rue Lepic gets a new rue!

When we arrived in Paris in late August, we were puzzled when the cab would not make a turn to get to our street.  Suddenly, both sides of the street had become one way, the wrong way.  It was not a long walk, so we got out of the cab and walked our luggage to the apartment.  Along the way we discovered that the section of road just beneath our windows was being replaced.  It was completely blocked off.

The signs said it would take a complete month to replace the road.  We were annoyed, thinking that we would spend our entire month in Paris listening to noisy road work.  But we were off to Zermatt, so we decided not to worry about it.

Over the five weeks of our stay, we learned a lot about Parisian road construction.

 As soon as the cement material had been laid, a curious event occurred almost every night. 

The restaurants adjacent to the road took down sections of the barricades each evening and set up tables in the roadway. 

Why not?!

 Before laying the cobblestones, they would be lined up in rows.  The men setting them would reach of a stone fitting the hole they needed filled, and use them up as they moved along. 

We wondered how they knew to keep to the scallop pattern, but they just seemed to know it by feel. 

 On the weekends, the tables would stay up al lday and into the evening. 

 And why not? 

All too soon, the work and our visit were over.  The road opened up a couple of days before we left.  There had been almost no noise, and no disruption for us, and we missed the evening's entertainment from our windows.