Blogs from Paris, Île-de-France, France, Europe - page 13

Introduction to My 2017/18 Project It was quite difficult to know how to approach a major update of the 40 entries I made to this Travel Blog in 2009/10. In the end I decided to leave the text, photos and maps pretty much the same for the first entry for each arrondissement, except to replace poor quality photos with new ones, correct spelling mistakes, and rectify other obvious errors. I'm also going to add some bulleted highlights to the front of each section to whet your appetites for the content to come! All the new material, I decided to put into the second entry for each arrondissement, entitled 'Additional Photographs'. I've added a new heading to alert you when that new material starts. It will be about new tourist attractions that have opened (like the refurbished ... read more

International Mother Language Day (towards sustainable futures through multilingual education) .... is a bit of a mouthful, but I like the idea of UNESCOs day. The idea for Mother language day is for all people to access education in their mother tongue and other languages, that local languages transmit cultures, values and traditional knowledge, and are important in sustainable futures... though I'm not sure what 'sustainable futures' are. I do know from studying other languages that there are words that are untranslatable, and concepts that don't exist in English. On the other hand, English has considerably more words than other languages and has incredible detail in almost insignificant differences. The difference between freedom and liberty, for example. In many languages there is only one word, yet lacks words for concepts such as Spanish 'ganas' or Russian ... read more

It took us a long time to get organized this morning, maybe because we're getting tired, maybe the temperatures. And we thought it was cold yesterday...today was even colder, and more overcast, even a bit foggy. We even got a few snowflakes in the morning. We eventually made it out and took the Metro to the Abesses station in Monmartre. We walked up Rue Abesses, down Rue Lepic with its seafood shops that the kids loved, to the Moulin Rouge. It seems like so long ago that we were here for a show! Doesn't look very different than at night besides the crowds. We went on and into the Monmartre cemetary. The cemetary is very different from what we are used to in Israel. It's filled with family tombs. They have maps you can borrow with ... read more

We got up late this morning. Hardly surprizing after our long day yesterday. We thoroughly enjoyed the hotel breakfast and set out in the general direction of the Eiffel tower. We had a tour booked there at 13:00, so we were in no rush. We wandered around the area of Les Invalides, looking for a supermarket and enjoying the Parisienne streets. We found a store and got some snacks for the way. Then we headed towards the tower. At around noon we came to the Champ de Mars, the old parade grounds leading up to the tower. Ethan said it well. The tower is beautiful, ugly, and impressive all at once. On the Champ de Mars there's a christmas market (lots of them around) with lots of stalls, mostly food. We worked our way through the ... read more

We arrived in Paris painlessly at 05:40 after our 13 hour overnight flight from Hong Kong and were punished with fairly long walks through the terminal and hyperactively happy Lucy & Roman that promptly descended into grabbing one another and crashing to the floor which led to a 'no touching' ban and some threats. Stepping outside the terminal it was 2c and we could blow lots of 'smoke' with our breathe which the kids enjoyed in the dark. After a brief struggle to get a suitable car/ booster seat configuration for the kids we were away to Paris. We were astonished that it was pitch black and the sun didn't come up on the transfer until the end around 7:55am. The street our 'Hotel Bsquare' in the charming district of Batignolles, was remarkable with nice christmas ... read more