I live in the 2nd arrondissement (district), the Montorgueil-St. Denis quartier pieton (pedestrian neighborhood), and the St. Eustace Church parish. Serving the arrondissement, the quartier, and the parish is the market street Rue Montorgueil, just west of my apartment. Montorgueil is pronounced “mont-or-goo-ee,” and it translates to English as Mont Orgueil or “Mount Pride,” referring to the hilly [...]
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Thursday, November 8, 2007
St. Eustache Church serves the parish where I live in Paris. The church has an impressive organ, and there are free concerts every Sunday. But who was St. Eustace? Eustace (in French it’s pronounced “oo-stash”) was originally a Roman general and captain of the guards named Placidus. He served the emperor Trajan. While hunting a white [...]
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Wednesday, November 7, 2007
I walked right into a really, really, really fancy hotel: the most expensive and exclusive hotel in Paris. THE HOTEL DE CRILLON. It’s the hotel where Marie-Antoinette took piano lessons. A hotel so good, the Nazi high command commandeered it for their headquarters during the occupation of Paris 1940-44. (“Let those SS counterintelligence idiots take the [...]
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Tuesday, November 6, 2007
For all moving beings in Paris, the allees, avenues, boulevards, impasses, passages, quais, and rues are very important. Like in the United States, some of these designations of surfaces for vehicular passage are a little vague–do you have to be so many feet wide to qualify as an avenue as opposed to a rue?–but I’ve compiled [...]
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The studios of Walt Disney and Hana-Barbera don’t have the lock on fictional characters. Many of Americans’ most beloved cartoon, storybook, and movie heros and heroines come from writers and storytelling traditions in France. Some of the characters are actually Belgian or Swiss but are very popular in the French language. I’ve listed below some [...]
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Many Parisian museums are free on the first Sunday of each month, so today I walked right into the Louvre, big as you please. No ticket and not even a glance at the keepers of the gate. I also didn’t bring my pack, so I didn’t have to unzip the pockets, show my umbrella and water [...]
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Saturday, November 3, 2007
It’s about stopping, reading the paper or your guidebook, getting off your feet. Or off life’s merry-go-round. Order and sip. Maybe you don’t do anything else. I haven’t bought a single Herald Tribune (the English-language newspaper sold here) because I usually want to shut out the world’s goings-on. I’ll admit it’s been quite blissful ignoring the [...]
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I had heard stories about my father Glenn’s year in Meudon, France, since I was a kid. He’d gone with his parents–my grandparents Helen and Karl Grossman–to this southwestern Parisian suburb in October 1928. My grandfather had come to study music for a year with Nadia Boulanger (her picture is below) at the Paris Conservatory, and my [...]
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Thursday, November 1, 2007
Parisians had a few pumpkins, skeletons, and witches in shop windows the last few weeks, but I wouldn’t say they celebrate Halloween. But November 1, All Souls’ Day or Day of the Dead, is a major holiday. Today’s November 1 and it wasn’t raining, so it was a good day to visit Cimetiere du Pere [...]
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Wednesday, October 31, 2007
A place in Paris is a pedestrian walking area, like a square or large patio. Sometimes a place is hard to get to, such as the Place Charles de Gaulle at the Arc de Triomphe, which you enter and exit through an underground passage. France’s Tombe du soldat inconnu (Tomb of the Unknown Soldier) contains the remains [...]
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