Life in the Neighborhood
By alesa
“It was a lovely spring evening and some friends from the US were in town, passing through Paris just for a night. We met up at a brasserie in Ménilmontant, L’Entrepot’s on the animated Rue Sorbier, and sat outside on the terrace catching up over some delicious Belgian beer. Midnight came and went, and so did the last metro. We were having too good of a time to leave and decided we’d take a velib’ whenever we were ready to go.
When the bar closed up around 2am, we headed to a nearby velib’ station and each hopped on one of the public bikes. My friends were staying in an apartment somewhere near Nation and didn’t know Paris that well, so I accompanied them even though I lived nearby. The Rue de Menilmontant is pretty steep, but we were near the top, so we flew down on our bikes, hair in the wind, all smiles on the empty streets. It felt like we had the city all to ourselves.”
