Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

This morning, I crawled through muddy, dark Roman-era tunnels below Lisbon.  The tunnels were carved during the reign of Emperor Augustus, and for centuries, they directed underground rainwater while empires above rose and fell. Eventually, they were sealed off and forgotten - to be rediscovered completely by chance during the rebuilding after the 1755 earthquake, which turned most of Lisbon into rubble. Today, the crypts are normally completely filled with groundwater, but they are pumped dry on just a couple of days each year, where only a few visitors are allowed access.   Today, I was among the lucky few.  The only entry to the below is through a narrow temporary shaft in the middle of the busy Rua da Conceição, right between the rails of the 28 tram line. The stairs leading down felt steep and risky, and when I finally reached the galleries, a few lights illuminated the void that had stood in total darkness for more than a Millenium. Some passages were s...

Ever since our very first visit to Paris, we have made it a tradition to light a candle at the Church of St. Pierre de Montmartre on our final day in the city - hoping to be allowed to come back. This is of course superstition, and we're not superstitious, but luckily it seems to work, even if you don't believe in it! For the last 40 years, we have  lit perhaps thirty candles - and we have been coming back to Paris every single time without exceptions :-  ) This afternoon a new candle has been lit. À bientôt Paris!

My main focus - just now - is to keep my lips sealed, while I lie, floating on my back, in the middle of the Canal St Martin in Paris. The place I just duck into is absolutely no azure swimming pool, but rather an industrial canal cut through the city center, where swimming for the last hundred years has been strictly forbidden And for good reasons! The river flowing through Paris has been severely polluted, making it possible to contract skin infections, or develop gastroenteritis if you ingest the water. Not speaking of leptospirosis, or rat disease, which is transmitted via rat corpses or urine!   In lieu of all this - why am I this Sunday splashing around in the canal with a happy group of Parisians? One thing is the heat, but the main reason is: Because we actually can! For the last hundred years wild swimming in Paris waters has been strictly forbidden under pain of a fine (or pain of sickness!), but this Sunday and in this small part of the Canal St Martin, it is allowed for...

Yesterday, we were going to the Fondation Le Corbusier. On our way to this museum, which lies in the posh Paris neighborhood of Auteuil, we passed row upon row of centuries-old homes with bisque stone facades and quiet courtyards - until we stumbled upon a small street, which stopped us in our tracks. A short, private cul-de-sac with five giant cubist townhouses - the Rue Mallet-Stevens. We gazed up at whitewashed facades, sinuous curves, and floor-to-ceiling windows, and we felt like we had stepped into a living architectural exhibit from the interwar period, where - even by today's standards - each house seems as modern as the next. When we googled the street, it turned out that it is named after a now almost forgotten architect, Robert Mallet-Stevens, who back in the 1920s designed all five houses for a group of wealthy bohemians, who embraced the clean lines and geometric forms of the newly developed Art Deco architecture. Robert Mallet-Ste...

The stench is the first thing that I notice as I enter the dark underworld of the Petite Ceinture, the long-abandoned more than 150-year-old railway line which traces the 32-kilometer perimeter of Paris. Some parts of the Petite Ceinture are now open to the public, but the kilometer-long tunnels are barred and you have to be sneaky if you want to explore them. I found a way in (see below), where the dank air smelled of urine, rot, and abandonment. It was the smell of a place forgotten. Moving further on, the beam of the torch on my mobile creates a bubble of light in the almost impenetrable darkness. It flashes at the stone walls on either side, and the circle of light picks out tags, scribblings, and crude drawings, as this abandoned place has probably for almost a century been witness to furtive meetings, drug use, rough sleeping, and teenage gatherings. I walk slowly, wary of deep holes in the floor and obstructions on the tracks. Everything...

After several months on hectic Montmartre, the last couple of weeks have been completely relaxing. We're living on a houseboat on the Seine - nestled in between Ile de la Jatte and Boulevard Boudon - in the northwestern part of Paris. The area - Neuilly-sur-Seine - is among the most affluent in all of Paris and some of the houseboats moored along the quai are almost as big as aircraft carriers, but not our little raft. It is petite, but it has everything you need - a small bath room, an even smaller galley and a bunkbed we can rise up with a pulley, when we need the space for sitting down  - and most important:  It has a deck, where we can stay all day,  sketching and reading and watching the scullers g lide by Everything is constructed by our generous host Captain Bob, who leads an exciting life - half the year on a (somewhat grander) houseboat next to ours, the other half in the Rockies, where he has invented a sport he calls 'Ski Frisbee'  (  https://youtu.be...

For the last several weeks we have lived on Montmartre and when we have walked the streets, we have actually walked in the footsteps of Van Gogh, Modigliani, and Picasso. Even though the most prolific painters on present-day Montmartre are the ones hitting on visitors coming to  the infamous tourist trap Place du Tertre, Rita has found inspiration in this 150-year-old artist community and taken up the water coloring she used to do a lot in her youth Last night, she even went to a live model drawing class in the basement of one of our local dive bars, and before going, she was pretty worried,  that she  would be the most inexperienced in the class: The last time I made drawings of live models was more than thirty years ago, and I felt completely rusty, but it turned out the participants in this class were at all different levels and I actually did some work that I dared show to the others. Our model was a beautiful, slim Bulgarian girl with a lot of curly hair. She w...

Living in Paris for the last months has been living a vast, moveable feast. Spending that much time in one place, you could expect you came to know this place intimately, but we have almost every day walked completely fantastic streets, alleys, squares, and parks which we had never visited before (or even heard of!).  This city - and its possibilities - seems to be endless. While wandering its streets, we found so many hidden, quirky spots, which you rarely read about in guide books, we decided to place our findings on a map.  In this way, our friends, who come to visit Paris, can see suggestions for surprising experiences off the beaten track. Putting them out here will eventually make them not so secret anymore - mais c'est la vie!   https://tinyurl.com/4mhyc7w6 link to our google map of cool, quirkey, often hidden, places in Paris, N.ew York and C.openhagen (the places marked in red will be worth a detour) ----------------------------- E...