Of all the dreamy ideals France and Paris elicit among visitors or expatriates, one joker in the deck often goes overlooked: The French predilection for taking to the streets in protest whenever they are unhappy with their government. And, just now, they are plenty unhappy with the regime of Emmanuel Macron, the country’s president. To […]

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If Paris has seemed like a weekend battle zone for the past year … well, it often has been. It was 52 weeks ago that a grass-roots movement erupted across many areas of France, and especially in Paris, that led to arrests, injuries and plenty of destruction, most of it aimed at police and property. […]

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Seventy-five years ago today, 150,000 American, British and Canadian troops landed in France to begin the reclamation of Europe and especially France from Nazi Germany. Recalling D-Day, as June 6, 1944 is known in the U.S., has been a very big thing this week, here in France, and I am more than a little surprised. […]

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Because of a little park named after Pope John XXIII, I came to think of Notre Dame from the “wrong” end of Paris’s famed cathedral. In a silly, selfish way, I thought of Notre Dame as “belonging to me” more than the average tourist way because I was on its grounds for jogging/walking nearly every […]

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Living in western Europe, the assumption by most Americans, including this one, is that professional soccer teams must not be far from any point on the maps of England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France. That assumption would be wrong. Where we live, in the Occitanie region (previously known as the Languedoc) of southern France, plenty […]

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This blog commenced on March 10, 2008. Ten years ago today. It was four days after I had been fired by the Los Angeles News Group, and I wanted to let co-workers and other journalists know what had happened, with as many specifics as I could recall pertaining to the (then mostly novel) concept of […]

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It’s final. Well, as soon as the rubber-stamp approval of International Olympic Committee voting members next month. But the top guys have agreed with the two cities that bid for the 2024 Games. The 2024 Olympics go to Paris. The 2028 Summer Games go to Los Angeles. Los Angeles will get $1.8 billion in cash […]

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I covered the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. (I was a teeny bit too young to see the 1932 L.A. Games, back when the Memorial Coliseum was “only” 11 years old.) And I can vouch that things went off quite well, in 1984. From Opening Ceremonies and the 84 grand pianos and right on down to […]

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The sappiest and silliest expression of eternal affection in Paris over the past decade has been the “love lock”. What whispers “be mine” quite as beguilingly as a big, ugly, heavy brass padlock attached to a bridge in Paris? And left behind to become an eyesore as it begins to rust away? But this has […]

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We now have added the Languedoc to places in the world where we have had Thanksgiving dinner. That ends a period of five years out of seven when we celebrated Thanksgiving in Abu Dhabi. The exceptions were … when we spent it in Paris (inviting some people over to where we were staying) and when […]

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