We went around Gazhane itself, visiting the museum shop. There were a few customers despite the bad weather. It's really more of a (nice) bookshop than a museum shop with lots of items like we're used to in France. Well, half the shop sells children's books (quite a few comics), some of which are in English. We took a few photos of politicised authors (Buzzati, Beauvoir, O'Farrel....). There were quite a few Western European books (like Asterix and the Smurfs). And a nice plump cat.
Then we went to the big new buildings below Gazhane. To get there, you have to take a large street where the houses are very run-down. There's a clear divide with a sort of bridge and a stream, and the houses along the stream are very poor. Then there's a sort of crossroads where you don't know where to cross, where there are no signs. This crossroads is unstructured and very noisy because of the overhanging dual carriageway. There's a mixture of different types of shops, with a sort of garage and a fishmonger's next to each other, and a storage area for household appliances in the background.
Then we found ourselves at the bottom of the towers. They're relatively new and at the bottom of the tower, the stalls are very different too, with storage areas, a chic fruit and vegetable shop and broken-down escalators. The differences in living standards and lifestyles seem very marked. We don't know whether these are offices or residential buildings, and therefore whether people live there and use the shops or whether they're just passing through....
Then it started raining really hard and we went back to the cafeteria. We realised that the pavement was full of potholes all along our walk.
