If you’re planning on heading out on the town on New Year’s Eve, the RATP has a little gift for you: free rides on the subway, buses, trams, and RER trains throughout Ile de France from 5:00 pm on December 31st through noon on New Year’s Day. But be advised that the Metro itself only functions in its [...]
If you’re new to Paris, you may not be aware that Parisians enjoy winter sports as much as the rest of the world does. The usually milder weather is no deterrent to ice skating enthusiasts, as evidenced the selected list of available rinks below. It’s good clean fun for the entire family, very affordable, and [...]
I watched The Tourist and was happy to see Angelina Jolie (aka Elise Ward) sitting on the terrasse of one of my favorite Parisian cafés, Le Nemours, between the Musée du Louvre and the Palais Royal Gardens. Café Nemours is located on the Place Colette, just outside the beaded entrance of metro Palais Royal. This [...]
In the late ’60s or early ’70s, a French house guest, whose parents ran a cultural festival in the North of France, brought as his present a seriograph that was simply captivating and something like the one on the right. A few weeks ago an art historian appraising our paltry collection for insurance purposes wrote that [...]
You couldn’t get more romantic than this: the Eiffel Tower in the snow on a sunny December afternoon.Then, you walk across the Pont de l’Iena bridge to the right bank and catch the #72 bus west a few stops to Versailles–Exelmans, just across from 137 Avenue de Versailles, the Tierny & Co restaurant, a cozy [...]
I don’t know if we offended the gods or something, but this year’s weather really sucks. No only have we broken a cold record (the coldest December since 1969!), not only did we have snow like – almost – never, but on top of that, now the Seine is overflowing! I took this photo yesterday [...]
The French bulldog is descended from an asian “mastiff” type of dog, that have a flattened muzzle and a strong jaw, but the race was really developed from the British bulldog. Mixed with the bulldog brought over to French by British workers around 1850, and bred with the terrier dogs or the “doguin” dogs that [...]
Even the French are worried these days about putting on weight. Although obesity isn’t the problem here that it is in the States, the indicators are all moving in the wrong direction. A new social marketing campaign seems to be everywhere, urging folks to make sure they get 30 minutes of exercise a day without [...]
Year after year, hordes of university students head to France for their junior year abroad, as they have been doing since the 1920s. Perhaps you were one of them. In 1949 those students included a 20-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier. She had visited France before, on a whirlwind European trip the previous summer with some family friends, [...]
Merry Christmas everyone! The Paris Blog’s little gift to you is a coupon code for 10% off Air France economy-class tickets booked between now and January 31 for travel between January 1 and March 31, 2011. The code is WINTER925.
