Hôtel de Ville, Jardin Anne Frank

Salut!

Many museums here are closed on Mondays, but not City Hall, where there was an exhibit of the art of Jean-Jacques Sempé.  The name might not ring a bell, but I'm sure most of you are familiar with his work: in addition to Le Petit Nicholas, Little Nicholas, a very famous French comic which he illustrates, he has also created many of the cover illustrations for The New Yorker since 1978!  (It was very interesting, in looking at the display of his cover art for that magazine, to notice how the price has increased over the years... from $1.00 in 1978 to $4.99 in 2011.  Yikes!  When I looked at the first cover, from '78, and saw that it only cost a dollar, I thought, "Why don't I read The New Yorker more?"  As the price kept going up, I remembered why...)  Anyway, I really enjoyed the exhibit, and it was interesting to see some of the inside of City Hall.

part of the exhibit 

To enter the exhibit, you have to go in the back door.
I liked the big lions.

I thought the drawing of the Pompidou on  this sign was funny
(and fairly accurate).

Hôtel de Ville, or city hall, from the front

After I was done with the exhibit, I decided to walk home (I was lazy and took the metro there, although I could have also taken bus 38).  It's not far at all, only 30 minutes on foot at most, and as I was walking home, I noticed a little sign that I hadn't noticed before, for le Jardin Anne Frank.  It's at the end of a little dead-end street (or an impasse, as they're called in French), right next to the musée de la poupée, or Doll Museum, which I haven't yet visited but which is on my to-do list!  Anyway, the Anne Frank Garden isn't very big or grand, but I liked it a lot.  Even though it's not far off of a very busy street (Rue Beaubourg), because it's at the end of a dead-end and surrounded by buildings, it is very quiet there, which is a nice relief from the constant noise of the city here.  (Here are two of the noises I hear most often, and which I will be so glad NOT to hear when I'm back home: the wailing of sirens, which are even more obnoxious here than they are in the U.S., and this one ringtone which I swear is on practically every French cell phone and which I hear multiple times daily, and which apparently is impossible to find an example of on the internet.)  Anyway, the park was very quiet, and very nice.

Note the Centre Pompidou in the background.