Better bike lanes, fewer bookshops — the recent changes at Place Saint-Michel are a mixed bag. The bicycle lanes at Place Saint-Michel are now wider and better protected than I remember them from before the pandemic. This is typical of the improvements that have been made to the bicycle infrastructure 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 …
The Rue de Rennes is one of the long, straight streets that were cut through Paris during the Second Empire, under Napoléon III and his Prefect, Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891). Hundreds of old buildings that were in the way of the new street were expropriated and demolished. The street now runs Read More …
Since electing its first Socialist mayor in 2001, the city of Paris has made considerable progress in re-allocating public space: widening sidewalks, narrowing streets, creating bus and bicycle lanes and reducing the space devoted to cars. But the problem is so widespread that numerous streets in Paris still have grotesquely Read More …
It only rained once during the ten days I was in Paris in June 2006, and that was — you guessed it — ten minutes before show time at an open-air opera performance in the Senate Gardens, which are in the Luxembourg Gardens right behind Luxembourg Palace. A nice announcer Read More …
In the spring of 2019 I was invited to a book-signing in a Paris bookshop, because I had once ordered a book online from the publishing house Editions Alexandrines, so I was on their mailing list. The book in question was Le Paris de Mitterrand by Michèle Cotta, the 30th Read More …
Looking through my photos of the Lucernaire from the past few years, I see that sometime between 2014 and 2019 the wording over the entrance was changed. It used to read Centre national d’art et d’essai (National center for art and experimentation), but now it just reads Théâtre Lucernaire. This Read More …
For years I was mildly puzzled about who Saint Germain was, but only mildly. Now that I have finally looked him up, it turns out he was born around the year 496 and was Bishop of Paris from 555 until his death in 576. According to a poet called Venantius Read More …