A Rainy Day in Montmartre

Recently I visited the beautiful city of Paris and whilst I was there I went on a free guided walk around Montmartre, the famous district of Paris located in the 18th arrondissement. It was a wet and grey Wednesday afternoon on the day of my visit, I got the Metro Line 2 (Blue) to the designated starting point of the walk at La Chapelle Metro station. I found the tour of Montmartre online and it had been organised by a Parisian woman called Camille who told me I would find her on the platform wearing a red scarf and a straw hat which made her very easy to spot when I stepped off the train. Camille, a tanned skin woman in her forties, led me to the others who were already waiting down the stairs at the station entrance, there were six or seven people in total. There was a man called Reza, an Iranian from Tehran. Sarah and Daniel, a German couple from Dresden and Peter, a New Yorker from Crown Heights in Brooklyn who looked the spitting image of Roger Daltrey of The Who. Also on the walk was a couple of Parisians who’s names escape my memory. We started our tour by walking through the Barbès Market which is a street market that runs under the Metro Line from La Chapelle to Barbès Rochechouart station. The beauty of Barbès Market is that it is not a tourist attraction or an over-priced ‘fake market’, it is an authentic street market where local people go to buy their food and other goods as part of their daily lives. The area is multi-cultural, aka poor, and the locals are a mixture of African and Arab. The market is very crowded so it advisable that you put all of your belongings in a secure pocket or into your bag to avoid being the victim of a pick pocket. But on the whole that is a very small worry and shouldn’t be at the forefront of your mind when walking through the market. The atmosphere is fantastic and the market is a sensory delight, the hustle and bustle gives the place a fantastic energy. You will find merchants shouting in both French and Arabic trying to attract attention to sell their wares alongside a lot of sometimes frantic bartering and bargaining, the locals are out to get the cheapest price. There is a wide variety of things on offer at the market; fruit and veg, meat, fish, spices, clothes, trinkets etc. Whilst walking through the market I was talking to a Parisian on the tour who told me about the local area and how the prices on the market reduce in the afternoon because most of the products are no longer fresh by that point.