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

We're on our last day in Paris, and the stay has - once again - been a gorgeous experience. Friends, who haven't visited the city for a while, have asked us about how it is evolving. For some, Paris is probably now synonymous with armed police surveillance and  dread of terrorist attacks, of migrants camping in the streets, of piles of filth and garbage, of Paris, as one put it, being turned into a sh*thole! OK. There ARE people sleeping on benches or wrapped in cardboard boxes, but as far as we can see, most of them are not African migrants or fugitives. Most seem to be ethnic French, who have fallen through the security net of the welfare state, and even though the street people are far too many, the wast tent camps, which we, just last year, saw erected below the bridges along the Seine have now disappeared. There ARE complaints about people pissing in the streets (and even more complaints about the many, quite ...

Michael has a dream of exploring the catacombs below Paris - but his dream doesn't include standing in a long line of tourists waiting at the official entrance. He wants to find a secret manhole somewhere, which leads down to some of the 300 kilometers of labyrinthine tunnels, which lie below most of central Paris. People called cataphiles are actually exploring these labyrinths - but I have nightmares about him climbing down into slimy darkness and perhaps on his way back finding out that the manhole he entered had been closed shut from the outside. No way! Luckily he found another way to be a trespasser and explore  hidden parts of the city without going underground The Petite Ceinture (“little belt”) is a disused railway line which traces the 32-kilometer perimeter of Paris. It was built about 150 years ago and now long abandoned. Today most of the tracks are quite inaccessible and off limits, overgrown  and forgotten, ...

  This is how we do when we walk the streets of whichever place we're visiting: We choose a point of interest as our goal and then we stroll serendipitously towards it - looking behind corners, down alleys, inside courtyards - perhaps even wander so far off course, we never arrive to our original goal. This time our goal was the Ozenfant house - the first Parisian house built by famed architect Le Corbusier. The search for this house let us deep into 14 arrondissement, which - besides Tour de Montparnasse and the entrance to the catacombs - is probably not on the itinerary of many tourists. The 14th turned out to be a lovely place to wander around - the Parc Montsouris was so pretty on a sunny afternoon, with its lake and great lawns. We found the Ozenfant and I took in all the fantastic details - but just from the outside. The building is privately owned and not open for visitors. Right next to this modernistic masterpiece, we ventured down Square Mo...

For the umpteenth time,  we have returned to Paris. This time we've exchanged our house with a Parisian family living smack in the middle of my personal heaven: the garment district on the slopes of the Montmartre. I can every morning pop down to the shops and look through masses of rolls of beautiful silk, flowery pieces of cotton or just any pattern I like. I imagine myself making a dress, a silk pajama, a pair of trousers. All the things I didn’t make of the lots of fabric I bought last summer. As a bonus, my favorite Parisian consignment boutiques are just a few minutes away. The very nice Chinemachine in Rue de Martyrs ( www.chinemachinevintage.com ) being a favorite. I also visit the much more scrappy Guerrisol ( www.guerrisol.fr ) and Emmaüs boutiques ( www.emmaus-paris.fr ), where you can dig through mud and come up with pure gold Just the last few days, I have located a beautiful Cacharel shirt, a silk dress, a long green robe, some t-shirts and a lin...