One knows the Parisian summer is in full swing when Paris starts emptying out, when suddenly there’s space on the boulevards or cobblestone streets once the mass summer holiday exodus has begun. A friend told me yesterday that last weekend 1.3 million Parisians left the city by train and plane. No wonder our Sunday market [...]

For at least eight years, hortensia (hydrangeas) bloomed in this giant plant space on our balcony. Sadly, damage when the balcony was sand-blasted doomed the hortensia. When weeds started to grow in its place, I looked out the window and thought ‘I should go pull them up.’ But I was busy and traveling, so the [...]

My friend has a theory: London and New York are boy towns, while Paris is all about being a girl. Judging from all the fashion, pink pastries and charming men around, I think she may be onto something. Paris is the ideal destination for a girl getaway. Even if that girl is [...]

After moving to Paris, I made it my aim to explore the city’s many stunning bibliothèques, like the gorgeous Bibliothèque Mazarine, a dream of a library if there ever was one, and eventually I made my way to the biggest library in the city: la Bibliothèque Nationale de France Site François-Mitterand, called “la Bibliothèque Mitterand” for [...]

Anglophone feminists, rejoice! The new English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpiece The Second Sex was published in the UK this week by Jonathan Cape (with the American edition set for publication by Knopf in April 2010).
Viewed by many as feminism’s foundational text, Gallimard published The Second Sex in two volumes (to mixed reviews) in 1949.  It sold extremely [...]

15 years ago, my first experience of Paris was the Gallieni international bus terminal in the basement of a 1970s shopping centre. I had said goodbye to my girlfriend that morning and was about to spend a year working in Hungary. I now had a 24 hour bus journey ahead of me and a couple [...]

I bawled my eyes out on the plane ride back from New York this time around. Alone in the dark at 3AM. For exactly 76 minutes. I thought about my family and cried. I thought about my friends and cried. I thought about all the stoops in Brooklyn and Queens I sat on and cried. [...]

O’Kari,  a traditional North-African hammam devoted exclusively to women, is my current favorite. Opened just four months ago in the newly trendy Montorgueil district, it has the perfect combination of luxurious pampering, beautiful setting, all-natural products, and authentic spa techniques perfected by Arab women for centuries that will have you glowing. When you enter, the friendly [...]

With a little time on my hands today, I sifted through my photos and made an album of the 42 Things I Love About Paris. If you have a similar album somewhere, send me the link and I will post it on The Paris Blog.

Is Jeanette Winterson writing about Paris a lot more frequently in her journalism, or is it just me? Her latest column for the Times is a bit of fairy dust about her love for Paris and Shakespeare and Co and how when we think we’re speaking French we may be saying something altogether different. This is followed [...]