The metro can be a lovely place to people watch. But then there is the inevitable moment when you see someone really attractive, and you try desperately to come up with an un-desperate approach to getting their number before they get off at the next stop. My friend has decided to keep it simple and [...]

A friend of mine decided to detox from a year of college drinking by spending his year after university living the life of a monk. He took a position as a history teacher at a secluded boarding school in the mountains of Switzerland, far from anything but lovely landscape and a lot of homemade cheese. [...]

I was hoping to meet some nice, normal, eligible young gentlemen/gentlewomen, and I was told that the public library of the Centre Pompidou museum is a hot spot to pick up people in Paris. So I stood outside for twenty minutes in the queue, amazed that people actually stand in line for admittance into a [...]

The FIAC in Paris is just as any other gathering of the international art world—a time for blind self-importance and a proliferation of designer spectacles. The contemporary art scene tends to revolve around The Three P’s: performance, posturing, and pretension. And what better place for that than Paris?
Adrift in a web of cigarette-butt-inspired conceptual art [...]

Personal ads are always intriguing sources of entertainment. Some desperate men living in Paris have posted ads in the local bilingual magazine, and their cultural confusion is only exceeded by the vagueness of their romantic expectations:
“Single, 6 feet, sportsman, Architect-innovator, screenwriter; I’m looking for a bilingual woman: French, English, single pour [...]

The second that World War II ended Ernest Hemingway (an ultimate pimp) barreled into Paris and headed straight to The Ritz. He entered the bar that would later bear his name and said to the bartender, “I’ll have 50 martinis.” He ended up staying at The Ritz for the following 3 weeks and basking in [...]

Train travel can be an ecstatic experience, even simply on short trips between city and countryside.
Gauche Things to do [especially as a middle-aged man] on a train:
1. Reading pornographic picture books.
2. Drinking alcohol (that you brought from home).
3. Watching The Lizzie McGuire Movie on your laptop. Even more gauche would be to watch [...]

When a Boston Brahmin moved to Paris for a four-year sojourn, due to her husband’s business, she soon became intimately acquainted with a notable family in the French aristocracy, which is, I can assure you, an expansive entity — France has doled out titles of nobility in an excessively liberal manner, and every fifth person [...]

Today a semi-sinister man dropped a bundle of business cards on the street in front of me. I picked them up and tried to give them back to him, but he was walking too quickly. And then he dropped an orange Louis Vuitton card case. I picked that up too. And then I realized that [...]

My friend arrived in Paris ready for a romance of epic proportions. Unlike the typical American who arrives in Paris and conscientiously avoids baguette and butter (out of an irrational fear of carbohydrates and cholesterol), she was ready to have her pain au chocolat, and eat it too.
She quickly met the perfect candidate to sweep [...]