I love Paris every moment...

   You can keep London or New York. Nowhere beats Paris, and I go into a total fizz of delight the moment we climb off the train. We arrived here yesterday after a sleepy race through the French countryside: sleepy because, as usual, we'd left tons of stuff to do till the last minute and consequently had little sleep; a race because we took the TGV, which rampages across the country at hundreds of kilometres an hour.
   Two weeks equals two different apartments, both in Le Marais. The first is on the sixth floor of an ancient building. The smallest elevator in the world takes us as far as the fifth floor so we only have to climb one flight of wide, polished stairs. If I can find the tape measure that I may, or may not, have packed, I'll measure the elevator next time we use it. Small? Let's just say that if you stand facing the door, your shoulders touch the walls on both sides. Two people and two suitcases were out of the question, so we rode up in shifts.
    Large by Paris standards (about 40 square metres) this little apartment has sloping ceilings and four oval windows, which make you feel as though you're coming in to land....  

 Here's the apartment I'd buy if we won the Euro lottery. 

No prizes for guessing that it's the one with all the geraniums. That pipe-covered building in the distance is the Pompidou Centre.

    When we were here in June, we stayed just down the street so we came to know the quartier fairly well. One block over is a little street crammed with Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants, which is where we ate last night. Nems, squid, chicken with cashew nuts, and a couple of grande Tsing Taos to wash it all down...we can eat French food anytime but we do occasionally crave Asian flavours.