Posted by admin on January 31, 2008 under One stop travel guide to Paris | 
At a photo lab in Rochester, New York, negatives of pioneer photojournalist Robert Capa are in the process of being restored and will once again be brought to the public eye after remaining dormant and supposedly lost forever. The Figaro news report in Paris says - and maybe Gerda Taro will also be brought to the public eye! I’m always looking for Paris love stories and what could be more romantic than a couple fleeing Nazi Germany and Hungary - meeting in Paris, taking on new names and in Capa’s case an American identity (neither Capa or Taro are photojournalists original names) to photograph the Spanish Civil war. According to Ron Steinman’s article Capa and Taro Together at Last
they arrived in Paris in 1937. Taro was eventually killed on the front lines in Spain - while Capa remained in Paris. The Spanish Civil was an important factor stimulating the arrival of American expats in Paris between the two World Wars. A number of Americans had arrived in Europe to participate in Spain’s civil war as ‘freedom fighters’ . The name of the American brigade that participated was the Lincoln brigade.
A huge funeral was staged in Paris with a procession leading to Pere Lachaise cemetery where Gerda Taro was buried.
Even though her tombstone was designed by Giacometti, because the lease on the burial site expired, her tomb was expunged and the monument supposedly destroyed.
A hero compared to Joan of Arc one day becomes an unknown statistic when the burial site is no longer paid for.
So, the moral of this story is, if you ever get buried in Paris, leave enough money behind to ensure your place in history.
If you’d like to see photographs taken of Paris in the 1930s era (including photos by Robert Capa) the Hotel de Ville’s show Paris en Couleurs will be running until March 31st, 2008.
Mary Blume’s IHT story Coloring Paris: A photographic homage to the city writes “the irrepresible Robert Capa forsook black and white for color shots of girls swinging through the streets in Dior’s ‘New Look’”
Hotel de Ville (Paris’s town hall) is located at the metro stop by the same name: Hotel de Ville in Paris’s 1st arrondissement.
Posted by admin on under One stop travel guide to Paris |
We are still working on a really cool interactive Paris map for Parislogue, but until that’s complete we’d like to turn your attention to a new and really useful one in the updated Travel Guides section on BootsnAll.com, which is the main site on the network that hosts Parislogue.
You can see the new interactive map by clicking on the Map tab on the main BootsnAll Paris travel guide, or by going straight to this interactive Paris map link. You’ll find many Paris attractions on the map (with more coming soon) and clicking on the little star will bring up additional information along with hours and prices for each place. You can also see a selection of Paris hotels, hostels, and apartment rentals, with more information available by clicking on the appropriate icon.
Updated travel guides
Parislogue is the definititive Paris travel guide on the BootsnAll Travel Network, but for other destinations you might be interested in the new upgraded travel guides on the main site. There are mini-guides for nearly every country and major city in the world, so you can quickly see the highlights, and also some practical information as well as forum posts about each place.
These can be a great way to start planning a future trip, since every location is just a click or two away from every other location. You can find the travel guides by clicking on the map on the main BootsnAll.com home page.
In addition to the new interactive Paris map, there are similar maps for many other big cities around the world as well, and more will be coming soon.
The interactive maps are now part of the following travel guides:
- Amsterdam
- Antwerp
- Barcelona
- Berlin
- Boston
- Budapest
- Chicago
- Dresden
- Frankfurt
- Hong Kong
- London
- Madrid
- Montreal
- Munich
- New York
- Paris
- Philadelphia
- Prague
- Rome
- San Francisco
- Sydney
- Toronto
- Vancouver
- Washington DC
Posted by admin on January 30, 2008 under One stop travel guide to Paris |
My doctor said recently she doesn’t go on vacation without her face mask handy for long flights. She is a very cool doctor - and she would still look very cool even with a face mask. A translatlantic flight from New York to Paris will give you a minimum of six to seven hours to swap germs through the recycled air system so here are some things you can do to protect yourself from picking up a cold enroute:
Face mask. Gauze face masks may look weird - it’s definitely not a fashion statement, but for most of the flight you’re going to be staring at another person’s headrest.
If you haven’t yet heard of neti pots, these are saline solution irrigation kits that come in handy for clearing out your sinuses. I have to admit I don’t watch Opra Winfrey and I missed the Jan 8th article printed in IHT,
but French doctors have been prescribing saline sprays for colds for years. (I just never knew that the salt was the key ingredient for curing sinus headaches as well). Most of the saline treatments suggest using non-iodized salt.
This morning I used a much simpler saline treatment for a sore throat and cold: Gargle with warm salted tap water (I poured in about 1/4 cup of salt. Cup your hands and splash some of the salted water around the nose at the same time. You don’t have to actually pour the water into your passages - you can just exhale repeatedly.
Just a P.S. here regarding the IHT Neti pot story - I love the quote from a doctor who explains the reason why saline irrigation isn’t prescribed more often: “Studies indicate that saline nasal irrigation is a highly effective, minimally invasive intervention for people suffering from nasal issues,” Dr. Marple said. “But it’s just not as sexy to talk about. People want to hear about surgery or antibiotics.”
And just what is so sexy about surgery and antibiotics?
I’ve read that some flight passengers put a dab of triple antibiotic ointment around the nostrils. Now isn’t that just so sexy?
Re: Jet Lag
Melatonin appears to be useful to a number of fliers. I’ve used it in the past - but usually forget to start taking it a few days before the flight which is suggested. You should be aware though that melatonin is actually an illegal substance in France. Don’t ask me why - it just is. Not that you would be thrown in jail for popping a melatonin capsule, but don’t expect to find it at the pharmacy - pretty amusing when you can, on the other hand, easily purchase codeine enhanced cough syrups with no prescription.
Another article suggested inhaling a pleasant perfume before you go to bed each night (for about a week before you leave on your trip). Then when you arrive in Paris, do the same thing. I’ve never tried this jet lag remedy because I’m always too busy packing or procrastinating about packing to remember to do anything so aesthetic.
It can take you an entire week to recover from jet lag - which when you’re flying from west to east will cause you to be an insomniac and then wake up around noon for the first few days. Obviously, not everyone responds to jet lag in the same way. Some say that you should fight the urge to go to sleep on the first day and stay up during daylight hours. I disagree with this. Sleep when you feel like sleeping. The body is always right. Paris is an all day all night city. Take a long walk whenever you do wake up and enjoy Paris by night. If you miss the normal lunch hour (12:30 to 2 pm), stop into a salon du thГ© for a light snack that will hold you over until dinner at 8 or 9 pm.
Posted by admin on under One stop travel guide to Paris |
It will keep going for 250 km before you have to recharge. It would cost you about 1 Euro to drive 100 km and you could buy this sweet car for about 15,000 Euros by 2009 IF Bollore group finds a partner.
If you’ve been reading Parislogue past articles regarding French cars, you’ll know that the electric car, ‘Jamais Contente’ appeared in France in the 19th century (1899). When it comes to putting electric cars on the road, it seems fitting that the first fully powered electric cars should appear on Paris streets.
President Sarkozy has been talking about encouraging renewable energy in France - here’s your chance.
La Blue Car has resolved many of the issues that made electric cars seem unfeasible in the past.
It uses a Lithium-Metal Polymere battery which is five times lighter than the comparable lead battery. There’s no liquid and the battery is totally recyclable with a shelf life of ten years. It takes six hours to completely recharge the battery but two hours will recharge the battery by 50 percent.
It would be the ideal car for Paris drivers. Designed by Philippe Guedon (Renault Espace designer), the car has enough seating for the occasional five people (with three seats in the front!). This car is really cute. It might remind you of the Twingo Renault.
Guillaume Zambaux, in his story for Le Parisien, last November, described La Blue Car as ‘Nerveuse et Silencieuse’
‘Nerveuse’ is the French way of calling a car ‘feisty’. It supposedly is capable of beating out some sportier -looking cars in the first 100 meters. Will we ever get a chance to see La Blue Car strut its stuff on the ‘Champs’? I’m eager to see France’s politicians get behind this car and show that France is going to be first to put clean cars on its streets.
Posted by admin on under One stop travel guide to Paris |
La Vie en Rose or ‘La Mome’, Oliver Dahan’s film about the life of French singer Edith Piaf was released on Februray 14, 2007 in France. The amount of energy packed into Marion Cotillard’s performance is positively nuclear. Rolling Stone’s review called it a performance for the ages.
Sometimes a role and an actress are pre-ordained to meet. Such is the case with Cotillard and her portrayal of Edith Piaf. If you have any questions about the magnitude of performance, pick up a copy of Claude Lelouche’s Edith & Marcel featuring Evelyn Bouix as Edith Piaf.
This isn’t a role prescribed for the faint of heart. I remember when Edith & Marcel had pre-screenings in NYC and in particular handing out questionnaires to a ‘test audience’ at a Long Island shopping mall. No questionnaires are necessary after watching Cotillard wring out every ounce of emotion - from wherever actors and actresses find this concentrated oil.
This is a quote from an interview with Cotillard posted on Collider.com
that says it all “that’s what I am here in that job for, amongst many things, to be able to share this and to feel like there’s a circle of emotion in sharing.”
Regarding filming in Paris at the Olympia, Cotillard says: ” the special moment was in the Olympia when we shot the last scene, because it was her theatre. She saved the Olympia several times from bankruptcy, and it’s told in the movie. And that day, of course, all the extras, all the audience were French. There were many people who had known her. Her best friend was there. So it was one of the most incredible days of the whole adventure. I don’t know how to describe this, but yeah, we were gathered all together by something.”
Read the rest of the interview on Collider.com
For those of you that haven’t made acquaintance with the songs of Edith Piaf such as ‘La Vie en Rose’, the singer also known as ‘Little Sparrow’ is the epitome of the Parisian kid that struggles from rags to riches, never sells out, but eventually self-destructs from the combination of high living, emotional torment and - well - just life - lived to the max.
As I’ve mentioned in a past post, there are some singers who refuse to sing Edith Piaf songs - considering it to be ‘bad luck’. I won’t spoil anything for you if you plan to see the film - you’ll understand after having seen the film, but it is somewhat ironic that this might be the year a Parisian-born actress wins the Academy award for ‘Best Actress’ during the writer’s strike - when no one will be able to say a single word about it.
Regardless of what the Academy Awards decide next month, Cotillard has won Parilogue’s vote for Best Actress.
Posted by admin on under One stop travel guide to Paris |
In a recent IHT article “Congestion and Other Terminal Illnesses - Europe’s Worst Airports” (Jan 13), sky warriors including writer Elisabeth Rosenthal awarded 2nd place for Europe’s worst airport to Paris’s international airport, Charles de Gaulle aka CDG.
Given the number of times I’ve bad-mouthed this airport in the past, I suddenly found myself wanting to defend this warhorse airport’s honor. Please, don’t ask me why, but it’s gotten to be something of an old friend. I know CDG needs some major overhauling - but when you look at CDG in comparison to JFK, for example, who can point fingers?
One interviewee described going through CDG “like being in an Escher print,” which had me trying to guess if the passenger was referring to Terminal 1 which is circular or Terminal 2 where the A-F buildings are set out like alphabetic parts of a 1960s era Japanese tricycle set.
Once you accept the fact that B doesn’t always necessarily follow A, especially at drop off points for the Air France shuttle service, you should be able to handle CDG just fine.
CDG is EASY - if you don’t believe it, all you have to do is check out the webiste
www.EASYCDG.com.
2nd Worst Rating Unwarranted
Contrary to those interviewed for the NY Times story, I have never had an airline employee direct me to the wrong gate, give me ‘bad advice, or seemed disinterested in helping. In fact in the last couple years I’ve had some pleasant chats with security agents who always seem to be on hand when I’m looking a little lost (which is my normal look). We’ve had some discussions about the pluses and minuses of living in Paris as opposed to Delhi (Delhi, according to one agent is definitely more lively - and more fun than Paris).
I admit I’ve heard some stories about people missing connections because of security check snafus. We’ve NEVER made a connecting flights through CDG on the same day for one simple reason. Why would you bother to fly through Paris without stopping off in the city for a few days? If only to recover from jetlag - if for no other reason. Therefore I wouldn’t recommend doing connecting flights through CDG. Stay overnight in Paris. Leave the following day.
Is Schipol Airport really better than CDG?
I noticed that Amsterdam’s Schipfol airport received Skytrax’s No. 7 spot in its top European airports list.
This is the only European airport where we didn’t get our luggage transferred in time (twice) coming and going for a connecting flight to Iceland. And believe me, if you don’t get your hiking boots on Day 1 when you land in Iceland, you’re not a happy camper. The next flight comes in the following day. Moral of this story is: Whatever the airlines says is a ‘legal’ connection time at Schiphol - don’t settle for anything less than an hour.
For the return flight, the baggage handling department at CDG was very helpful. They told us when the next Amsterdam to Paris flight would be arriving - and our luggage did arrive within the next two hours.
CDG has its imperfections - 1970s styles tubes that might be nostalgic if you had all day to ride around the people mover belts, leaving peace and love adhesive flowers along the way, but the airport gains high marks from me in two respects.
1. Next to Geneva, the customs arrival procedure has to be one of the most painless and non-invasive in the entire world. Especially if you arrive with your precious cat or dog. For example we arrived with all our papers carefully set in order for Sheba, our neurotic Persian cat. She received a glance and a nod - and that was it.
2. How about this? We flew in from Seoul, Korea via Frankfurt - and never ONCE went through a formal passport check - the Korean women ahead of us looked perplexed as it was clear we were just going out into the main lobby of the airport. She had just flown from Seoul to Paris without once having to show her passport in the European Union.
3. If a number of planes arrive all at the same time, you can expect to wait in line for the passport control, but rarely is it as long and laborious process of as waiting at Heathrow. (We had one exception to this case where the wait was extremely lengthy. You can avoid this by not checking bags).
In general I found the CDG airport staff to be helpful. And believe me, if you’ve tried to ask for help at the Moscow airport, you will know the difference between helpful and NOT. If there’s room for improvement it would be in the cleanliness department. CDG airport bathrooms definitely need to be upgraded and cleaned on a regular basis. Compare them to Japanese bathrooms and you’ll see what I mean. After all, wasn’t this the country where the bidet was invented? How did the bidet appear in Narita and NOT Paris?
Free Wifi - wouldn’t that be a ‘Welcome to Paris’ public relations coup? And, for any of us stranded travelers, let us be able to stretch out on the airport chairs. Those metallic mesh chairs are about as comfortable as a parking lot link fence. Okay, CDG won’t get any gold stars anytime soon, but neither does it deserve a bottom of the pile ranking. I’m still not quite sure why so much money has been pumped into Orly before working on cleaning the CDG bathrooms, but let’s give the airport planners the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, I’m waiting with baited breath for the FREE Wifi, comfortable waiting area chairs and a really good wine bar. The whole idea is to make Paris’s airport so inviting, you’ll wonder why you’d ever consider flying elsewhere. Aeroports de Paris? Do you copy?
Posted by admin on under One stop travel guide to Paris |
When I was still a student in Paris, a friend sent me on a quest. He wanted me to get the autograph of a composer named Olivier Messiaen.
He told me that Messiaen was a genius, that he used birdsongs to compose some of his music.
He told me it should not be such a hard task because the composer was an organist at the Trinite Church. He played the organ for mass every Sunday so if I could find the church, I could also find the composer.
I discovered the hardest thing about finding Monsieur Messaien would be trying to pronounce his name. Luckily for a beginning French student, La Trinite is a lot easier to pronounce. Once I arrived at the church and the services had finished - it also wasn’t too hard to find M. Messaien. Already a number of people had begun to line up beside the door that led to the choir loft.
In time, the organist/composer emerged. He was white-haired and wore glasses. He seemed to have plenty of time for every one of us who waited in turn to greet him. When it was my turn, I handed him the composition my friend had written and had asked for him to autograph. Messiaen took some time to look at the compostion and then jotted down his wishes to the fellow musician - my friend way back in Brooklyn.
I also had brought a few poems which I asked him to autograph. Luckily, I didn’t know at the time how he was about as accomplished in the literary field as he was in music. The poems were paltry next to his autograph - so in my photo album I covered the poems with a photo and just left the signature in view.
It wasn’t until many years later that I attended a Messiaen concert in the Bastille Opera House. He had already passed away but his wife played the piano and Rostropovich played. We had second row seats and could see the Rostropovitich’s expression throughout the concert - he was elated.
I admit - the language of Messiaen is not a language that I can begin to understand. He has been called one of the greatest composers of our era. I’m glad that I had the opportunity to hear him play the organ at the Trinite church. That was a concert that I did understand - as well as his kindness to a stranger.
Many concerts will be held in Paris and throughout the world during 2008 to celebrate the Messiaen centenniel - and no, I never did learn how to pronounce his name properly.
Trinite Church
Metro: Trinite
9th Arrondissement
Posted by admin on January 29, 2008 under One stop travel guide to Paris |
Just finished watching the Dior fashion clip (thanks again, to Madame Figaro) France’s newspaper for those of us that don’t have ‘fashion connections’.
And although I found the Dior designs to be fascinating - what do they have to do with Led Zeppelin? Tell me I’m not hallucinating here - Bjork would have made more sense here.
Posted by admin on under One stop travel guide to Paris |
I love Madame Figaro - friend of all of us regular people who don’t have carte blanche. You’ve always wanted to go to a Paris fashion show? It’s easy. You don’t have to be a jet setter to gain admittance to this fashion show. Just click your Prada or your Payless heels and and you’ve got front row seats thanks to Madame Figaro and Daily Motion. The runways are fun, but the backstage photos are even better. All the preparation backstage, seeing the makeup artists at work - that’s the real magic of a fashion show.
Posted by admin on January 24, 2008 under One stop travel guide to Paris |
Icelandair still does its inexpensive flights to Paris - of course with a stop in Iceland’s capital - but why not a layover in this winter wonderland?
This was the best round-trip I found without the benefit of any ‘cheapest airfare searchers’. When I do find good rates, I’ll post immediately for Parislogue readers.
This flight leaves February 3rd (return February 20, 08) so book it fast!
