Street Performers

Paris has lots of wonderful street performers. There are many of the same buskers we have in Melbourne, and also some very funny people who specialise entertaining people waiting in the interminable lines for galleries and museums. The best of these are very good ad-libbers who take people out of the line and make them part of their acts. They then pass around their hat for contributions. They do make the lines more bearable.
On one of the bridges over the Seine this afternoon I passed a man sitting one bench beside another flat bench. He looked to be North African and was playing a variation on the old thimble and pea game. He had three flat black discs about five cm in diameter. One of them had a mirror inlaid in its underside. They were in a straight line, and he would quickly rearrange them, sometime flipping one over to show that it was black on one side. All the time he would chant in a sing-song voice. There were up to ten people watching, and eventually one would give the man 50 Euros ($80) and point to the disc that he thought had the mirror on the reverse. If he didn’t pick it another would hand over 50 Euros pick one of the remaining discs, and if it had the mirror on the reverse be given 60 Euros back. I don’t know what a winner would be given if they were to pick the mirror first time, because nobody did this in the five minutes I was watching. One man bet 50 Euros five times without success before storming off.
When I was walking back to town house by myself later in the day a woman coming towards me bent down and seemed to pick something up off the footpath just in front of me. She held out her hand with a man’s ring and said in poor French “This is yours?” I think that she may have been Spanish. She handed the ring to me, and I looked at it. It was heavy, hallmarked, and was certainly gold. I said as best I could. “No Madam. Il n’est pas le mien. C’est or, et le soleil sourit pour vous. Bonne chance”. She pulled down the top of her T shirt slightly to show a gold cross on a chain and said “Non, non, non. Je suis evangeliste”, and closed my fingers on the ring, and walked away. I was dumbfounded, and walked on with the ring in my hand, thinking that I would just hand it in to the Police. Two minutes later I was photographing a wonderful large bronze statue of a stallion rearing away from a spike trap, and the same woman came up to me and asked if I could buy her a Coca Cola and something to eat. As I felt in my pockets for some loose change I thought “Oh, come on…”, and used the phrase highly recommended in one of French courses I did “Desole Madam, je n’ai pas d’argent”, and gave her back her ring. Perhaps I should have paid her for her performance.