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

The other day I was walking through the edgy, regenerated Villette area of Paris, and on one of its busy streets, I stumbled upon something that felt like a gap in time. I went through an unassuming gate and walked down a narrow, semi-private alley. Just like that, I was out of the noisy present and inside a hidden, completely quiet garden. It turned out to belong to the Saint-Serge de Radonège Russian Orthodox Church.   Photo: SortirAParis The whole scene looked like something out of an old nineteenth-century novel. Orthodox priests with long beards and flowing black robes moved slowly among the flowerbeds, and a group of elderly people sat on rickety chairs, chatting in a mix of Russian and French. The sudden shift from the bustling street to this completely quiet sanctuary was so strange that I almost felt out of place with a smartphone in my hand. In fact, I kept my mobile firmly in my pocket. For once, it felt a bit wrong to pull it out just to take the usual snapsho...

  The other night I was invited to a so-called Full Moon Party in the center of Paris. The host was a guy Rita and I met a couple of years ago, when we stayed on his houseboat a bit up the Seine. Captain Bob. He arranges these gatherings on the Pont des Arts every month, apparently without exception, come rain or come moonshine, which is actually a better expression here than usual. The bridge is mercifully free of love locks these days. In their place: about fifty people with wine glasses, speaking in what sounded like most of the languages of Europe simultaneously. French people and expats from many corners of the globe were just standing around and talking, and the mood was actually quite infectious. I accepted a glass from a Spanish astrophysics student who seemed extremely pleased with himself and with life in general, and I stood there for a while trying to work out what exactly was happening.  The answer, as far as I could tell, was: nothing in particular....

For a long time, Rita and I have dreamed of finding a small, affordable pied-a-terre in Paris. This September I am finally in town to chase that dream. The city is full of estate agencies. Their windows are plastered with images of quaint apartments, and one might think that in a city teeming with agents immobiliers , securing a modest little place would be as simple as ordering a pain au chocolat. One would be wrong. At my first agency, the door was marked Ouvert but remained stubbornly locked. At the second, a bored receptionist informed me that all agents were en réunion . At the next several, the apartments in the windows had already been sold. How long they had been sold was not mentioned. By the umptieth agency, I had developed a theory. Parisian estate agents with actual apartments for sale exist in a condition much like certain particles in physics; present and absent at the same time, collapsing into definite existence only when observed by each other...

Why go to the Paris Olympics when you have almost zero interest in sports? We imagined inserting ourselves right in the middle of a global phenomenon that everyone was talking about, but when we actually got there, the streets looked remarkably ordinary. We knew, of course, that the athletes and the national anthems and the actual competition would be kept inside the concrete stadiums. But we had genuinely thought the excitement would spill out into the rest of the city. It did not. Except for a few fan zones scattered around, the Olympic spirit was safely locked away behind forty thousand metal barriers. The city looked like nothing we had seen before; all those grates across the landscape, like an absurdist art installation that someone had forgotten to remove. The Seine was off-limits. Only people with a personal QR code were allowed to walk along the banks. Rows of policemen and soldiers in khaki stood on every other street corner.  The int...

Walking into the massive Boros bunker in Berlin’s Mitte is like walking into some ancient, alien tomb. This forbidding concrete monolith, built by the Nazis in 1942, is now the home of a rather eccentric private art collection Inside the building’s anthill-like network of corridors and small rooms, the art on display completely changes how you experience the space.  You encounter everything from strange kinetic sculptures to multimedia installations flickering in the dark. Each room opens like a window into a different creative mind, and to be honest, the story of the building itself is just as exciting as the art displayed inside it.   During the war, the bunker sheltered several thousand civilians from the nightly bombings that hit Berlin. In 1945, the Red Army used the building for prisoners of war, and it later became an East German warehouse for tropical fruit.  After the wall came down, the empty building was squatted by kids. During the nineties, it became simpl...

We started our travels in 2024 at our house in the Ardeche mountains of Southern France. And - we had four absolutely miserable weeks!!! While Northern Europe experienced a lovely spring, we stayed mostly indoors, covered in duvets, while persistent rain and even sludge beat against our windows. Well - this is now rainwater under the bridge. And plenty of it! We survived - and, eventually, we escaped - and yesterday we arrived in a sunny, warm Berlin, where our new neighbors were hangi ng out in some of Kreuzberg's many outdoor cafes. ----------------- o ----------------- Today we used a lovely Ascension day to make our own ascent onto what is probably one of the weirdest places you can visit in all of Berlin - the top of the Teufelberg mountain far out in the Grunewald forest. This rubble mountain turned Cold War listening post turned graffiti wonderland is a strange mix of the last 80 years of German turmoil and rebirth. The approach to Teufelberg is unassuming - a nondescr...

Antraigues usually looks peaceful, but this weekend the village came alive for the annual Ardèche chestnut festival, drawing people from across the mountains." Crisp autumn air and the scent of woodsmoke greeted us as we walked out from our townhouse and into the square just as the festivities were beginning.  Villagers mingled, voices rising in laughter as they awaited the evening's revelries. Tables were loaded with honeyed figs, freshly cooked chestnuts, soft cheeses and crusty bread.  The rich aroma of roasted meats drifted from fires crackling nearby, while children scampered about, their joyful shrieks echoing off the stonewalls. As darkness fell, the festival really got going  Everybody clustered together, clinking glasses of chestnut beer and warming spiced wine.  At long tables, families shared platters piled high with food. ...