How would the Champs-Élysées look with 50,000 people, shoulder-to-shoulder? Well, I found out when I joined 49,999 other people to run the Marathon de Paris. The course begins and ends near the Arc de Triomphe, stretching along the Right Bank, past Place de la Concorde and Bastille and encircling the Bois de Vincennes and Bois […]
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E. Dehillerin, Paris, France
E. Dehillerin is the place to buy traditional French cookware in Paris. I emphasize traditional, because there are also many popular shops that sell things like cupcake tins and Oxo products, which are nothing new to Americans, but are still a novelty for French cooks. This family-operated shop has been in operation since 1820. It […]
La Maison de Balzac, Paris, France
Though I love to visit writers’ houses, I only recently trekked out to Western Paris to the neighborhood that was once a smaller village, Passy, to visit La Maison de Balzac. Balzac moved into this house in 1840 under a pseudonym, Monsieur de Breugnol, in order to evade creditors. It sort of feels like it. […]
Nydeggkirche, Bern, Switzerland
This attractive steeple outside Bern’s city center, near the river, caught my eye. The Nydeggkirche marks the original site of Nydegg Castle, which was built in 1150 by Duke Berchtold V. von Zähringen right before he ordered the city of Bern to be built. From here, the duke oversaw Bern’s construction. In true real estate […]
Burgtreppe and Matte District, Bern, Switzerland
These covered steps lead from Bern’s city center down to the Matte district, which was an old working-class neighborhood filled with dockworkers and craftspeople. It was such a tight neighborhood that the citizens had their own dialect, descended from that of Swiss gypsies. In the 1970’s, the neighborhood was, of course, gentrified. It was bound […]
Berner Münster
After the Zytglogge, this late-Gothic church gets the most attention in Bern. Its spire is the highest in Switzerland and the portal, which has 234 colored depictions of the Last Judgment, is its most famous feature. The left half of the portal depicts the saved, the right half the damned. The 170 small figures are […]
