In fact, it would be extremely calm and quiet where I live, were it not for the three different construction projects in progress within 200 feet of my apartment. It's bad enough that a building across the street was under construction for about two years, after the street had been rebuilt over a period of a months, and before the building next door was put under construction, and now the building on the other side is under construction, and there's been a huge construction project in progress a bit further away for several years now as well. All of this means constant noise, even at times of year when it should be very quiet. For days I've been listening to jackhammers outside my window all day long, every day except Sunday. Oh well.
I don't actually take vacation myself. I'm in Paris, so as far as I'm concerned, I'm already in my favorite vacation destination, so why go anywhere else? Plus I hate travel, and I have no money to go anywhere, so even if I wanted to (which I don't), I couldn't.
Right now, the Forum des Halles is again under construction. This area used to be the huge wholesale food market for Paris, up until the 1970s, when the markets were moved to the suburbs (to Rungis, now the world's largest wholesale food market), and the entire area in Paris was rebuilt to include an underground shopping center and an above-ground park. Now, forty years later, the city has decided for some strange reason to tear it all apart and rebuild it again, so the whole area is walled off and under construction. Granted, the underground shopping center was always slightly depressing, thanks to its gray-concrete architecture, which made it look more like an underground parking garage than a shopping mall, but the rest was okay, especially above ground. But now it's being redone again. It won't be finished until 2014 or so. So I took some pictures of the fences and cranes, but that's about all I could do.
The surrounding area is intact, however, including the area around the butt-ugly Pompidou Center and the surrounding streets. Actually, I guess the Center isn't that ugly, but it sure looks out of place compared to surrounding buildings. It was built with the building's infrastructure on the outside, ostensibly so that there would be uninterrupted open spaces on the inside, but it's not very aesthetic. The Center does have an interesting outside escalator, though, which always reminds me of Beverly Center (which it predates). At one time, everything on the outside was color-coded—water, air, electricity, etc.—but after renovations that were required to upgrade the structure (apparently nobody realized that putting everything on the outside would aggravate the effects of weather), it seems that a lot just got painted plain white.
Anyway … the area around the Forum is very animated, day and night. By some standards it's a bit seedy in the wee hours. One of the world's largest subway stations is beneath the Forum, and the various dregs living in the suburbs roll into the city at this station so that they can make trouble in the nation's capital. I guess that since they've already laid waste to their worthless suburbs, they feel they must make a shambles of Paris itself as well. That's why the area is seedy late at night and in the wee hours, although I wouldn't call it dangerous.
There are tons of shops and restaurants on the mostly-pedestrian streets around the Forum. And there are always people, which is nice (at least if you like areas with people, as I do). I try to show most of this area in the video. One thing about videos on neighborhoods, though, is that it's hard to know where to saw off the video at the edges of the neighborhood, as these edges tend to be rather blurry. I didn't show some of the jazz clubs in the area, for example, but I did show most of the streets around the Pompidou Center and parts of the Forum, and the curious Quartier de l'Horloge.
I suppose I'll have to redo it once the Forum is all done again, but this will do for now.
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