Hotel de l'Europe Paris

Hotel de l'Europe Paris, originally uploaded by Campobello Island.

I've been staying at this little hotel for several years now I can't decide if this is my fourth or fifth visit. It is just a little family run two star hotel nothing fancy very small rooms but comfortable and very reasonably priced 64 euros per night and for Paris that is very good. Second time I stayed there the owner saved my life, so that helps to keep me coming back. I suffered a pulmonary embolism in the middle of the night and he got an ambulance for me, but that is a whole other very long story. Because of that incident I'm recognized at the hotel the owner and his sons all welcome me and I think hope they won't need to call an ambulance. I like the hotel because of the price and it's location. It is less than a five minute walk to two of the large train stations the Gare de l'Est and the Gare du Nord both of which have excellent metro connections to the rest of the city. It is on Blvd de Magenta, this is the street:



Marche St. Quentin is just across the street:







When I was out for a walk in the street this morning I found this small patch of grass that has been turned into allotment gardens about a meter by a meter and half each. Too early to have much in them yet but I saw a few herbs and some one had planted spring bulbs.




I had plans of taking the Batobus today to get some video from the river and it would have been a good day for it except that area of Paris is covered with people today a combination of weekend, good weather and the Paris Marathon is going to be run tomorrow. Took this photo at one of the Batobus stops next to Notre Dame there were more than a hundred people waiting in line to get on the boat and there is one about every 15 minutes the problem being they can only allow as many on as get off at each stop because the boats are full to capacity, didn't look like fun to me. Hopefully Monday or Tuesday early in the morning.



Thanks everyone for all of the nice birthday wishes, I sure can't say it hasn't been a special one.

I don't know weather to call these guys buskers or not but they are amazing, I've seen them do their tricks here before but I'd never seen this one before, there were more than 100 pylons and they never touched one of them. I think maybe they just do it for the fun of it, I tried to find some way to give a tip couldn't find a container and no one was passing the hat.