There always seems to be a festive atmosphere on the “piazza” at Place Georges Pompidou in Paris, in front of the modern art museum Centre Pompidou aka Beaubourg. Groups of street performers take turns putting on shows and funny sketches here. The Centre Pompidou was one of the first huge Read More …
There are said to be 38,000 works of art on display in the Louvre in Paris, so it’s sort of like the internet or the Frankfurt Book Fair — you can’t possibly see them all, so you have to navigate to see what you want, or take potluck. And don’t Read More …
As a fan of both operas and cycling, I of course wanted to see the show Orphée et Eurydice à bicyclette (Orpheus and Eurydice on bicycles) that was playing in Paris at the Lucernaire in January 2018. This “musical fantasy” was written by Pierre Lericq, who also performed it along Read More …
In 2017, I returned to the Lucernaire and saw two more shows there. The first was an adaptation of the novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, adapted and directed by Manon Montel. I was curious to see how she would condense an 1800-page novel into a 90-minute play. The solution Read More …
In 2014, I stayed for several nights at the Hôtel Stanislas. Since I had never stayed in the 6th arrondissement before, I entered that as a search criterion in booking.com and came up with this small hotel on Rue du Montparnasse — a street I was slightly familiar with because Read More …
Here are some more photos of the Eiffel Tower that I have taken from various vantage points over the past few years. The first is from the right bank of the Seine, downstream from the tower, with the double-decker Bir-Hakeim Bridge crossing over to the Île aux Cygnes (Island of Read More …
When I first started writing about Paris on the now-defunct website VirtualTourist, I announced that my Paris page was going to be “ET-free” — on the grounds that VirtualTourist already had 1,178 tips on the Eiffel Tower (this was in 2006; a year later there were 82 more). I wanted Read More …
In my old Guide de Paris, published by A. Taride around what we quaintly used to call ‘the turn of the century’ (meaning around 1900), the Eiffel Tower is not listed under E for Eiffel but under T for Tour, the French word for tower. In the first line of Read More …
Salle Pleyel is an Art Deco concert hall that was originally built in 1927 by the Pleyel piano company. For decades it was a leading classical music venue in Paris, even though the acoustics and appearance of the building suffered from a series of botched renovation projects over the years. Read More …
Nancy has a small self-service on-street bicycle rental system called vélOstan’lib, with 29 stations, 250 bicycles and 560 docking points. These numbers have not changed since 2015, so either they haven’t expanded the system since then or (more likely) they have neglected to update the numbers on their website. The Read More …