Jaunted

No-one stands on bridges over the Seine anymore except for groups of old age pensioners on organized tours, desperate brooding men (rolled up in cut-price Persian carpets), and people who read their guidebooks too carefully. For real riparian entertainment you'll want to head for the canal.

The best stretches of the canals are around the Bassin de la Villette, where the Ourcq and St Denis canals coincide, and the Canal St-Martin . I would say that, because I happen to live there. But it also happens to be true.

If you look `canal' up in your guide book, you'll learn that some bright young sailors have started up boat tours up and down the canal, as a kind of Bateaux Mouches equivalent. To be honest, the most exciting things you'll see on your tour are regularly spaced giant building sites where the old abattoirs, flour mills and meat markets of this working class area are being spectacularly demolished in order to make way for posh high rise apartment blocks. If you look way, way, up into the sky at the right moment with a powerful pair of binoculars, you'll also see me doing my morning exercises naked on the balcony. That's not mentioned in the guidebook, but I'm told the comedy value's worth getting a cricked neck for.

Read on! The canal has much more to offer than a building site and a contorting female.

To get it all at once, grab a friend or two, pack a picnic and a good supply of wine, stick your mouth organ in your pocket and head out there around 4pm on a Saturday afternoon. I do it every Saturday. Here's roughly how it goes:

3pm: Preparation. Red wine, beer, camembert, two crusty baguettes, and a tub of strawberries from the market. Keep it simple. Wicker picnic basket.

3.30pm: Just time for a quick detour into the Parc de la Villette, a huge clumsy modern cluster of museums, exhibitions, 3D cinemas and entertainment spaces. They have regular music, theatre and circus events, but my favourite is the free spectacle of tanned muscled young men and women playing sport on the fields every weekend. Brief perving session. Sneaky ice-cream.

4.15pm: Tear self away and walk down canal path towards centre. Avoid getting run over by streams of cyclists and amateur skaters. Meet friends having coffee on new café aboard Dutch barge belonging to the Peniche Opera, a theatre company who specialise in holding live music events on river barges. Make more friends from next door table and challenge them to game of petanque.

5pm-9pm: Picnic, pratting about, and petanque. Petanque, like most other games, involves men playing with balls. Hand-sized metal balls, called boules, which women can play with too, but only after the men have shown them how. The game is designed for people who have eaten too much too quickly, drunk too much too early, and run out of things to talk about. Perfect. Generally a spot-on description of me between five and nine pm on a Saturday afternoon after a good hard picnic.

You can borrow petanque sets from Bar Ourcq, the gem of the Quai de la Loire. Go there. It's filled with both trendies and tramps. It will give you a plastic glass of grotesque wine substitute or piss-in-a-beer-bottle for two euros (for the tramps - don't make this mistake), or a fresh mango-and-lychee cocktail extravaganza for a little more (for the trendies). It offers wireless internet (for the yuppies) and big slices of oozy chocolate cake (for the greedies). It also has the most fantastic sign, kindly requesting `please could patrons refrain from pissing up the sides of nearby houses'. I can only guess the recycled 2 euro beer is causing the cement to dissolve.

Around 9pm: Successfully navigate the seven-way junction at the Villette roundabout. Recover nerves at Le Point Éphémère, a happening electro-music magnet for young Parisians and trendy travellers. It has really cheap, really bad wine, a terrace extending onto one of the dirtiest bits of the canal, and a big mirror ball. How cool is that? Leave as soon as the mirror ball starts to make your head spin.

Sometime later: This area's still not cleaned up enough to be the kind of place you want to hang around too late at night. If you don't fancy the great quayside cinema, then jump on the metro for a couple of stops to Republique for some partying in the Marais and rue Oberkampf areas.

And even later: if I've got lucky, I usually try for a quick snog on one of the bridges over the Seine. I recommend it. Just for comedy value, you understand.

Jaunted Emedded Travel Guides :: Paris
Monica Guy lives in Paris, writes for Time Out, and keeps a low profile, like any true femme fatale. In fact, most people don't even realize she's a femme fatale. She's been told to upload her avatar, but she's not sure who or what that is, or why she might want one. Unless he's in a pilot's suit, that is. That would be quite another matter.

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