I’m not actually going to count them because there are too many. Bercy is my absolute favorite place I’ve been on this trip, and that’s saying something.
To clarify, I’ve had high hopes for Bercy since I saw it on the schedule. I vaguely knew about the area because I’m crazy obsessed with the Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir (a gorgeous pedestrian bridge named after my third favorite female intellectual? YES. PLEASE), but I was wowed by the area immediately. Forget anything bad I’ve ever said about Paris, because the City of Lights frickin’ delivered with this neighborhood.
One of my previous posts talked all about the unattainable wealth represented in the monuments we had seen thus far, and I had reached the point of a sort of nauseating appreciation for these structures. I could respect the architecture and the objective beauty, but the obscene displays of wealth were making me sick to my stomach. I was getting a little disillusioned with Paris, becoming frustrated with the opulence and the lack of self awareness. (That, and the wallet thing really killed my buzz). Bercy was like a balm to my aching soul. She’s not the rapid excitement and commercial intrigue of the Latin Quarter, and she doesn’t have the cultural history of the Jewish Quarter; Bercy has a magic all her own. It’s Paris, but modern. It’s everything you love about the city of lights, but wonderfully abstracted.
Not only is she lovely, but Bercy is an example of affordable, walkable, down-to-earth urban renewal done RIGHT. It’s everything I love about modernism but accessible to the middle class and beautifully rendered. This is what I needed from Paris. This is what I didn’t even know I was hoping for.
This post made me realize how much I love Bercy too. I think its abundance of greenery also sets it apart from the rest of Paris.
Bercy was awesome and probably even more special than the more common parts of Paris because it’s unique all in its own- an has no tourists.
The park here was by far one of my favorite parks that I had seen during this trip because of how it was landscaped. It also had the perfect amount of people there. 10/10 good park