Travel

This picture is one of my favorites from this month's escapade in Paris. It was taken at one of the top pastry/confection shops in Paris, Jacques Genin, which I was very happy to find to be just a matter of blocks from the apartment I rented in the Marais. And it was taken at a Sunday lunch I enjoyed with my sister. Not dessert after lunch. But FOR lunch. We each got our own from among the few millefeuille ...

I went a little nuts at the market today. It's Sunday, a prime market day in many neighborhoods around Paris. The closest/best to where I'm staying in the Marais is the Bastille market that spreads north of Place de la Bastille on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. I went to the market last Sunday too (it's on Thursdays as well, I'll hit it one more time this coming week), but that was a more casual ...

My first three trips to France came over the course of about five years and the length of each trip increased about five-fold from one to the next. First, one month with about 20 students for a Winterim term in Paris. Next, just six of us from the same university returned for the inaugural year of our school’s study-abroad program, a semester at the Université de Dijon. Then came my cooking school adventure, which I thought would be ...

As I mentioned in the prologue post about this Paris trip, one of the earlier decisions I made was to get out of my own Paris ruts by NOT staying in the St. Germain/Latin Quarter section on the Left Bank. I'm thrilled to my toes with that choice. Not that there aren't crowds here in the Marais neighborhood, but they're much, much smaller (in large part because there's simply not ...

It’s Mother’s Day today, at least back in the United States (the French will celebrate la Fête des Mères in two weeks). So what I did I do to honor the day in Paris? I took a walk through Père Lachaise cemetery. Not out of some grim impulse to acknowledge the eleventh Mother’s Day since my mom passed away. But because it felt like the right kind of soulful environment ...

It's not me making that decision -- it was a panel of illustrious judges who convened last month to sample over 150 entries for this year's Grand Prix de la Baguette de Tradition Française de la Ville de Paris. It was just delightful timing that the news of this year's winner came shortly before I left, so the winner was quickly noted on my to-do list for time in Paris. And it's where ...

My first inclination when I started to plan this long-awaited, extended time in Paris was to narrow my apartment-searching to my old stomping grounds. The Left Bank. The 5th, 6th and 7th arrondissements. As noted in this earlier post, it's where I've spent by far the most of my time in Paris. That first study program in 1984, we spent most of a month in a hotel on the rue des Ecoles in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Which ...

I spent a few minutes trying to come up with a more clever title for this post but figure it pretty much speaks for itself. Whether you've been there on your honeymoon or for a study-abroad term, if you backpacked-it in a hostel or lived it up at George V, even if it was one of those horrid if-this-is-Tuesday-it-must-be-Belgium "highlights of Europe" tours--there's surely a buzz of delightful nostalgia that hits you at the mention of Paris. Or maybe you have yet to ...

I didn't want to break the spell. When I left Seattle to go to cooking school in France, it was a major adventure, a big step into an unknown future, a dream come true. Belongings that I wasn't taking with me went into long-term storage, since this was to be an open-ended trip of at least nine months (ended up being 2 1/2 years). The last thing I wanted to do was break the momentum and serendipity of my time abroad with splashes of my ...

I love living in Seattle for just a huge range of reasons...... But one that's standing out for me right now is its simple geography. Not that it's on the Puget Sound, or framed by two mountain ranges or in the Cascadia zone that creates a distinctly lush environment for countless outstanding foods that enrich our dinner plates. Those are all perfect reasons to ...