One morning during our 2011 VirtualTourist meeting in Paris, we met in the Parc du Champ de Mars near the Eiffel Tower for a picnic. I rode over there on a Vélib’ bike from the Latin Quarter — as did another VT member, Dave Sut. (He and I and several Read More …
One morning in September 2011, a group of VirtualTourist members met at the Square René Viviani in the Latin Quarter of Paris (with the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in the background) for a walking tour led by VT member Paul Smith, who took us through some side streets of the Latin Quarter, Read More …
Hippophagy, meaning the eating of horse meat, wasn’t even legal in France until 1866, although there was a black market for horse meat long before that, especially in times of crisis. According to the French historian Sylvain Leteux, horse meat lost its taboo status and became a popular food in France Read More …
This old façade of the Bains de Chatêaudun, made mainly of ceramic tiles, has been lovingly preserved and renovated, although the bathhouse itself no longer exists because most people now have indoor plumbing at home, so they can bathe or shower whenever they want to without going out to the Read More …
This picturesque art-deco façade — made mainly of ceramic tiles — provides a welcome splash of color on the otherwise undistinguished Cours de Vincennes at the eastern end of Paris. Zaengerler et Roussel was an enterprise that made tiles and mosaics. The company no longer exists (having gone bankrupt in Read More …
One of the things I really love is cycling home at night after the opera. This is even more magical in Paris because you not only have the opera going through your head, you also have Paris all around you. You do have to look out for the taxis, though, Read More …
The Arc de Triomphe was commissioned by the Emperor Napoléon I in 1806 to celebrate the triumph of his armies over the rest of Europe in the early nineteenth century, particularly his triumph over the Russian and Austrian Empires at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. In recent decades, however, Read More …
In one word I can tell you what’s wrong with the Avenue des Champs-Élysées: cars. (Not to mention motorcycles and trucks.) This street is marketed as “the most beautiful avenue in the world”, and it really is beautiful except for the fact that there is an ugly ten-lane highway running right Read More …
The amazing thing about my visit to Paris in June 2006 was that in ten days I saw eight operas at seven different venues. As I wrote at the time, “I don’t know of any other city in the world where this would be possible.” The operas I saw on Read More …
In terms of the number of seats that they can actually put on sale for any given evening, around 1,750, this is only the third largest opera house in Paris (assuming you still count the Châtelet as an opera house). But when you consider the amount of high-quality space that Read More …