My walk to school

The Pont de Grenelle, with the mini Statue of LibertyThree mornings a week, I walk twenty-five minutes from my apartment in the fifteenth arrondissement to school, in the sixteenth. I could take the metro, but it probably wouldn’t save any time, and anyway most of my walk is along and then across the Seine, with a great view of the Eiffel Tower for part of the way. That sounds really glamorous. It’s not, exactly. I do walk most of the way with the Seine to my left, but there’s an RER train station and then a lower walkway between myself and the river (Of course, I could take the lower walkway, right next to the Seine, and I sometimes do; that adds a few minutes and two more sets of stairs to my commute, though.). On my right side, I am significantly closer to a highway. And most of the time I’m in a rush, looking at my feet or the next traffic light, and not the Eiffel Tower looming ahead of me.

I usually cross the Seine at the Pont de Grenelle. Aside from the miniature Statue of Liberty on one of its sides, the Pont de Grenelle is a pretty basic newer Parisian bridge: built of greenish metal, with multiple lanes of traffic and a bus stop at one end. Every so often, though, I notice something strange on the Pont de Grenelle during my walk to school. Once there was a small film crew set up at the far end, near the bus stop, and they had temporarily prevented pedestrians from passing until the shot was finished. Another time, I passed a man in an ankle-length off-white tunic walking across in the opposite direction; every so often he would tap on the bridge’s metal railing, and a flock of pigeons, who were following him, would land on the spot he had tapped. And then last week, on my way to class, I saw an older woman in a red polo on the other side of the bridge, leading six miniature ponies across. Though I was running late, I couldn’t help turning around once I was off the bridge to watch them: after leaving the bridge, the woman waited for the sign to walk, and then led her six miniature ponies across a major intersection, while the cars of commuters waited.

Location