Paris

The company you keep

Posted on by Pat and David
We're already looking forward to reading Paris to the Past: Traveling through French History by Train, the newest thoughtful volume from Ina Caro. Her first book about traveling around France, the 1994 The Road from the Past: Traveling through History in France, came out of road trips where her husband, Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer Robert Caro, did the driving. We love it that the new book tours France by train, especially capitalizing on the vast distances made possible by booking the high-speed TGV. As she explains, she can cover 800 years of French history by train and still be back in Paris to sleep. But what really drew us in is her attitude about the food: ''It's a terrible thing for a historian to admit, but...Read More

Making your own lunch in Paris

Posted on by David
We used to have a professional dancer friend from New York who always signed up for a dance class when she visited Boston. We thought it was an amusing quirk--until we discovered that most dancers take classes when they travel. At worst, they get a good workout. At best, they learn something new. In that same spirit, I signed up to make my own lunch in Paris with a half-hour express class through L'atelier des Chefs (Chefs Workshop), which offers a whole array of cooking classes for home chefs and, judging by my classmates, for bachelors who are cooking for themselves for the first time and women who would like to relieve them of that chore. Most classes take an hour to half a day...Read More