No Vacancies at Hotel Kaiserstein

Someone asked us yesterday if we're going to have any more visitors before we leave. Sadly, the answer was no - Hotel Kaiserstein (Paris) is closed until further notice. On the bright side, we have gads of lovely memories of all the guests we hosted this year, and right now we'd like to revisit some of our favorites from each visit, if only briefly. (Click on each visitor's name for all the posts associated with their time here.)

Robert - making Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur dinners from scratch, and our visit to the Société Générale headquarters
Jacob - Nuit Blanche and funtimes at the Eiffel Tower with Sandi and Ethan

Phil and Josh - proof that couchsurfers are always friends of friends of friends
Sarah Fischer - long walks and the Centre Pompidou

(Picture taken with Sarah's camera)

Joy and Jake - they may have saved my life, and Christmas Eve at the Menilmontant church
Alyssa and Michelle - all-too-short sight-seeing extravaganza, including a romp through two department stores

Eden and JP - they brought the bitter cold with them from Minneapolis but together we found warmth in excellent cheese and excellent tea
Matt - proof that research and fun should be mutually inclusive; his Eiffel Tower Tips post is a must-read
Katie and Darryl - two Chinese New Year parades, and a great dinner at La Bouche
Talya and Ari - making hamantashen and hitting up Purim services

PS - Congrats to Talya and Ari on their recent engagement!!!

Rebecca and Moritz - playing a part in Moritz's proposal!!!
Becky and Gladis - picnic, museums, May Day, and SO MUCH DELICIOUS FOOD
Dimi - our last burst of speed sightseeing, including a bateau mouche ride, three former palaces/mansions become museums, our second best meal of the year, and much, much more . . . coming soon to a panda-à-paris blog near you!

Special mention: Joy and Cathy - Technically they didn't stay with us, but given that we spent anywhere from 8 to 12 hours a day with them throughout their visit, they qualify for "Hotel Kaiserstein Preferred Guest" status. Like Dimi, they ran us ragged with sightseeing and quality dining experiences - or was it the other way around?

21 guests in 8 months - not too shabby. Will Hotel Kaiserstein remain popular after moving back to its Somerville location? We doubt it, but we hope we're wrong!

Château de Vincennes

To celebrate the end of our time here, we'd like to ask a favor of our readers: take a minute to read back through your favorite posts, and send your "top 3" list to panda.a.paris [at] gmail.com. We'll be collecting your submissions throughout the week, and next week (our last in Paris!) we'll post the results. Thanks in advance, and happy browsing!

For our last free museum Sunday, we set our sights high: the Château de Versailles. But then we found out that it's only free the first Sunday of the month between November and March, so that was a no go. We decided to substitute one château for another, and with Becky and Élodie (Maggie's conversation partner/our new friend), we headed instead to the Château de Vincennes.

From the outside, we could already tell we were in for a treat - this is an honest to goodness castle, with high, often crumbling walls, a moat, towers, and drawbridges!


A slight let-down once we got inside: like Versailles, the Château de Vincennes is only free on the first Sundays of November through March. (Clearly we should have checked our own post on this very subject from way back in September. Stupid, stupid, stupid.) On the bright side, the woman selling tickets took pity on us and let me and Becky in for free (because I'm 26 and she's 25 - although technically 25 is the cutoff, and you're supposed to be a resident of the EU). Maggie and Élodie, on the other hand, got stiffed with a 12-euro tour fee. Eek.

You can technically enter the Château de Vincennes for free and walk the grounds, but you can't go in the buildings, and you certainly can't benefit from the excellent tour. Our guide discussed in detail three highlights of the Château and led us through one of them. First, we learned about the Tour du Village, the only remaining tower of the original six constructed in the 14th century:

Second, we spent about an hour walking in, over, through, and under the landmark that Céline correctly identified to win our last Photo Challenge: the Donjon de Charles V, constructed between 1337 and 1373, is the highest medieval tower in Europe.

It began as the stronghold of French kings during the Hundred Years' War, then became a prison that held such luminaries as the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Mirabeau. In addition to its historical importance, the donjon is something of an architectural marvel for its time, and many of the monument's details struck us as both brilliant and beautiful.




The two columns in the bottom row constitute the main supports for the tower - they're actually stacked on top of each other through five 30-ft-high floors. You might just barely be able to see the colors painted on the column on the right, which give a faint indication of the riot of color that these rooms originally boasted. (Another great place to see "authentic" medieval interior design: Église St.-Germain-des-Prés.)

And finally, the Chapel, designed after the much more famous La Chapelle of the Île-de-la-Cité. It doesn't quite measure up, but only because the stained glass hasn't been preserved as well. On the bright side, with fewer heavy panels of stained glass, there's tons more natural light, such that the ceiling seems to float above your head. Bonus: When we visited, there was a nifty temporary exhibition on medieval musical instruments. Score!


Unfortunately it wasn't possible to visit several of the 17th-century additions to the château, which now host archives of the Defense Ministry. But we'll see plenty of 17th-century interiors when we visit the Château de Versailles later this week with Maggie's mom. Stay tuned!

Two Days with Moritz and Rebecca

After a glorious, five-day romp in Paris, Becky flew back to the States yesterday (sad times Panda). Now that she and Gladis have come and gone, we only have one remaining visitor coming up - Maggie's mom. But before we get too ahead of ourselves, we're super late in gushing about two visitors we had in early April, when the ash cloud was still just a bit of indigestion in the belly of the Eyjafjallajökull Volcano.

Rebecca (Maggie's 2nd cousin) and Moritz (Rebecca's partner) had previously been our hosts when we visited Munich for Thanksgiving. We were excited to return the favor during their trip to Paris, and we hope we showed them as good of a time as they showed us.

Since neither Rebecca nor Moritz cared too much about hitting all the major sites of Paris, we were free to meander through our favorite areas, stopping by places both familiar and completely new. For example: the Maison de Victor Hugo (the apartment where he lived between 1832-48 is now a free museum run by the City of Paris) . . .


 . . . the Berthillon salon de thé . . .

 . . . La Grande Épicerie du Bon Marché, where all kinds of Easter-related delights could be found  . . .

 . . . and the Pont des Arts, where couples recently began leaving small padlocks attached to the bridge as a sign of their undying love (the City of Paris just announced it will soon begin removing said padlocks).

But the big event of the weekend had nothing to do with where we went or what we did. It started when Moritz emailed us several weeks before the visit, asking for restaurant recommendations for a "special celebration." Maggie came up with Les Ombres, the restaurant on top of the Musée du Quai Branly with close-up views of the Eiffel Tower. Here's the happy pair before dinner:

When they got home, we found out that Moritz and Rebecca had had the "best meal of their lives," followed by a short walk to the Eiffel Tower, where Moritz proposed, and where Rebecca accepted. Hooray! and congratulations!

It turned out Moritz and Rebecca showed themselves a good time in Paris. We're just glad we got to go along for the ride.

Musée des Arts et Métiers

We timed our picnic Thursday afternoon to end around 6 PM, which is when the Musée des Arts et Métiers begins its weekly "Nocturne," during which entry is free (just the way we like it) between 6 and 9:30 PM.

The Musée des Arts et Métiers was founded by the Abbé Grégoire (a major figure in the French Revolution) as a history of science museum and depository for new inventions. Thanks in large part to him, we saw lots of beautiful, complicated-looking, and often mysterious scientific instruments stretching back hundreds of years. The oldest pieces are held in what appears to be the attic of the building, wood beams and all.


Later in the parcours (visit path), we learned about how computers work, inspected full-sized looms, gained respect for the technological leaps it took to mass produce glass bottles, and practiced construction techniques. My favorite pieces both had what looked like piano keyboards: the first was an 1819 monochord (an actual monochord! that divides a string to produce different intervals/pitches, proving the physical principles on which all music is based) and the second was an early typewriter that assigned a different letter to each key (assuming that piano skills would translate to typing).


Hopefully you don't get the impression that this was boring, because it really wasn't. Quite the contrary, the incredible quantity of stuff was pretty overwhelming, so much so we would have been happy dividing our visit into several. Our only complaint was that there weren't enough interactive exhibits. The two things we enjoyed most were getting to "code" a hard drive through manual "magnetic impulse" to form binary code which we then translated into numbers; and getting to play with an abacus. We are huge dorks.

The Musée des Arts et Métiers saves the absolute best for absolute last. When you round the last turn in the parcours, you find yourself in the former Priory of St. Martin-des-Champs, a renovated, centuries-old Gothic church, now filled with the "large-format" works of the museum:


Planes, cars, trucks, a scale model of the Statue of Liberty, yeah, they've got that. Foucault's Pendulum? Check.

Foucault's Pendulum! It's real! It's fantastic! And so is this museum. Go to there.

Good Friends, Good Food

It's been forever since the last confluence of our favorite events: friends visiting + a meal so excellent we couldn't not tell you about it. But finally, that moment is here!

Yes! Gladis (left) and Becky (middle) are here! Amazingness was in the air at La Bouche, as well as on our table. Here's the menu:

We ended up getting at least one of everything.


As you can tell, after the mango, vollaile (game turkey) and white asparagus amuse-bouche (top left), the sliced beef tongue with warm leeks and peanut vinaigrette (top right), the fish rillettes and algae tartine (bottom left), and the lamb+blini hamburger with caramelized turnip (bottom right), it just got too dark to take pictures. But the desserts were also incredible (creative, tasty, beautiful), and we were so glad to have Gladis and Becky visiting we mostly forgot to take out the camera. Nothing wrong with that.

Since this meal (Thursday night) we've had a delicious picnic in the park, famous falafel, and a quasi-personalized meal at a local table de hôte. Don't worry - we'll tell you about all that in good time.

Happy Easter!

Paris can't seem to make up its mind about Easter. Lots of things are closed today and tomorrow - schools, the BN, the Grands Magasins - but lots of other things are open - museums, local boulangeries, parks. Schools have spring break starting two weeks from now, but people still call it "Easter break," much as they do in the U.S. Flowerbeds are bursting with color but temperatures have been hovering in the upper 40s (Fahrenheit, obvi). Whereas I'd expect everyone to be hunkered down with family obligations today (including a big dinner), I have a rehearsal and a photo shoot scheduled late this afternoon, and no one I know has left town for the long weekend.

Still, it's not like anyone could miss Easter's arrival. Egg-shaped balloons hang from balconies and delectable desserts beckon from storefront windows. Yesterday we stopped by La Grande Epicerie at Le Bon Marché with our most recent visitors, Rebecca and Moritz, and took in the sights and smells.


Happy Easter, everyone!

Grande Mosquée de Paris

We visited the Grande Mosquée de Paris last Saturday. Except we didn't actually visit the mosque; we instead enjoyed thé à la menthe in one of its peaceful courtyards with Louis' colleague Hannah (visiting her sister this week) and her sister, Becca (studying in Paris for the semester).

If you go to the Grande Mosquée for tea, you will enjoy a sweet, hot beverage that warms you in the winter and refreshes you in the summer. A nice gentleman will pass through the courtyard with a tray-full of glasses like those you see below. Wave the man over (it may take several tries - he may be busy shooing away the pigeons), ask for one glass (or two), and hand over two euros per glass. Pastries must be ordered indoors. 

In poor weather, you might want to head inside to the vrai salon de thé where you can enjoy even more vivid decor and a more bustling scene. 

Panda didn't join us on this expedition but we're always scoping out future dog-friendly outings. From what we can tell, you can bring your dog to the Grand Mosquée as long as you take your tea in the entrance courtyard. But they made it very clear: no Cocker Spaniels or terriers allowed inside.