The Many Glorious Shoes of Paris

This is the Holy Land, the city that shoe lovers all over the world dream about.  Paris is a great shopping mecca, with more stores per square mile than any other city in the world. But for shoe fanatics, it’s paradise. High fashion shoes for women prevail and the high heels match the high prices. Whet your appetite in the swanky shopping districts along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, Avenue Montaigne, Louvre-Tuileries, and Place Vendôme. Don’t forget the funky independent designers in Abbesses, the Marais, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

The essential destination for any fashionista in Paris is Christian Louboutin's flagship store. There's always something magical about visiting the first/original flagship.

This cozy store displays one-of-a-kind shoes in an intimate, exhibit-like environment.
 Not only are the red-soled heels beautifully crafted and flattering, somehow the designer’s creations manage to be comfortable, too. With shoes lovingly presented on illuminated shelves, Louboutin’s Left Bank boutique looks more like an art installation than a shop.

The Café Terrace At Night

Vincent van Gogh's The Cafe Terrace is one of the painter's most remarkable and famous works as well as the first in a trilogy of starlit skies.  More than one hundred years after Vincent painted it, the Cafe Terrace is still in Arles, now called the Cafe Van Gogh.

When you see the café today, the outside walls are bright yellow, which is what it looks like in the painting. But in Van Gogh’s time, they weren’t in fact yellow, but a dull sandy color like a neighboring building. The yellow in the painting is Van Gogh’s interpretation of the light cast by a big gas lamp. This was the painting he did with the candles stuck to his felt hat so that he could see his canvas.


The original The Café Terrace at Night is currently on display at the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands.

Fromage - Reblochon

 Cheese monger Steve Jenkins, author of  The Cheese Primer, describes Reblochon as “a triumph of cheesemaking—its rind is like the velvet on a deer’s antler, its flavor like filet mignon.”  Reblochon (ruh-bloe-SHAW), which comes in 1”-high, 5 ½”-wide wheels, is a raw cow’s milk cheese from France that is aged about 50 days—ten days shy of the FDA's minimum requirement for legal sale in the U.S.

Reblochon comes only from the eastern slopes of the Haute-Savoie – plus one small adjacent valley in Savoie near the swiss border, high in the Alps. The cheese is made by mixing the milks of three different breeds of cow : abondance, tarine, and montbéliarde.

 The birth of this fascinating cheese is due to the ingenuity of the Savoie herdsmen. In the 13th century, the farmers were completely dependent on landowners who insisted that all the herd's milk was their property. At milking time, the herdsmen did not quite complete the milking. After the controllers had left, the herdsmen finished the milking.  From this the cheese was made with the creamy milk of a second milking. Reblochon derives from the word 'reblocher' which when literally translated means 'to pinch a cow's udder again'.

The Makers - Artoria Limoges

One of my personal favorites and easily distinguishable by bright, vivid paint colors is Artoria Limoges. Artoria has aquired exclusive licenses to retail some Disney and other copyrighted icons. Most Artoria Limoges boxes are numbered, limited editions in lots of 1000 or 2000. Artoria Limoges is the largest manufacturer of porcelain giftware in Limoges, France, located on the banks of the Vienne River. It has been a family-owned business for generations, and has become known for the outstanding quality and fine craftsmanship of its hand-painted Limoges boxes and other collectibles. Artoria performs all aspects of porcelain manufacture - sculpting, molding, finishing, decorating and accessorizing. Its artisans are among the finest in Limoges, and many are the sons and daughters of Artoria craftsmen. They also offer tours of their factory in Limoges.

The name Artoria was adopted in 1990. The factory was founded in 1957 by Robert de Merindol as Manufacture Nouvelle de Porcelaines. Merindol had been director for Camille Tharaud. The factory was expanded in 1959 (architect J. and J.L. Picot) and again in 1973 (by G. Boineau). R. de Merindol's son Thierry inherited the company in 1983, incorporated it in 1985, and changed the name to Artoria in 1990. The number of employees was 22 in 1965, 75 in 1988, 110 in 1990, 55 in 2003.

Artoria expanded to the USA in 1982 and opened a showroom in New York City in 1995. In 2005 American operations relocated to Northern New Jersey, actually five minutes from me in Morris County, to stop in and check them out is definitely on my 'to do'  list!.

The World's Most Famous Bookshop - Shakespeare & Co.

For half a century, a crowded bookshop set on the Left Bank opposite Notre-Dame, has offered food and a bed to penniless authors - the only rule is that they read a book a day. "Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise" is the revered bookshop's motto. 

In 1951 after World War II , George Whitman a demobbed GI,  had decided not to return to America, had chosen Paris as his home and decided to open a bookstore. George opened his doors midday to midnight, and the deal then is the deal now: sleep in the shop, on tiny beds hidden among the bookstacks; work for two hours a day helping out with the running of the place; and, crucially, read a book a day, whatever you like, but all the way through, unless maybe it's War and Peace, in which case you can take two days.

George took in the beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Henry Miller ate from the stewpot, but was too grand to sleep in the tiny writers' room. Anaïs Nin left her will under George's bed. There are signed photos from Rudolf Nureyev and Jackie Kennedy, signed copies of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.

Thousands of people have come through his doors, slept in his shop, eaten at his table, and many of them still write to him, or return.