When I left Paris to move to Washington, DC thirteen years ago (**le gasp**) the city didn't even have a single Starbucks yet. Now they're everywhere, and I'm not saying that's a good thing but I do want to point out that the coffee scene has changed in a few years. Of course, Paris has always been known for its street-side cafés, where you can grab a quick noisette at the counter or linger for hours at the terrace people watching and sipping a café crème. Those were never really about the coffee and new cafés, inspired by the artisanal coffee culture in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. have popped up all over town. In many of those, it's not unusual to hear English spoken fluently behind ...
Postcard from France
A Taste of Lille ~ Méert’s Legendary Waffles
No visit to the Northern French city of Lille would be complete without a stop at 27 rue Esquermoise. This address has delighted local gourmands since 1761. Initially, it was a humble chocolaterie and ice cream shop until it was taken over in 1849 by Michael Paulus Gislinus Méert who turned the shop into a local institution with its signature thin, gaufres filled with Madagascar vanilla. Today, the former confectionery is an elegant patisserie, salon de thé and gourmet gourmet restaurant and a must-visit sight if you're in the area. I don't remember the first time I had one of Méert's waffles, but I must have been a baby -- I'm a second generation Lilloise after all, though we moved to ...
Postcard from France: Marseille
Last Christmas, my uncle invited us to spend the holidays at his house in Goult, a lovely village in the Luberon, located halfway between Aix-en-Provence and Avignon. My uncle is my mother's brother and they both grew up in Marseille, France's second largest city. Rather than take the train to Avignon and get picked up by my uncle there, we decided to spend a day and a half in Marseille and rent a car to drive to Goult. I have very little childhood memories of Marseille, and my husband had never been so I was excited to discover the city, especially with my favourite Marseillaise - my mom - as our guide! FIRST THINGS FIRST: LUNCH AT CHEZ ETIENNE The trip from Paris Gare-de-Lyon ...
Postcard from France: Cour Bérard in Paris
Cour Bérard is a small street in the 4eme arrondissement in Paris. It's the home of the Moretti & Moretti, an art galerie which focuses on street art, digital art and installations. I headed to the galerie to check out its Konny Stedin exhibit. If you've been to Paris recently, I'm sure you spotted some of the German street artist's work. Her signature black and white portraits, with the red paint tears, can be seen throughout Paris, like this one below which I snapped a few years ago outside of Beaubourg But the best street art wasn't inside the gallery. It was actually outside, in the street, which was lined with graffiti black cats. Cour Bérard is a small street, but it's ...
Travel Highlights from 2014
2014 was a great year for me travel-wise. I made it home to France not once, but twice. I made the most out of a few work trips in New York, Chicago, Raleigh, Boca Raton and Austin, Texas. I even tested out Icelandair's "the best part of a trip to Paris is Iceland" advertisement by doing a stop-over in Reyjkavik on my way back from Paris. The highlight of last year, though, was traveling to Brazil to cheer on my beloved Bleus during the World Cup, a trip I had been planning for and looking forward to for the past 3 years. MAKING THE MOST OUT OF WORK TRIPS Chicago (and New York before that) happened in the dead of winter. For Chicago, I think I got to go because none of my colleagues were ...
Postcard from Paris: a Paws Café at Café des Chats
Paws Café... Pause café... get it? OK, that was a bad pun, but I couldn't help it. Just like I couldn't help visiting both of Paris' cat cafés during my last stay in the city. In my defense, one of them is just a few blocks away from my parents' apartment. When did rue Sedaine become so hip? The original Café des Chats, located in the haut Marais close to Beaubourg, opened back in the fall of 2013 and turned out to be so popular that a second location near Bastille was added. Margaux Gandelon, the young entrepreneuse who launched the "café chat" concept in Paris after a successful crowd-funding campaign, was directly inspired by the "neko" cafés in Japan. She describes her project as ...
Postcard from France: Visiting the Louvre-Lens
Lens, a small town in northern France, boasts a football stadium with a capacity larger than its population, but doesn't have a movie theater. A former mining strong hold, its main touristic and cultural attractions used to be world war I cemeteries and Europe's tallest slag heaps (known by their formal French name of base et terrils jumeaux du 11/19.) That all changed in 2012. That year, one of the world's most famous museums, the Louvre, opened an outpost in Lens, attracting some 900,000 visitors its first year of operation. While that's barely anything compared to the 8 million visitors that go through the Parisian museum each year, that's still very impressive. Lens is easily ...
Guest Post ~ My Trip to Paris by Ashley
Neither David nor I can remember how we agreed that Paris would be our honeymoon location. And truthfully, it never occurred to either of us as being cliché (being the city of love and all). The truth is, we're city people, and we like to visit other cities, and we both took enough years of high school and college French that we felt it needed to serve some purpose. We flew to Paris a few days after our wedding, with only the vaguest ideas of what we would do or see. We had secured our apartment via AirBnB, a great little studio in Le Marais, exchanged our dollars for Euros and headed off on Iceland Air. When we got there we were surprised that Paris seemed trapped in time. For me, it was ...
Guest Post ~ My Trip to Paris by Cecile
Gertrude Stein once said “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” I couldn't agree more! When I am in Paris, I feel very much at home and become une petite Parisienne. Of course, it helps that my father is a francophile and my mother is, well, une vraie Parisienne. She used to live near the picturesque Place des Vosges and I grew up hearing all about Paris, its culture and its fashion. I'm lucky that I get to visit about once a year, and I'm thrilled to share with you a few of the things I love the most about my hometown... ... starting with fashion. French women always manage to look effortlessly chic, elegantly maneuvering the cobblestone streets of le Marais in their Louboutins ...
