There are still some good places to stay in Paris for less than $150 per night. Here are some that are vetted by the editor of the NY Times Travel section:
New York Times: list of hotels from special issue on ‘Fall in Europe’, dated October 11. The list has a section for hotels in Paris; see items #68 through 77.
Art Buchwald’s classic explanation of Thanksgiving is priceless! It’s still a riot after 50 years. In 2005, a copy of it was reprinted in the Washington Post and it still packs its punch!
I thought it was written to explain our holiday to the French but now see that there are too many in-jokes for them. It must be for the very people who would read my blog – YOU bi-cultural and bi-lingual people!
Enjoy: Le Grande Thanksgiving
For a history of French restaurants and what remains there after 200 years, check out: this New York Times article
Thank you, Pamela, for sending it to us!
Did you know that the history of French cuisine is an academic field? I have a friend who got wrote her doctoral dissertation on it from her French department. She now teaches college courses on that and French. Boston University also has a department on it.
Récemment, j’ai reçu mon enième exemplaire d’une alarme d’anti-sémitisme en France. Pourquoi s’alarmer sans savoir les faits ? Pourquoi blâmer la France ? Comment croire un mail sans auteur? Il y a assez de racisme dans le monde pour ne pas en rajouter.
(In English)
After receiving this same “recent” message a few times over the past few years, I finally saw a disturbing pattern: alarm, conspiratorial tone, accumulation or invention of undocumented incidents, appeal to Jews not to “let it happen again,” exhortation common to hoaxes to forward the message to everyone we know, and a call to boycott the country of France.
1) A condensation of the original message that I received.
2) A condensation of a briefer reaction to #1 from an informed French friend.
3) The reaction to #2 from the person who sent it to the person who sent it to me.
4) An article on the cycle from “Jewish Currents” in 1/8.
- “Jewish Currents,” Jan. 2008. http://www.jewishcurrents.org/2008-jan-antisemitism.htm
- “http://www.jewishcurrents.org/2008-jan-antisemitism.htm” par Ami Isseroff
Pamela Sacks and Etienne Roop are two of my more erudite students. Pam is learning French by supplementing grammar with translating from French to English. Etienne is progressing by reading and writing French. Below is Pam’s translation of Roop’s recent post on French politics, its take on “liberalism” and “antiliberalism,” and Bernard-Henri Lévy. Lévy is a political, cultural, inetellectual writer and philosopher in France today.
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Briefly, in my view, the key word here is “antiliberal.” “Liberal” is commonly used among French intellectuals who do not mean the same thing as in the United States. “Liberal” is an allusion to economic politics, in particular the presumed preference of America (and of Great Britain – therefore the common epithet used among leftist socialists and other leftists, “Blairites”) for free exchange and free markets.
French workers react to the financial crisis in France:
A surprising civic failure….
“The cautionary tale of Paris, which has had more than 80 percent of its 20,000 bikes damaged or stolen in two years, shouldn’t stop other cities from pushing forward with similar bike-sharing programs, as Boston hopes to do next summer.”
Back Bay Francais