The New York Times Goes To Paris

Interestingly, the New York Times is the most read English-Language newspaper on the planet. For very good reasons: the writing is beautiful and clear, the stories are well chosen, and their website is free of the celebrity sensationalism that has ruined so many of the great English newspapers these days.

One of the most viewed stories on the NY Times website in this summer has been a travel article, “Frugal Paris,” which suggests to American readers how to see Paris without spending too much money; and not just the obvious, cliché, Paris, but interesting new sights and regions.

The article begins with the summer evening picnics on the Canal St Martin, in the city’s 10 arrondissement ( My Cow readers should know that “arrondissement” is NEVER translated to “district” in English; “arrondissement" is a Paris thing, specific to Paris, and so, must remain in French, like “metro”. ) The author, Matt Gross, is entranced by the simple joys of the Parisian picnic. Being American he also very much likes the fact that a local pizza parlour is using advertising on a helium ballon flying close to the canal to co-ordinate bicycle delivered pizza meals, for those who forgot to bring a picnic.

Matt would like to see Belleville and the newly fashionable areas of the North East, where “Asian, Arab and African immigrants live alongside artists and yuppies and bobos….” Alongside “ strivers, schemers, hustlers, freeloaders and starving artists who roam its streets, sing chansons on its subways and make tiny cups of coffee last hours at zinc counters,” but he finds the 32 euros per night hotels he originally booked, charming, but impossible to stay in because of their lack of creature comforts.

So Matt swaps Belleville for the well-worn streets of the Marais. He does return to Bastille. He particularly likes, as we all do, us Anglo-Saxons, Le Baron Rouge, a bar in what he optimistically terms, “an old working-classneighborhood , “ where most of the nearly 50 wines cost less than 3.50 euros!”

From there he takes his binge to Chez Georges, on the Rive Gauche. “Beers are 2 euros, kirs 2.50, and all are welcome, from old-timers who wander in and out, to hip kids who groove to the D.J.’s turntables under the stone arches in the basement. In my mind, I saw it as an assommoir, or gin mill, from one of Zola’s novels.”

What he neglects to mention is that Chez Georges, for all its undoubted charm, is tiny, and often full of American tourists like himself. You could fit four times Chez Georges into a typical, popular, London pub.

Matt likes the restaurant “Spring”, “ one of the hottest tables in the city…Opened two and a half years ago by Daniel Rose, a 32-year-old American chef who has already become a Paris legend.”

By now he is spending 48 euro on a meal of gray-shrimp marmalade, sole beignets, lobster rolls and duck-fat French fries. By now the “Frugal,” in “Frugal Traveller” had definitively left the City of Light.

By Mycowedit

Quand le New York Times vient visiter Paris... (A écouter en V.O. (cliquez sur le fichier MP3) à la fin de l'article. A noter également qu’en passant votre souris sur les mots en italique, ces derniers apparaissent traduits en surimpression.

Article publié en partenariat avec MyCow.eu