Paris has many food markets. One of our favorite areas is on rue Cler, on the Left Bank. While we haven’t stayed at the hotel on that street in several years, it’s a unique food market with many good specialty stores, a number of restaurants and, (no great French neighborhood should be without one), great bakery (boulangerie).

Today we’re going to visit an area we’ve visited before for shopping, but not managed to visit the covered market called Marché des Enfants Rouge

At first glance, it’s just an entrance to an alley, but there are quite a number of specialty food stands (cheese, vegetable, fish) along with a number of restaurants, nestled behind the facade of the stores along the street on rue de Bretagne.

As blue as the sky was yesterday, today it is cloudy with occasional showers. After exploring the market a bit, we decided to stop for some gelato.

And while were finishing our gelato, we began having some rain. Nothing heavy, but enough to get you wet if you had no umbrella 🌂.

We made our way back to the Metro station as we wanted to visit Le Bon Marché and the Hermès store nearby. The Hermès store is actually built in what was a swimming pool. In the lower floor they have home goods you wouldn’t typically see in most Hermès stores. Le Bon Marché is a large department store that spans two blocks. One section of one building has “Le Grande Epicerie” , a large gourmet food store. Where Galleries Lafayette is noisily busy, Le Bon Marché is quieter.

Around the corner from the Hermès store is rue du Cherchi-Midi and one of the small stores on that street is legendary for its bread and pastries, Poilâne.

Leaving Poilâne, we took the Metro back to central Paris (passing a musical group on the way through the tunnels) where we had intended to go to Angelina for some chocolat chaud à l’ancienne l’Africain (an intense hot chocolate). The line for Angelina was way too long to justify waiting since we were here in April. Maybe tomorrow.

We’d saved a goodie from Poilâne for later, so we made our way back past Place de la Concorde….

View of Place de la Concorde , obelisk, Eiffel Tower

to our hotel. Despite not visiting too many places, we did a lot of walking (almost 5 miles).