the sepia tones worked out best to reveal most of the image. You can just make out the water from the mobile mini-street cleaner in the gutter, bottom left, so the street had been cleaned about a half hour before I came along. There are 'service taps' at regular intervals so that the street cleaner can refill his water tank. Everything goes into the sewers and, I guess, from there to the Seine.

These streets/lanes are (usually) one way traffic with traffic light controls fixed to the buildings at intersections, probably every 300 to 400 metres. During the day you hear the approaching vehicles, mostly very small Fiats, Citroens and Renaults as they accelerate rapidly through their low gears as the negotiate these carriageways.

In all the 'pensions' adjacent there seems to be innumerable little old ladies with their very small dogs who they take out every evening for their 'walkies' and to do what they 'need to do'. No-one seems to pick up the dog dropping and as the cars come very fast the LOL's keep their doggies up on the narrow footway - which becomes littered with dog droppings. People walk along the road surface but when you here the roar of the accelerating vehicles you have to jump up onto the footway out of the way. This becomes a gymnastic feat as you seek to avoid firstly the racing cars and, secondly, the dog droppings.

I found several more photos which I must load up into a digital album - the Seine, its bridges,  the Eiffel Tower, etc.