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TL:DR Some quick tips for friends & family travelling to Paris

France is the world’s most popular destination for tourism, and its capital is of course the entry point for most visitors. The Paris region has a population of 9 million, but Paris intra muros (Paris within the walls, the deep historical core city within the Périphérique ring road) is only about 2 million.

Driving within Paris proper is a nightmare, and completely unnecessary given the quality of the regional public transit network. Going to suburbs like Versailles or Saint-Germain en Laye is easy, but going from one suburb to another is harder because the public transport network is radial, you often have to go all the way back to Paris to transfer, although the situation is improving.

The CityMapper app is very useful for figuring out the best transit options to your chosen destination. Since 2005, the entire region has a flat €2.50 charge, or €2 if you limit yourself to buses or the Paris Métro (this does not include the airports, for which there is a surcharge). The easiest way to move around is to use the official Île de France Mobilités app, you can load individual tickets or day/week passes onto your phone if it supports NFC as most do nowadays.

Of course, France is renowned for its food and no visit to Paris is complete without sampling its treats. I’ve made a custom map. David Lebovitz’s blog and book The Good Life in Paris is also an excellent resource, and more up-to-date than anything I can produce from afar.

I won’t cover the major tourist attractions, but here are a few off-the-beaten-path ones:

• The Musée des Arts & Métiers has a wealth of ancient scientific and technical exhibits, like Foucault’s original pendulum, king Louis XIV’s machines (he had a hobby building mechanical machines), Caselli’s Pantelegraph, a 1860s fax machine, and much much more.
• The Palais Galliéra is a museum dedicated to fashion. It doesn’t have permanent collection, only rotating special exhibitions, and sometimes workshops as well.
• The Promenade Plantée is the inspiration for New York’s High Line and other imitators. It’s a raised railway viaduct converted into an urban park, and under its arches the Viaduc des Arts houses arts & crafts shops as well as a number of foodie outlets.
• The Musée de la Magie is a museum devoted to stage magic, in one of the oldest parts of Paris where you can still see the remains of Philippe-Auguste’s fortifications nearby. It has workshops for children on Wednesday, with some coverage in English, but you would be best asking if one of the teachers is proficient first.
• The Fragonard perfume company has English-language workshops in their flagship store near the Opéra.
• The Musée des Plans-Reliefs (English brochure) in the majestic Hôtel des Invalides has a unique collection of 3D scale models of cities and fortifications, built for military planning purposes from Louis XIV onwards.
• Outside Paris in Élancourt, the France Miniature amusement park has scale models of all of France’s top attractions, plus a few more physical activities like ziplines. You do need to drive to get there, however.
• The Terrasse de Saint-German-en-Laye and the Parc de Saint-Cloud have outstanding views of Paris.
• Lines for the Eiffel Tower are often very long. The views from the much less crowded Tour Maine Montparnasse are just as good, and as a bonus you can’t see that modernist carbunkle from itself…

I use Dovecot as my mail server, with maildir format mailboxes. It is very easy to make the Sent folder be the same as the Inbox: just symlink the Sent messages folder’s cur subdirectory to be the same as the Maildir’s top-level new directory. This ensures any email placed in the Sent messages folder is magically a whisked off to the inbox.

starvald ~>ll Maildir/.Sent\ Messages/
total 85
drwxr-xr-x 5 majid engineers 11 Apr 20 13:01 ./
drwxr-xr-x 268 majid engineers 278 Apr 20 13:26 ../
drwxr-xr-x 2 majid engineers 2 Oct 14 2007 courierimapkeywords/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 majid engineers 6 Oct 30 2010 cur -> ../new/
-rw-r--r-- 1 majid engineers 33 Jun 15 2011 dovecot-keywords
-rw-r--r-- 1 majid engineers 54 Apr 20 13:01 dovecot-uidlist
-rw-r--r-- 1 majid engineers 400 Apr 20 08:38 dovecot.index
-rw-r--r-- 1 majid engineers 24K Apr 20 08:39 dovecot.index.cache
-rw-r--r-- 1 majid engineers 26K Apr 20 13:01 dovecot.index.log
drwxr-xr-x 2 majid engineers 2 Apr 19 09:43 new/
drwxr-xr-x 2 majid engineers 2 Apr 20 08:38 tmp/

• Swan Laundry will pick up your laundry at your hotel, wash and fold it, and return it the same day for a $50 flat fee.
• Wind Mobile has an unlimited 3G hotspot plan for $35 per month (they will throttle you if you exceed 10GB in a month), a better deal than any US carrier offers. They sold me a refurbished Huawei hotspot for $45 (why should the NSA have all the fun listening in?)
• Urban Fare is an excellent place for breakfast and fancy groceries, specially the Shangri-La location.
• The Blue Water Cafe is my favorite restaurant in town.

Legendary cellist and all-around good guy Mstislav “Slava” Rostropovich passed away in Moscow today. He was a friend and supporter of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Britten and many others like Dutilleux, and many of the greatest works for cello of the 20th century, indeed of all time, were dedicated to him.

I had the opportunity to hear him conduct Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” a year ago (when I took this photo) and a few years earlier as a cellist the Dvořák Cello Concerto (sadly in replacement of the far superior Shostakovich First Cello Concerto that was dedicated to him).

The world of music has suffered a grievous loss. None of the current generation of cellists (Ma, Gastinel) is of the same caliber. As a conductor, his legacy is more mixed, as his Shostakovich interpretations often lack fire, but his Prokofiev cycle with Erato is marvelous, specially the Fourth in its original version.

Is it just me or is the Finale of Sibelius’ Second Symphony, Op. 43 (1902) eerily reminiscent of the first movement of Saint-Saëns’ Third Piano Concerto, Op. 29 (1869)?