We'll Always Have Paris

Bill

Beyond that, I asked Momus hisself for advice, being an iggorunt Merkin and all -- he suggested this:

"I'd recommend a trip to the Bibliotheque Francois Mitterand (good sombre wood panelled cafe there, though not sure if you can eat fully there) followed by a visit to the art galleries on the nearby Rue Louis Weiss, 13th arrondissement. If you have time, check out the Vietnamese Chinatown nearby also.

Or for more conventional inner city prettiness, the Rue des Rosiers in Le Marais. It's an old Jewish area abutting (ahem!) a new gay area. Chez Marianne is an excellent place to eat here."

Dunno whether I'd say Paris is the most romantic city on Earth (I'm cheesy, I'd pick Venice), but a classic and very much so. So much history and yet so much modernity (I loved the Pompidou Center). Defintely check out the Sainte-Chapelle, the Ile St-Louis, and the Jardin des Tuileries. Also nothing beats walking the length of the Champs-Elysee (from the Tuileries up to the Arc de Triomphe, which is surrounded by the most insane traffic circle I've ever seen anywhere).

Mind you I have found romance in a tent in an East Sussex campsite so what do I know?

Has way cool station names: Stalingrad!! (Is it still called this?)

Tourist stuff: a good restaurant is le Commerce. It's on rue du Commerce and the nearest metro station, funnily enough, is Commerce. Very cheap groceries and booze can be acquired from Ed supermarkets (like a French Kwik Save) - there's one on rue des Entrepreneurs, round the corner from le Commerce. It's worth sitting on the number 1 metro line all the way out to La Defense - it looks great in bright sunshine. The Eiffel Tower is bloody expensive, but you have to go up it, don't you? The Musee Rodin is lovely - I think the sculptures by his lover, Camille Claudel, outshine his own.

I think our tour group spent a grand total of one half-hour at the Louvre. Another morning, our guardians dropped us off at the Centre Georges Pompidou, which was hosting, excuse me, a fucking EXHIBITION on LEGO ART. I mean, HELLO? Total intellectual porn, custom-made for Michael Daddino circa 1988. And what did the fucktards I was stranded with want to see? A street performer breaking chains and walking on glass, followed by lunch at McDonald's. I could go on.

Just about the only cool things I did in Paris was 1) buy some cool baggy striped shorts 2) eat at a Vietnamese restaurant 3) see Woody Allen's Manhattan in a theater, with French subtitles.

Public transportation in metropolitan cities: S&D.

Los Angeles is an obvious candidate for destruction.

Yes, it is.

Oh yeah, I also liked the Paris Metro. I also liked that little lights-and-levers thing they had in stations showing you what lines you had to take to get from Point A to Point B using the Paris Metro. If only the New York Transit Authority would follow suit :-)

Supposedly, the Athens subway has relics from archeological digs in its various stations (all of which were recovered when they were digging the tunnels). I've never been to Athens, and that would be a cool thing to see.

This is bollocks, as you'd expect from such an unreliable source. However, the Rodin museum and gardens are so not to be missed. Skip the fucking Eiffel tower, please. It's just a big TV transmitter and is overrun with the most irritating teenagers the world can muster.

I think Paris is beautiful. Even the dilapitated bits. Unlike London, the city the architecture forgot. I saw London from that big stupid wheel for the first time the other day and it just looks like nothing. Yes parts of the centre are magestic, but most of the rest is just an unholy mess of stained concrete and twee suburb Barratt home hell. Why isn't plaster used more? I hate stupid little London bricks. Unless it's a row of houses that are produce a classic London street a la Peckham or something.