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Come along on a ‘Hidden Paris’ tour and we’ll show you a few places off the beaten path. One stop is Rue Crémieux, which thanks to Instagram, is perhaps not really ‘hidden’ anymore, but it’s been a popular addition to the tour. Take a few minutes now to escape to Rue Crémieux with tour guide Simon Jones.

At one time this enchanting little cobbled street, hidden away in the 12th arrondissement, was a “secret place” few people knew about. These days, however, Rue Crémieux is an increasingly sought out haunt for fashion photographers, filmmakers, and people looking for something uniquely suited the color-saturated world of Instagram.

In many respects, this quaint throughway between Rue de Lyon and Rue de Bercy doesn’t really feel like Paris at all, and is perhaps more reminiscent of Portobello Road in London’s Notting Hill, or Burano in Venice. Amid the colorful façades, trompes l’œil paintings, and shuttered windows, are window boxes and terracotta pots filled with lush plants that add to the feeling you have somehow escaped Paris for a moment. This is a residential street, albeit a very short one, but the homes are not large. In fact, on one side of the street, the building is little more than one room in depth.

Instagram has made Rue Crémieux so famous…

An interesting fact that few visitors to Rue Crémieux probably realize is that the street is actually named after a lawyer. Jokes aside, it was renamed in 1897 in dedication to Adolphe Crémieux, who defended the human rights of the Jewish people living in France.

Instagram has made Rue Crémieux so famous that residents have felt increasingly under siege from visitors who forget that the street is a residential neighborhood. In early 2019, residents tired of the noise, pointing lenses, and inconsiderate tourists asked the city of Paris to erect gates closing the street to visitors on evenings and weekends. One particularly understanding resident of Rue Cremieux told the BBC that she understands people want to visit the street and take pictures, but she asked visitors to “do it with some common courtesy and respect for property owners, fellow visitors, and the environment.”

At Bike About, we’re careful to spend only a few moments dazzled by the beauty of the delightful Crémieux. For more beautiful photos, we take you down lesser-known streets, such as the Cour Damoye, pictured here, and let your hearts, imaginations, and cameras run wild.

Ever wonder what happens when a child falls in the grand canal at Versailles? Tour guide Joshua, pictured below, has a story to tell

It was the second month this season that thus far had been colored by persistent rain. “We usually only get three or four days in the season, usually,” Mark muttered as we sheltered from the downpour in a deserted Versailles marketplace. Our four guests cowered in the cafe nearby. That was my first day. Today is mild, peppered with clouds, not warm but good enough and spirits are high. At the shed, as I manhandle the bikes out of their puzzle-like formation, a father of two tugs at my ear, “I have a change of clothes for the children, could I leave them here?” Mark has nicknamed me The Bad Luck Fairy. It’s bound to rain today and this way there are dry clothes for when we get back. I nod, “good plan”

It stays dry. The older of the two children latches onto my back wheel as we ride down to the market. It turns out she is not to leave my side for the entire tour. She offers me advice on my choice of footwear, while I wave my hand madly behind my back to keep her from straying too far into the middle of the road. We whittle through the history and some child-friendly Versailles quips. At the Grand Trianon, the young group is beginning to fidget; the weather has held but may break at any moment, risking our idyllic picnic. I offer firm instructions to my tiny tag-along for riding down the steep cobblestone hill and thankfully she hangs back with Dad

We all picnic by the canal. I warn everyone to lay their blankets up by the trees, away from the water, as the wet spring rains collect where the bank slopes down. I munch through my tour guide lunch – baguette with cheese and a roughly cut tomato – and regale the old ones with some gory revolutionary stories while the young ones are off playing.

Then, there is a delicate plopping sound, like a small stone falling into water. One of the children, my tag-along, is standing by the canal’s edge. One. “I think she fell in the canal!” Another mother shouts. It’s true, the five year old has somehow fallen in

I take off, hardly believing myself, power slide through the wet grass to the edge. I plunge both arms, and a leg, into the water and haul the five year old out. Her sister begins to cry, and Dad sweeps the wet one into a bear hug, mum comforting. No harm done.

Luckily we are all English, and just started saying sorry over and over. The rest of the group spouts phrases loudly— “not your fault”, “happens to every parent”, “no harm done”. Everyone laughs and congratulates me for my quick reaction, I’m as amazed as they are. During first aid training the instructor told us it’s normal to freeze in a crisis. I had been sure then that I would be a freezer. Apparently not.

Lunch officially interrupted and clouds gathering I recommend we make our way back due to the shivering five year old in our midst.

We make our way over to the bikes, and my tag-along has perked up. Her mother keeps telling her she was “very good to start screaming for help”, and that she probably saved her sister’s life. I smile, “lucky we’ve got that change of clothes up in the shed”. The dad smirks as he wraps his five year
old in reams of waterproofs and his own ginormous woolly jumper.

Back in the Peloton I recounts the story to Emily, Mark, and the others. Mark promptly raises his flat white in a toast,

to the Bad Luck Fairy

Tourism (especially bike tourism) has always been a seasonal activity. Most of our tour guides do whatever they can to make it through the wet Paris Winter while dreaming of the day when it’s sunny again. Even as company owners, Paul and I had to work a number of side jobs at the beginning of Bike About.

The first year of Bike About, Paul and I haphazardly distributed about 5,000 brochures to hotels all around the city. We had a website (kind of) and thought that surely we could muster at least 10-15 clients per day on the bike tours. We thought.

Well, between May and September we averaged 2 clients per day…. Needless to say, I needed another job by September.

I found one, and worked for a temp agency for 4 months in the off-season to see myself through the Winter. My first job was a 2 month stint as a telemarketer, or more accurately, a “survey-er”. This entailed calling up companies to see if they were happy with their deliveries from Geodis. Of course, 75% hung up on me before I made it to the second sentence. After some brainstorming, I figured out that I needed to act like I worked for Geodis (I didn’t) and pretend to intimately know their company’s needs (Again, I didn’t). Suddenly they were happy to be surveyed, because they thought they’d benefit from it. (You guessed it: They wouldn’t). In the end, this method was a catch-22 because people would be happy to answer my survey questions, but then took the liberty to discuss how peeved they were about every small thing Geodis did, and I had to pretend that I knew what they were talking about (I didn’t) and could do something about it (I couldn’t). I would get so bored during their long rants, I would find myself saying “I’ll look into that” or “I’ll let my manager know”. Little did they know that I was working for a “survey company” sitting in a dark, cramped room in a dingy Paris suburb and that I was getting paid €1.50 for every completed survey.

My second job that Winter was a two week stint on a luxury cruise boat on the Seine. Somehow I had landed a job as a interpreter. Looking back, I may been slightly liberal with how I described my level of French on my CV. I had arrived in France three years prior and had a decent level of French, but I was definitely not an interpreter. But hey, I was desperate. My first day on the boat I was so nervous to be found out, that I pretended to be extra French as I chatted with the new colleagues — finishing all of my sentences with “en fait”, which was the cool lingo in 2006. In the end, it didn’t even matter: it turned out, they didn’t need an interpreter. They needed me to go around to Japanese businessmen and explain in English what they were eating. Thankfully, that, I could do for a few weeks.

In the years that followed, Paul and I got the company up and running, and got to the point where were didn’t need any more side hustles – in fact, we now pride ourselves in being that seasonal side hustle for a team of tour guides here in Paris — and the next few weeks of blog posts are just a few of their crazy stories.