Muguet des bois

Hmmm - think I might have broken the rules slightly. Like Matthew said in Paris maybe I need more than a single image to say the things I want to say.
Still I'll pick one of the two flower sellers - two very different girls selling flowers on the same street. These is the street girl selling flowers for a Euro a bunch. Across the street an older girl was working in a flower shop selling bunches for 20 and 25 Euros

The first of May and a day for flowers on the streets of Paris, or more specifically for muguet des bois, lily of the valley. Everywhere on this fete du travail - workers holiday - people were selling bunches of white flowers. On the first of May the usual rules prohibiting the sale of goods on the street without a license don't apply so anyone can sell the traditional flowers - a gift for family or friends. And despite the 1 euro bunches available from little kids on almost every corner, the flower shops were still doing a good trade with their much more expensive versions.
they told us that everything would be shut, so it was a day for wandering about the streets and seeing what we could find. Headed out with A and her Kiev. At the Bastille I photographed flowers on a street stall while close by we saw a waiter standing on the street having a smoke. In his black clothes and white apron he looked so very August Sander. A asked if she could take his picture and he agreed but hid his cigarette behind his back and looked straight at her. No, she wanted a natural pose, what were the words? 'Regarde ici', and pointing somewhere else seemed to do the trick.
And that was the pattern of our day - I looked for 'May Day moments' and A got into conversations and took street portraits with her medium format camera. Like the bride-to-be with her hen party - complete with white dress and sign around her neck "baisers 50 cents". In the Eglise Saint Eustache de Paris, where the organist was playing the wedding march for some reason, someone had left a bunch of lilies of the valley next to a Raymond Mason relief sculpture depicting the closure of the old fruit and vegetable markets at Les Halles. There was a short handwritten note with the flowers which seemed to say that his work had made him immortal. I assumed he had been dead a while but later I discovered he had only died in February this year.
When we stopped for something to eat in a corner cafe on Rue Montorguei I took photos of my two very different flower sellers. We moved on and into the courtyards of the Palais Royal. Under the trees a strange ritual was going on - several men in suits seemed to be teasing one of their number who was wearing a red blindfold. He was passed plastic glasses of wine to drink and made to play blind man's buff. We discussed it with a couple of Italian tourists but our best guess was that it was a stag weekend or initiation into a drinking club. Perhaps we should have asked them, but it didn't seem quite right. There were a few football fans in another courtyard - Monaco scarves around their necks, looking around and taking each others pictures. Presumably on their way to the cup final against PSG that evening out at the Stade de France. Given the recent trouble at PSG games I had decided it wasn't an event to try and see.
We wandered slowly back towards the hotel, taking more pictures and chatting. It was strange but we had been in Paris a whole week. On one hand it felt no time at all but on the other it seemed so long since we had first arrived.