I’ll confess to having a stack of Parisian histories (and a number on my Kindle as well) that have been leafed through but not exactly read. I mean to, I want to, I just haven’t. I am not sure where I picked up a copy of Edmund White’s The Flâneur, but it’s the perfect little…
Category: Paris
Gertrude Three Ways
I first meet Gertrude Stein during my Pablo Picasso phase, and my Hemingway phase, and my F. Scott Fitzgerald phase and then I come across her in Bryant Park in New York and I see her resting at Père-Lachaise in Paris and I would swear I see her in a little park in Mallory Square…
Paris to Woodstock: Sculpture Deep and Light
Travel and art seem to go hand in hand, so today I share two very different works, in two very different places, that trigger very different emotions. Auguste Rodin’s Burghers of Calais commemorates the leaders of Calais who volunteered to be executed to spare the city of Calais during the 100 Years War between England…
Paris: This Is the End
A fitting finale for our last day in Paris is a visit to Père-Lachaise Cemetery. On the subway ride there, I begin to doubt the appropriateness of this trek. Are we squandering our time by looking to the past? Will the Senior Adventurer and the Youthful Adventurer, both on this trip, become bored or dismissive?…
Reading Without Reservations
I pick up Alice Steinbach’s Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman (Random House, 2000) at North Salem, N.Y.’s Ruth Keeler Memorial Library book sale, so I don’t have a lot of money invested in it. The first 20 pages or so really annoy so that I wonder whether I should stick with it,…
Quality Time at the Eiffel Tower
Figuring that the Eiffel Tower will be a ho-hum stop on our tour of France, I buy tickets to go see it on the first night we will be in Paris. I’ve seen the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, site of the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens. I’ve seen the Statue of Liberty. Neither…
Three Lines Worth Waiting On (and Two to Skip)
The frustration of any trip—especially one taken during peak tourism times—is waiting on line. If only all major world attractions had a FastPass, where I could return at a designated hour and cut right to the front of the line. Some attractions, though, are worth those minutes and hours and sweaty days of snaking forward…
Paris: Don’t Skip Sainte Chapelle
During this season of renewal, my mind floats to my favorite churches in Paris. I can’t help but marvel at Sainte Chapelle, stuck next to a courthouse, the little sibling of its competitor, the grand Notre Dame Cathedral. With each located on the Ile de la Cité, and with time in the capital limited, the…
What We Used to Think of Paris, and Women
Get a few glimpses of 1960s Paris—and New York—in A New Kind of Love, starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward playing, respectively, a ‘newspaper man’ and a career-gal fashion designer who meet not-so-cute on a plane headed toward France. Newman’s character, a boozing, womanizing charmer with an ironclad contract (did those ever really exist for…
Can You Really See a City unless You’ve Been beneath It?
No matter how fantastical the artwork, the Youthful Adventurer can only appreciate so much of it before being obligated to run, jump, shout, and—as has happened more than once—set off museum alarms. We were fortunate to find alternatives in Paris that could keep the young set amused: the elevator ride up the Eiffel Tower, a…