The author enjoys eating local specialities when he travels
Advice & Opinion
Sometimes we just like to sum up our point of view with a bit of advice and commentary, sometimes practical, sometimes inane, sometimes to make ourselves feel wise, sometimes to blowoff steam.
I know food bloggers are supposed to be into food, but do they really have to tell us everything they eat? They remind me of 12-year-old girls with half-chewed food in their mouth, sticking their tongues out to get attention. Not very appetizing.
Parisians of the partying kind have long lamented the decline of the city’s nightlife. Those over 45 date the good ole days to the 1980s, those over 30 manage to cite a couple of highlights of the 90s, and those in their 20s simply criticize Paris for not being New York or Madrid.
It takes no more than a few clicks or a phone call to reserve a rental car in Europe, but when things go wrong, either from consumer ignorance or agency handling, it can take months to dig your way out of rental car hell.
You may think that the title of this opinion piece is a joke from The Onion, yet that’s precisely what Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said in the Weekly Republican Address of April 25, 2009 when he declared that the new budget passed by Congress “makes the United States literally ineligible to join France in the European Union.”
Paris, Election Season 2008—During those unforgettable, breath-holding seconds during the 2008 Superbowl when Eli Manning was making his mind-boggling escape from Patriot rushers and releasing a monstrous pass that was so incredibly caught by David Tyree with only a minute left in the Superbowl, I was asleep.
Like many Americans overseas, my most regular source for general American written news is the New York Times online. So it’s with no regret that I read in March that Elaine Sciolino, the paper’s Paris bureau chief, was leaving her gig in France.
I’ve heard that line a thousand times on the streets of the city as men and women on the edge of a nervous breakdown wait in the cold or heat or rain.
From Bangkok to New York all you have to do is go out to the street and hail a cab, but Paris is the only international metropolis where the taxi lobby imposes its law on both French and foreigners. There were 32,000 taxis in Paris in the 1930s but only 15,000 in 2008.
