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 …
The Paris Water Pavilion is a building at 77 avenue de Versailles in the Auteuil quarter of the 16th arrondissement. It is a building from the nineteenth century that originally housed a steam-driven pump to bring up water from the Seine for the then-independent towns of Auteuil and Passy. It now Read More …
The Wallace Fountains in Paris were named after the English philanthropist and art collector Sir Richard Wallace (1818-1890), who donated them to the city of Paris starting in 1872. Their purpose was to dispense safe drinking water, after the city’s public water system had been damaged during the Franco-Prussian war Read More …
The fresco in this photo (above) is at the north end of the Rue de la Gaîté, at the corner of Boulevard Edgar Quinet, where a popular ice cream shop attracts long lines of customers. As the name implies, the Rue de la Gaîté has always been a place of Read More …