France is best savored in tiny moments.
It’s the way of life that is French, not the Eiffel Tower, or the art museums, or the food itself. It’s the sum of small activities and experiences, counted like precious little sweets and enjoyed slowly using all of your physical senses. I traveled through the south of France and Paris by bus, train and metro, seeing and listening and eating and drinking and swimming over the course of a month.
Here are a few of my favorite French things:
1. Piano concerts in Paris
Every week, at least in the fall, there are a few classical piano performances playing in medieval chapels across Paris. The first one that I attended, at the Eglise Saint Ephrem, put me in an absolute rhapsody: Liszt, Satie, Rachmaninoff and Mozart! By candlelight! I was dying. For the second concert, the pianist played Schubert, Chopin and Beethoven at the Eglise Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. The second pianist was much better technically, though the space was bigger, so not as intimate. Still, both performances were divine.
2. Modernism
In Paris, the Louis Vuitton Foundation’s exhibition offered an excellent homage to the life and work of the talented Charlotte Perriand, a contemporary of Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger and Le Corbusier but often overshadowed by them in terms of fame and public exposure. I was grateful the foundation organized such an elaborate and detailed show dedicated to Perriand’s vision for a new world where furniture design, fine art and architecture could be integrated to improve urban living. It was a nice addendum after my experience visiting the actual site of La Cite Radieuse in Marseille, Le Corbusier’s archetype for his utopian vision of modern society. He never finished building that utopia. That was his first and only apartment complex in that particular design.
3. Café culture
I practiced my people-watching (and judging) skills while sipping negronis and white wine in the Marais and the Rue Montorgueil in Paris, and Deli Bo café in Nice. It’s arguably a favorite French sport, alongside soccer and petanque.
4. Baking under the sun in Nice
Lying out to fry, or “faire la crepe.” My favorite spots were on the pebble beach of the Promenade des Anglais and floating on my back in the cove of Villefranche-sur-Mer at Martinière Beach.
5. Family gift shop, still there
My grandpa’s old gift shop in Paris, near Pantheon, is now a café called Gandeamus, but the building façade looks exactly the same. I also spent an entire day trying to track down French government records on my great-grandfather, who had been awarded a legion of honor. But the search was complicated by the fact that he wasn’t a French citizen, and his honorable activities hadn’t occurred within France itself. As family lore goes, he had supposedly done something to help a French commander during the Vietnam War. No one knows the details – not my mom, nor her cousins whom I asked. My grandpa is dead, so I can’t ask him. We have a few documents, but they don’t contain any explanations. It remains a mystery, until I find the right cousin who’ll speak to me, or find more records.
6. Aperol spritzes
My summer drink of choice. Fizzy, a little sweet. I drank them everywhere, from a modernist balcony at the Cite Radieuse in Marseille, to the old town of Nice where I paired it with caramelized onion flatbread, or pissaladiere, and at the maritime-themed La Caravelle by the old port of Marseille. The runner-up: negronis in Pigalle.
7. Inspired by French literature
I absolutely loved visiting the places that had inspired famous French storytellers. I went to Chateau D’If, the site that inspired Alexander Dumas’s fictional island in the famous novel, The Count of Monte Cristo. I also hiked the hills of Aubagne around the hulking mountain of Le Garlaban, where French filmmaker and author Marcel Pagnol grew up and which he fondly described in his memoirs.
8. Medieval village on a cliff
Eze, perched at the very top like an eagle’s nest, was stunning. What made it even better was the little garden of succulents.
9. Parisian gardens
I did it like the Parisians did, and strolled like a flaneur with no aim in mind through the Jardin des Plantes and Jardin du Luxembourg.
10. Shakespeare bookstore by Notre Dame
The original Shakespeare & Co. is gone, but a second English-language shop by the Notre Dame (which is undergoing renovations after the fire) lives on, crowded at nearly all times of the day. The shop, with narrow passageways and lined with books on all the shelves, seemed to buzz with the collective energy emanating from all the book nerds. They squeezed by each other, propping themselves up on tiptoes and scrambling to locate book titles. Of course I was one of them: I bought a book of sonnets by the old Bard.
