Many potential visitors to France were blocked when Covid raised its nasty head and drove much of the world into lock-down, and into an understandable panic over what we know and don’t know about the pandemic. France went through 4 waves of it and 3 distinct distinct lock-down phases, as did many other countries in […]
Category Archives: Daily life|Paris
As everywhere else, the program to vaccinate the French population has primarily been a function of the availability of the vaccines. European countries, including France, opted to coordinate and channel their vaccine procurement efforts through a single European agency, and, for reasons we will not explore here, it fell far behind the USA and UK […]
The Grand Paris Project is a gigantic reshaping urban project which focuses on creating a mega railway system throughout the bigger Paris region, thus creating new centers and new habitat as well as reducing the impact of the region’s population on the downtown area. The project started in 2007 under President Sarkozy and is supposed […]
Paris is experiencing another flood, reminding us of a fact that we tend to suppress: the City of Light historically has experienced a super flood more or less every century, and the last one was in 1910, which now puts us in overdue territory. Could this be the start of the next big one? It […]
In Paris we don’t talk about the weather unless something really unusual happens. Unusual by Parisian standards, of course. In the summer if the temperatures rise above 27° C (80° F), which does not happen often, everyone laments their lot, with constant bleats of “il fait chaud” (It’s hot !). This week we got 10 […]
Some of the issues that have divided Parisians to the point of bitter debate have been the Paris municipality’s decrees ordering the closure of some of its expressways to vehicular traffic and their conversion into pedestrian malls. The two most important were the Left Bank and Right Bank expressways. The Left Bank expressway conversion was […]
Recently, the public car transport industry in France has evolved, particularly with the appearance of a new means of transportation, named VTC (literally “tourism vehicle with driver”), where we find the controversial name, Uber. This new service has changed the rules of the system regulating public transport by car, which traditionally was the exclusive domain […]
Paris, like most major cities of the world, was originally chosen for it’s geographical location and the presence of water. Every century or so, the river Seine reminds itself to Parisians by coming out of its river bed, creating some of the more unusual sceneries that can be seen in the city. In 2015, those […]
Is Paris a good place to shop? It depends on what you seek. If you are looking for best value, there are many places in the world where you will get more for your money, such as in the USA. That there are often more choices in Paris (size, color, model, etc.) does not alter […]