Front Lawn Fresh Cuts vol.VII

your belated source from the City of Lights

On the Playlist: Rufus Wainright’s Complainte de la Butte… or rather, I hummed it while Dean composed beat poetry in French while eating sushi beside the Seine.

On the Reading List: Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (purchased at the Pantheon)

Current Obsession: Inevitably, fashion. No city can rival Paris for originality or options. My one splurge was a fancy little top from the brilliant French clothing chain: A.P.C.

Design of the Times: Though we have it in the UK, one of my fave spots to shop in Paris was Habitat. After reading about it in Living Etc for ages, it was nice to finally get my hands on some of their stylish and affordable wares at Les Halles in the Marais.

Have an ’Art: One of the artists at the Spank the Monkey exhibit Lorah and I saw in Newcastle was a dude known just as “ Invader.” He installs mosaic tiles all over cities in the shape of little video game space invaders. Dean and I kept ourselves busy during our daily strolls through Paris by keeping our eyes peeled for them. There are hundreds of them but we spotted at least a dozen.

Blog Log: Voila! La Coquette: a fabulous blog about daily Parisian life (I confessed, I just spent an hour of my morning reading her archives).

Gastronomic Highlight of the Trip: Lorah, shelling her way through more than 100 mussels at an Italian bistro on the Champs Elysées.

Badly Adapted French Phrase of the Week: “Tray droal” (Dean’s bastardized pronunciation of ‘very funny’), inducing an eye-roll from me at least once a day.

Insider Scoop: Napoleon had his tomb installed below ground level so that your first response when viewing it from the Invalides balcony is to bend over—ie, bow.

Hipsters on the Web: Sofia Coppola lists her Paris favourites in The Independent.

To Do List: Figure out how to get my combined France and Scotland purchases back to Vancouver next month.