Paris Rendezvous

Paris Rendezvouz

                          Paris meeting place rendezvous

“ We preferred meeting on the bridge, at a sidewalk café, at an art movie, or crouched over a cat in some Latin Quarter courtyard. We did not go around looking for each other, but we knew that we would meet just the same.”

Julio Cortázar

A ” Café ”  or a “terrace” are a quintessentially Parisian place, it is how to meet up in the city, and the best place for a “rendezvous”, where on any given day you can come across the gamut of human emotions as they play out in their little universes, spread in profusion across the City of Light.

The Paris of encounters and fables, the quest for the hot lifeblood of the city.

Secret confessions are made, love stories begin and end, masterpieces of literature are conceived in Paris cafés; these very same places that were the cradle of the Existentialist school of thought.

Spending time in a café in any of the “arrondissements” of Paris, observing, and attempting to decipher and discover the people who surround me, to catch a glimpse into their lives for a moment,  has always been an interesting game. This is is what this gallery attempts to do. On one hand it is very  incomplete, as it could never capture the infinite nuances of encounters in Paris, but on the other hand it is comprehensive, as the images can be divided into smaller images, each reflecting the universality of human, and often opposing, emotions and situations that so often coexist, even if only for a moment.

“Someone  in Paris told me that he used to write  at the Old Navy Café on Boulevard Saint Germain, and I waited there for several weeks, until I saw him enter as an apparition …. I watched him write for more than an hour, without a pause for thinking, without taking anything more than half a glass of mineral water, until it began to darken in the street and he put the pen in his pocket and came out with the book under his arm .. “ (Gabriel García Márquez evokes Julio Cortázar- “El Pais” 22 February 1984 )

Today, from the “Cafe Paris” in Prague, where its dazzling art nouveau atmosphere displaces me for a moment from the otherwise lovely Czech capital, transporting me to a Paris that is eternal, timeless and metaphysical, to a Paris where perhaps at the table next to me Ernest Hemingway or Gertrude Stein may come and sit. I present to you this gallery of images, a humble quest for the spirit of the “rendezvous” of the Parisian cafe.

Prague, September 2017 © Pablo Munini

” Paris Rendez- Vous ” I ,  video on Pablo Munini Youtube channel

Paris meeting place rendezvous