Spending a week in Montmartre is different than spending a week in Marais. Instead of a historic downtown area, you have a historic smaller neighborhood. The main tourist attractions in the area seem to be Sacre Cœur and the various cabarets. There’s some great food, and lots of art history here too, if you know where to look.

We’re choosing to keep our activities as covid safe as possible. We’re trying to to limit our time spent in crowds, inside, or with our masks off, which means that, sadly, we can’t just eat delicious food at neighborhood restaurants all day long. The up side of this, is that there are plenty of neighborhoods around to explore. Today, we wanted to see Batignolles.

On our way to Batignolles, we walked through Rue des Abbesses, a nearby road named for the benedictine nuns who had a chapel in Montmartre. Things look different in the daylight, as many shops shutter their doors at different times in the day.

Continuing on, we walked down to Villa Leandre, a picturesque dead end road. The three story houses have a different feel than the rest of Paris’s uniform Haussmann architecture.

From there, we walked through a busy neighborhood center of the 18th arrondissement, Rue de Poteau, then across Rue Championnet.

Jessie stumbled upon a pedestrian only street: Cité des Fleurs. For those of us who could see over the fences, the backyards were clearly well taken care of, and the houses clearly out of our price range. We’ve since learned that it was the birthplace of Catherine Deneuve, as well as home to resistance members during World War II before being found by the Gestapo.

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After our slight deviation, we made it to Parc Clichy-Batignolles – Martin Luther King, a large multi-purpose public space, full of gardens, waterfowl habitat, a skate park, and space for other sports. Surrounding it was an eclectic collection of apartments.

Like many other things we’ve seen today, these buildings were in direct contrast to the standard Parisian Haussmann style buildings. I’m sure some locals are offended to look at them, but they appeared to be well thought out, and something new to look at.

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After sitting still long enough for the chill to set in, we continued to our final stop, the nearby Square des Batignolles. This park was much smaller… cozy even. It was full of small paths winding around a pond. There were several small areas reserved for kids, and a space for dogs too.

We exited the park, grabbing a quick drink and snacks at a nearby restaurant. I had the Kir Royal, (upgraded from the standard Kir, by swapping white wine for Champagne), and Jessie grabbed a drink called a Red Sombrero (Pineapple juice, Orange juice, Lemon juice, Grenadine, and ginger beer). We snacked on some egg rolls and french fries. From there we headed home and ended our day.

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