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September 19, 2010
The Ultimate 'Hood: Ile St. Louis
Ditch your American companions and learn something. See a post last year at Richard Nahem's I Prefer Paris. Richard leaves the Marais to enter close-by Ile St. Louis, my adopted neighborhood, and famous for its quality of being a small town at the center of Paris. Yank tourists think Ile St. Louis is about an ice cream shop at its edge near Notre Dame. It's really not. You can slurp ice cream all you want when you're back in Elkhart or Sioux City.
You are in Paris right now. This is your life, and life's short. Please walk around, okay? It's over 2000 years old. Escape your "American bubble tourist group". Escape, if you must, your family and friends. Go it alone. Tell your spouse to shop somewhere with your goofy back-home friends you brought along. Meet a South African woman named Zoe who's lived across from Cluny for eight years, plays the viola and has never visited Cleveland or Chicago. Talk to her. Tell her about those places. And about your life.
Learn something. Change your life.
Posted by JD Hull at September 19, 2010 11:59 PM