One thing about Paris that really suits us is the fact that it’s such a film-friendly town. There are so many theatres, playing so many different movies (current and classic), that it’s pretty easy to find something we want to watch. Of course, we’re somewhat limited at this point to English-language movies (at least until […]

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in my post Kissell on Kessel, I discovered shortly after arriving in France that there’s a street named after a famous writer and journalist whose name looks suspiciously familiar. I’d been to the street, but once I read Kessel’s biography and discovered that he’s buried in the […]

If you’re in Paris this month, and haven’t yet checked out the current exhibition at the Musée de la Poste, I would strongly encourage you to see it before it ends its run on September 1st. The exhibition, titled “Avec le Facteur Cheval,” is a fascinating look at one man’s life’s work, and includes numerous […]

One of my favorite memories of previous visits to Paris was the first time I visited Notre Dame. Upon entering the dim, cavernous cathedral, I was awed by the incredible height of its arched ceiling, which seemed to expand upwards infinitely. The quality of the light coming in through the intricate stained glass windows was […]

Before we moved to Paris I had a list of places I wanted to visit when we got here, and La Grande Épicerie was very close to the top of the list. I had read about this food emporium, part of Le Bon Marché department store, on various Paris-based blogs, and was eager to see […]

Even though we’d figured out how to get “regular” telephone service in France before we left (see Taking our phone service with us (or not)), we knew we’d both also want cell phone service. We could have waited until we got here to figure it out, but we weren’t confident enough in our French to […]

Today’s article on Interesting Thing of the Day is about Paris Plages, the city’s yearly project to create artificial beaches in the center of town, including a 3 km stretch along the Seine. Parisians and tourists alike seem to think this is the Greatest Thing Ever, or at least the next-greatest thing to the new […]

It’s amazing sometimes how a small thing can turn into a big thing when there is a language barrier to navigate. Case in point: last week Joe and I went into a small grocery store we’d never been in before, and all went smoothly until we got up to the checkout. The cashier was ringing […]

In the waning days of June, as Joe and I frantically prepared for our move to Paris, there was one thing on our list that we did not get done: we didn’t see the movie Ratatouille when it first came out on June 29th. It didn’t seem like a major problem at the time, but […]

A few years ago, I wrote about absinthe on Interesting Thing of the Day. To summarize: while living in Canada, I became quite fond of this concoction of distilled herbs, legendary as the muse of writers and painters and equally legendary for its alleged contributions to insanity and violence. But as it’s still (mostly) illegal […]

In keeping with the theme of “hey-that’s-almost-spelled-like-my-name,” this afternoon, just a couple of hours after my post about rue Joseph Kessel, we walked out of a Métro station and saw this: It’s a tiny shop on rue des Halles that sells women’s clothes, shoes, handbags, and suchlike.

Shortly after we arrived in Paris, I began noticing how many of the streets are named after writers, and I jokingly asked Morgen what it would take for the city of Paris to name a street after me. As it turns out, they don’t have to. All they need to do is correct a small […]