365: Red; Food, glorious food...

For the fourth year of my gallery show with my colleague, Chris Tait, we travelled to Paris. We were going to Tokyo, but our respective schedules generally, and Chris's teaching schedule, delayed our booking to the point Paris, weirdly, became the affordable alternative. Happy accident!

Not knowing the city, and having made the decision late in the year, I booked what I thought to be a great choice of hotel/flights package.

Our hotel was located north of the river, and literally underneath the junction of two converging roads of the peripherique, which is the ring-road circling Paris.

From the nearby metro, we had to walk through a narrow, garbage-strewn roadway bordered on the south by garages and dilapidated car wash bays, and on the north by a garbage dump cum shanty town, where several families lived surrounded by the trash of the local community.

Behind our hotel on the other side of the fence bordering the hotel's patio and exterior gardens, were condemned buildings which were caving in due to fires and destruction by resident bad boys.

Inside the hotel? Total oasis. Weird. Lovely room, great buffet breakfast, nice staff... Step outside the door? Armageddon.

Generally, the area we stayed in was run down and probably not the safest for a couple of white kids from Canada, being a fairly middle-eastern-population community. That said, I didn't feel unsafe so much as feeling like a curiosity; it was obvious people were super confused by us: we stuck out for sure.

Regardless of the generally un-nice reality of the area, no matter what place we went into for food in our neighbourhood or anywhere else in Paris, it was always gorgeous. The street out front of a shop could be a disaster of crap laying about, but inside, there was peace and structure. Paris is nothing if not precise where it comes to presentation of food.