1) Nicknames for the building with its workings on the outside are the gerbil cage and the cruise liner. It reopened in 2000 after a two year refurb to the sounds of seagulls and fog horns in recognition of this. 2) Holly Goodhead’s office at Drax’s space-shuttle plant in the James Bond film Moonraker (1979) [...]
Continue reading about 3 Fascinating Facts about the Pompidou Centre
I saw this ad in the Eurostar magazine, and was intrigued by the picture. The boy has a funnily weird expression on his face, and I wondered what on earth was going on with the crooked hand. I decided to do a bit of research. Not surprisingly it turns out that this is an iconic [...]
Hilarious. I’d just arrived in Paris, not having been in a while, so my ear for French wasn’t particularly well-developed (not that it is at the best of times …) So there was a misunderstanding with the lady at the ticket desk right at the beginning. I was told to go down the stairs to [...]
Continue reading about Les Etoiles du Rex – Backstage tour of a great cinema
There was a much-derided alternative plan for the Paris train system, put up by the imaginative sea captain, Edouard Mazet in 1884. He proposed a system which used neither rails, nor wagons, nor bridges, nor tunnels. He reasoned that it was impossible to fit an underground sytem under a town that was already built, and [...]
La Défense Named after the statue La Défense de Paris by Louis Ernest Barrias, which was erected in 1883 to commemorate the soldiers who had defended Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. (la defense pic) That very same man is also reponsible for “Nature unveiling herself to science”, now housed at the Musée d’Orsay. Argentine Originally [...]
Continue reading about More Paris Metro Stations: How did they get their names?
After 20 years of bickering between the City of Paris and private transport companies about whether to have an underground or overground rail system, the Paris metro opened in 1900 – 27 years after the first London underground line opened. Here are some useless facts about the areas after which 10 of these stations were [...]
Continue reading about 10 Paris Metro Stations: How Did they Get Their Names?
Some smaller museums here that you mightn’t have come across … Musée des Vampires (Museum of Vampires) This unique almost Parisian museum (it’s at the end of a metro line in Lilas) houses 1500 books on the theme of vampirism and related subjects, 870 films, vampire slaying tools and an autographed portrait of Bram Stoker [...]
You’ll have heard of Jerusalem syndrome where tourists become psychotic and some come to believe that they’re Jesus Christ. Well, there’s also a Paris syndrome… It affects mainly Japanese visitors to the capital (and France and Spain as a whole), and in 2006 12 Japanese nationals had to be sent home, accompanied by a doctor [...]
The biggest cinema still working in Paris, Le Grand Rex has been around since 1932 and still a great place to see a film.
The best hotels in Paris if you love history, luxury or quirkiness.
