Today I went to the Marais on a vain errand-- the places I went to were all closed, serve me right for not calling first before traipsing all the way over there. But it's always a dose of adrenaline to go to that neighborhood. 
I stopped for a while at a café near the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, and it was such a pleasure to see the different imaginative ways people were dressed as they walked by. So different from my navy-blue-clad neighborhood in the "Beaux Quartiers." Kids with those strange narrow knee-length shorts that are in style this year; a pair of beautiful Asian identical twins with a girlfriend between them, laughing; some drop-dead-sophisticated Japanese Parisians in strangely cut black clothes and hair; an intense strung-out artist carrying a large portfolio.
There was a man in 18th-century costume leaning on a counter in one store, and someone on a unicycle on the sidewalk in front of me. I got lost and suddenly found myself in front of the oldest house in Paris , which was built by Nicolas Flamel. He was a real person whose name has become famous again because of its appearance in the Harry Potter books. 
The house is being renovated. Flamel didn't actually live there, but paid for the house, where paupers were allowed to live rent-free in return for praying daily for Flamel and his wife, Pernelle. I took a couple of bad photos of the doorway before turning to stare after another apparition, a man with shoulder-length locks and an ankle-length coat, striding down the narrow rue de Montmorency. He looked as if he belonged to Diagon Alley himself.
After amusing myself by watching a 78 license plate (the equivalent of New Jersey) try vainly to parallel park in a huge space for ten minutes-- 
he gave up and drove off to a chorus of honks from the patient drivers who had waited for him-- I went on up boulevard de Sebastopol where I noticed the 
Fair & White black hair products store and a big sign over a church
that says, "Dieu, où demeures-tu?" [God, where do you keep yourself? from John 1:38]
Then back past a Lollipops store and the Champs-Elysées all decorated for Christmas: the best place to buy last-minute presents-- I believe Séphora is even staying open till midnight on Christmas eve, which is a little extreme.
This car is turning about twenty feet from where a cop once whistled me down for doing a U-turn early one morning, soon after I moved to France. "Vos papiers!"
I handed over my papers. He looked them over and said stiffly, "That will be four points off your license!"
I was horrified. You only get twelve points and they take your license away forever. "Mais officier!" I said in my American accent. "I see people doing a U-turn here all the time!"
"Oui, mais pas devant un gendarme!" he said. [Maybe so, but not in front of a cop!] He laughed and let me go.
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