Paris

[The Stranger]

how cute!! though if u want romance i recommend Speyksessies in Rotterdam. Much more better than Paris.

[Moros]

how cute!! though if u want romance i recommend Speyksessies in Rotterdam. Much more better than Paris.

I will come to that one day, TS, I will. But I'm still having exams to make the 29th.

Edit: Louis Feré is indeed a great artist. Avec les temps is one of my favourite french songs, together with Les Passantes by Brassens and of cours most songs by the real maestro (not unsurprisingly a Belgian) Brel.

[Beirut]

Edit: Louis Feré is indeed a great artist. Avec les temps is one of my favourite french songs, together with Les Passantes by Brassens and of cours most songs by the real maestro (not unsurprisingly a Belgian) Brel.

We had a concert here in my small town a few months back by a Quebec artist who puts on a full Brel cover show. Sweat and all. Two nights in a local art gallery, about thirty or forty people each night. Plush seats with beers in hand. It was fantastic!

"Moules et frites et frites et moules."

[Moros]

We had a concert here in my small town a few months back by a Quebec artist who puts on a full Brel cover show. Sweat and all. Two nights in a local art gallery, about thirty or forty people each night. Plush seats with beers in hand. It was fantastic!

"Moules et frites et frites et moules."

If only a man could live multiple lives in multiple times and multiple places, so many great experiences we have missed, will miss and will not notice.

[Fragony]

how cute!! though if u want romance i recommend Speyksessies in Rotterdam. Much more better than Paris.

Going to compare that soulless concrete-upward village with Paris, Rotterdam is meh, nothing of any interest ever ever happened there and that includes being bombed, bye Rotterdam. Old harbour, it isn't a total disaster, but it's still really boring.

[Louis VI the Fat]

The Hausmannian buildings look great from street level. Pretty, restrained façades. Elegant in a stern kind of way, classical.


They are a complete disaster to live in though. The floor plans are made for nineteenth century living, small rooms, awkward layouts. Just when most had been build, electricity and bathrooms became the norm, shortly before WWI. However two wars, each requiring lenghty reparations afterwards, meant that only by the 1960s/70s the project to build bathrooms in old houses was at last making substantial progress.

Building blocks are too large. This was fine for the medieval city, with its mazes of alleys and courtyards. But as these dissapeared, were no longer build in the new blocks, it gradually it meant that most houses simply lost acces to the street. Because of the need for long visual lines, building blocks remained large, too large. As a result, still what you see in Paris is only half the city, the other half remains hidden. In the welathiest areas, the ancient eastern Marais, the 7th and 8th, this allowed for enormous gardens. In most areas, courtyards are build up with houses, lacking street access.

This all conspired with the decision to build prettty diagonal street patterns. So much more elegant than a square grid:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

When the inner courtyards are removed, or when an unfinished street façade leaves a gap, it sometimes shows to what extent the pretty streets can be deceitful: