Even though I like to write about Paris’s ethnic neighborhoods, a recent walk showed me that’s not really the right term. It implies boundaries and separation, when in fact many flow into each other, almost without warning. In three-plus hours, my sister...
“Let’s walk around the 13th arrondissement,” said my sister Christine. What a good idea! Even though I gravitate toward Paris’s funkier neighborhoods for my blog-reporting walks, this one was mostly unknown territory for me. But Christine had recently moved...
I grew up in a country that had four seasons, and later lived in Canada, which locals say has two seasons: winter and construction. Neither of those experiences prepared me for France, which has seasons not just for weather but for produce, school vacations, sales,...
My sister, Dr. Christine Swardson Olver, is spending four months in Paris doing canine cancer research, her second spell as a scientist in France. She has already mastered the place, or at least the transportation part. By Christine Swardson Olver I decided to live...
I recently returned from the U.S., where the talk was of breakthrough infections, vaccine reluctance, rising cases and unmasked citizens coughing on the masked. It was a relief to get back to France, which, after some false starts, seems to have gotten the balance...
We have a winner in the Locate-the-Paris-Rooftops contest! See below. * * * * * * * * * * “Have your butcher.” Those three words in a recipe used to bug me no end when I lived in the U.S. How could I have my butcher do anything when the meat came in a sterile plastic...
