Prostitutes

Transvestite prostitutes.  It was beautiful in Paris the other day!  I knew I had to get outside and take advantage of it, so I pulled out my map of Paris and found a couple of parks that I still hadn’t seen yet.  I told Sabine’s boyfriend that I wanted to go to Bois du Boulogne, and he just said “Why?”  I was a little startled by the question, but I said that it looks like a really nice park – there’s a lake in the center, and it’s big, and it’d be great for a bike ride.  I had even looked it up online and found that there were boat rentals for rowing on the lake, bike rentals and some Velib stations as well.  And it’s in a really nice neighborhood in Paris.  He responded “That’s where the hookers are.” And I was confused because I had never heard that, so I thought that there might be a translation error. 

Anyway, I had already sent a text to some friends asking if they wanted to bike around there, and my friend Alette said yes, but she had class until 5.  So we made a plan to meet there around 5:30 and explore the area.  It was creepy.  It stays light here until 7pm, but the part we first biked through was full of bare dead-looking trees and men walking through the woods.  It felt like we were in a bad movie, so we looked at my map to see how to get to the lake and biked a little faster.  We then found ourselves on a dirt path biking past three Spanish-speaking men dressed like women (and in short skirts) hanging around.  And there were a couple of cars paused on the road through the park near the dirt pathways.  But eventually we found the lake!  And it was very pretty! And there were people running and biking around, including women!  

When I told other French friends I went to the park, they all told me that everyone knows the park has transvestite prostitutes.  And the other one I wanted to visit (Bois de Vincennes) is known for having prostitutes.  They were quite surprised I chose to bike around at night…the timing wasn’t intentional though! And it looked nice on the map…