There's no call to be homesick if you're an American in Paris. In addition to the 50,000 or so other Americans currently living here, the city is rife with reminders of others from days past.
For starters, there's the street names:
Then you got your statuary...Washington, Jefferson, Franklin in various poses with and without the Marquise de Lafayette.
FDR has his own subway stop although sometimes I overhear American tourists calling it Teddy Roosevelt. (C'mon people, think about it.) Originally, this stop was named Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées.
And while you won't find a "George Washington slept here" marker in Paris (because Washington never got further from home than the West Indies), there are the moral equivalents.
Friday, September 12, 2008
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5 comments:
50,000? I had no idea thee were so many.
I noticed a funny thing : almost all those streets are in the 16th arr. Do you know if there's a reason for it, or it's just pure random ?
Yeah, good question. I know that Franklin lived near the street that now bears his name during his years in Paris and that some of the negotiations for the Versailles Peace Treaty in which Wilson was instrumental took place near the Avenue President Wilson. As for the others, I'm not sure.
And there is "rue Washington" in the 8th arrondissement...
Their are also two statues of liberty (Jadrin du Luxemburg & the Seine).
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