Tourists have been doing it for some time already, other than the self-censoring “Parisians don’t … so I don’t” crowd.

But this year another “don’t” bites the dust.

“Parisians don’t wear sneakers” fell by the wayside in the 90s.

“Parisians don’t eat hamburgers” got gobbled up in the 2000s.

The demise of “In Paris men don’t wear shorts” is now official.

The signs were already here in the dead of winter as men of all ages set about jogging in tights. Men’s running tights, like shorts, are nothing new on the market but rarely had Parisian men dared such public snugness off of the beach. I figured that if men can run around in tights then it’s no daring leap to wearing shorts as the weather warms, even though warmth has been a frustratingly relative term thus far this year.

And so it has come to pass, weather permitting, with men being spotted wearing knee-length cargo shorts, straight shorts showing a flash of knee, flappy shorts showing a glimpse of thigh and the occasional Bermuda, and I’ve even seen some 70s style jean cut-offs on the cobblestone catwalks of my quarter.

The arrival of shorts will now, one hopes, lead to the demise of that most unfortunate article of recent men’s fashion, the pedal pusher, the capris, le pantacourt, those sockless little-boy knickers that found their way into the closets of men and that for several years now have provided proof that les parisiens take their fashion clues not from other men but from les parisiennes. Adieu, then, as pedal pushers find their rightful place in the garbage bin of recent fashionography.

And a hearty and long overdue bienvenue to shorts on men in Paris.

As to that old favorite, “Why do they all smoke?” that’s still got wind in its sails.

© 2013, Gary Lee Kraut

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OMG, just look around you in Paris on this frigid morning and bear witness to the city’s sinful descent: a city where sculptures of naked men and women shamelessly decorate the gardens, the capital of a country with a national health system that pays for birth control pills and abortions, a place where tourists mock communion while visiting Notre-Dame and Sacré Coeur then queue happily at Ladurée and Pierre Hermé to gorge themselves on colorful sugar wafers, 2€ a pop, where a president lives openly in sin yet declares it a private matter, a metropolis where an atheist majority has twice elected a homosexual mayor (who may soon have the right to preside over ceremonies to marry other homosexuals) and where two women, twin Jezebels, are now publicly hissing and clawing at each other as they fight to replace him rather than stay at home caring for children and pleasing husbands.

Repent! Repent! Or we’ll all be damned and frozen for eternity.

Or so it is written in stone above the central door of Notre-Dame in the City of Paris, where blasphemy is not a crime.

(c) 2013, Gary Lee Kraut.

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Last month was the coolest July on record in 30 years and probably the grayest too. June saw two overheated days of about 100 degrees F. but otherwise there’s barely been a t-shirt in sight in Paris for the past two months.

Personally, I’m sick of it. Of course, if you read the blogs you know that it’s socially incorrect for an American to be sick of anything in Paris. Paris is perfect at every moment, they say, and we should be cheerful all the time and say that we ♥ Paris day in day out. Well I don’t heart Paris when it’s grey for all of June and July! And I don’t heart Paris when there are steel wool clouds overhead in August. If we’re going to suffer the consequences of global warming at least let me get a tan!

A friend of mine was visiting from Philadelphia in July and I couldn’t get him to agree that a daytime high of 65 degrees in July with the constant threat of rain was neither fun nor beautiful. Paris, I assured him, had seen better days. But for him it was already perfect. He kept saying how ideal the weather was (admittedly he’d been suffering through a long string of 100 days back home). He told me that being in Paris made him want to do nothing more than to walk around all day with a baguette in his hand. Unfortunately, walking around with a baguette in a drizzle is not a great recipe for anything but a soggy baguette. Still, he kept up his good cheer about the weather for five days, and then, without a single complaint, he left under a drizzle for Charles de Gaulle Airport. Two hours later I returned from an appointment to find him standing in front of my building. He’d gotten his passport stolen from his pocket on the way to the airport. He looked miserable. The sun shone briefly on the sidewalk.

On August 1 the sun was out, temperatures in the low 70s. I went out biking. The sky was a bit hesitant but finally, it seemed, summer had arrived. Same thing on the second. But by the third the steel wool was back overhead. The photo you see here was taken from my balcony at 1:25pm today, August 5. It’s warm enough to dare a t-shirt but too threatening to venture very far with a baguette.

Writing, as everyone knows, is a form of therapy, and many of the “I heart Paris” bloggers seem to be in highly medicated therapy. Still, they might be onto something. So I’m hereby giving myself some cheerful Paris blogging therapy by listing 5 reasons why I ♥ cool gray weather in Paris this summer.

5 Therapeutic Reasons Why I Heart Cool Gray Weather in Paris This Summer

1. Great sleeping weather. Window open, my winter comforter still on the bed, I’ve been sleeping great and then have plenty of energy through the day, except when I take a nap, because it’s great napping weather too!

2. Fashion has remained in the closet. Other than the fashion this summer of white tennis shoes, which, as a tennis player, I owned anyway, no significant fashion statements were able to take hold in Paris this summer because it’s been too cool to wear them. We can all be thankful for that. (Those plain knee-length shorts with stuffed pockets that we see walking about are actually old news.)

3. Think of all the café money I saved. With no desire to sit outside in a café because no hot days to draw me to a $6 soda and no hot nights to inspire friends to call at midnight to say that they’re in my neighborhood, would I like to meet them for a drink, I’ve probably saved a few hundred euros in café expenses over the past two months. Then again, maybe I don’t have any more friends who stay out late because they’re all getting old, which would mean that I’m getting old. But I’m backsliding a bit in my therapy there, so suffice it to say that I think the weather gods for saving me money this summer.

4. The grapes are happy, and that should make us all happy. A warm dry April and May followed by a cool wet June and July makes for happy grapes in early August. Provided that major rainfall holds off for the next 3 or 4 weeks so as not to bloat the grapes, it’s going to be a good, early harvest. Which reminds me that I visited three wine regions last month—Champagne, Burgundy and Saint Pourçain, which sounds more like a cheese—so it hasn’t been such a bad summer after all. Which further reminds me that I’ll be leading an organic Wine & Dine walking tour on late afternoon and evening of Wednesday, August 11. Those who would like to join can write to me for more information through the France Revisited Contact page.

5. We’re never alone when we talk about the weather. There’s no greater way to feel connected with others than to talk about the weather because everyone relates to the subject all the time. I’ll post on Facebook “68 degrees and cloudy in Paris” and within three hours 25 of my bestest friends in the whole world will commune with me by posting temperatures around the globe. Before long we all want to join Annie in a chorus of “The sun will come out, tomorrow…” Sing along!

© 2011, Gary Lee Kraut

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The seasons in the city. Along with the change of light and length of day comes the change in urban vegetation. For France Revisited I’ve been watching the seasons in Paris by keeping an eye on the Virginia creeper that hangs along the full side wall of a building in my neighborhood.

Les saisons en ville. Ce qui change, c’est la lumière et la durée du jour bien sûr et aussi la végétation urbaine. Pour France Revisited, j’ai guetté les saisons à Paris grâce à une vigne vierge qui s’accroche sur tout un pignon d’immeuble près de chez moi.

The entire wall turns:
Le mur devient entièrement:

dazzling green in summer,
vert éclatant l’été

dark red in autumn just before the rain causes all of the leaves to fall in the space of a few days,
rouge sombre en automne juste avant la pluie qui fera tomber toutes feuilles en quelques jours,

the wall and the branches appear nude in winter,
le mur et les branches apparaissent nus l’hiver,

then little by little they get dressed in green again in spring.
puis se rhabillent progressivement de vert au printemps.

There’s nothing artificial in the four photos presented here. These are truly the four seasons of my street in Paris! And a splendid start to spring it is!
Rien d’artificiel dans les quatre photos présentées ici, ce sont bien les vraies saisons de ma rue parisienne ! Et c’est un splendide début de printemps !

Text and photos by Va-nu-pieds. Translation by GLK.

The post Va-nu-pieds’ Wall for All Seasons appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

It was a Monday, the day the palace is closed to the public, so relatively few people visit the gardens that day, even though they remain open. Even fewer visit on a cold misty Monday in February.

The alleys were empty. The fountains were silent. There trees were reflected in the still algal water in the basins.

That and more can be seen in the audio slide-show below.

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* * *

The weather has been gloomy in Paris this summer, the sun unpredictable. No sooner are you ready to go out when the sky changes.
Le temps est bien maussade à Paris cet été, le soleil imprévisible. Le temps de se mettre en route et le ciel change.

Still, the desire to be outside and the need for nature are irrepressible. Returning to Parc de Sceaux, I continue my photographic experiments: alone against a tree,
Pourtant l’envie du dehors, le besoin de nature est irrépressible. De retour au Parc de Sceaux, je continue mes expériences : seul contre un arbre,

toes fanning out (a French expression meaning total inactivity),
les doigts de pied en éventail (une expression française qui dit la totale inactivité),

involving a couple of kind tourists with their feet in the water,
impliquant un couple de gentils touristes les pieds dans l’eau,

or playing between shadows and light.
ou jouant entre ombres et lumières.

And this is Paris’s emptiest week of the year: I’ll be here to take advantage of it!
Et c’est ce week end que Paris sera le plus vide de l’année : je serai là pour en profiter!

Photos and text: Va-nu-pieds

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I usually answer “Whenever you can make it.” But the real answer is June, those long days of spring-to-summer when Paris is at its most vibrant, when you can still get a seat in a café of a village square in Provence, when you can still get a last-minute hotel room in Biarritz, when the tennis at Roland Garros is on TV (or better yet when you’re actually attending matches), when Normandy celebrates D-Day and the Liberation, before the biking routes of the Loire Valley get crowded, before traffic along the Riviera comes to a complete stop, when the Burgundy vineyards are in flower…

In a word: NOW!

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I rarely go out for lunch in winter,
but today I joined a television weatherman
at a neighborhood restaurant that prides itself
in serving only the freshest of fresh food,
though it seemed a stretch for the waiter to call the scorpion fish fruity.

He recognized him, and I think the women at the next table did, too.
And afterwards someone stopped to say hello as we crossed the bridge.
What a beautiful day to be walking by the canal, she said.
It’s going to get cold again, he warned, maybe even snow next week.

I don’t have a TV to see him wave his hands before the map of France.
But I saw buds on the bush on my balcony today,
and the cat, too, noticed the morning sun on the kitchen table
finally reaching over the grey mansard across the street,
where the neighbors close their curtains a little later every day.

(c) Gary Lee Kraut

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* * *

It’s been unusually cold in Paris, mostly a dry cold though. It’s the damp cold that normally marks the Paris winter so, warmly dressed, it’s nearly a pleasure to be in the cold outside. It’s inside that things get dicey. I returned to Paris a few days ago after six weeks in the U.S. and have since spent a good amount of time winterizing the apartment: hanging curtains, plugging spaces on the edges of doors and windows, buying an electric heater.

The elderly woman downstairs used to heat a lot in winter, I could tell by the warmth of my parquet, but she now goes south for much of the winter. And a guy in his 20s recently moved next door and doesn’t need to turn on his own heat very often since most nights he warms his apartment by having a dozen friends over for a rave party. I’m left to heating my own space. So much for community.

The best place to find community these days is in the cafes and bars of the residential neighborhoods. They’ve been quite crowded, I’ve noticed, these past few days and evenings, smokers swarming by the doorways. Crisis, what crisis?

I love cafes in winter, the way people come in rubbing the cold off their hands. There’s more of a community feel to a café in winter than in summer. In summer everyone wants a piece personal joy, their own proverbial spot in the sun. You tolerate your neighbors at surrounding tables in summer, but other than the usual sexual attraction you’d rather have nothing to do with them. In winter, though, there’s more of a feel that we’re all in this together. On especially cold winter days, as in rain storms in other seasons, the café becomes a kind of genteel bomb shelter. It’ll pass, we think, or we’ll soon go out and confront the elements, but in the meantime un autre, s’il vous plaît.

I just got home from having coffee with a friend and I take back what I said a paragraph ago.

There isn’t much of a sense of community in the café after all. I now think that the difference between the winter café and the summer café is that in winter Parisians have even less of a sense of personal space than they do in summer. Their sweaters, scarves, and coats not only put a damper on the aforementioned sexual attraction but also make people unaware of where their space ends and others’ begin. Add to that the shopping bags now that the annual winter sales period is underway and oh the looks you get when you ask a woman to take her ankle-length duvet coat and H&M bags from an otherwise available chair so that you can sit down! Sometimes the bomb shelter feels less genteel, but once you and your friend have got your space it’s café society as holders of McStarbucks Cards can only dream about, even at McStarbucks in Paris.

Yesterday, after insulating window cracks in the morning, I went out to take photos in my neighborhood along the canal. There were at least a dozen people taking pictures within the same 300-yard stretch of the canal during the same 30-minute grey-day photo shoot, including a couple of guys with long lenses, one with a tripod. The thought that most of those photographers were going to put their pictures on blogs accompanied or not by text about the cold in Paris and the ice on the canal was rather disheartening. It’s one thing to compete for elbow room in a café, it’s quite another to think that we’re all competing for attention on the internet.

Truth be told, the canal is not a highly photogenic place. Oh, it’s a nice place to live, to hang out, to stroll, to café-sit, and, when the weather’s right, to picnic, but its color combination of dark green, grey, beige, brown, and black, with little sky in the frame and an uninspiring mishmash of architecture alongside, make the canal an awkward place to photograph. We all pointed our cameras towards the ice in the hopes that that would be evocative enough.

I stood on a bridge by a guy with a long lens to take the shot above of gull prints in the dusting of snow on the ice. The guy tried not show that he was annoyed by my “copying” him, but when I then followed him over to shoot a view from the side he gave me the same look as the women whose space I invaded in the café today. Why should his blog have better photos than mine just because he’s got a bigger lens?

The canal may not be very photogenic but the Eiffel Tower always is. That explains why one occasionally comes across some stunning photographs of the Eiffel Tower. Problem is, it’s hard to make the Eiffel Tower look like anything but the Eiffel Tower, by which I mean that it rarely evokes any other thought than: That’s the Eiffel Tower, I’ve been there (or I want to be there).

That’s why I love the joy that comes across in Va-nu-pieds’ Eiffel Tower photo. In it he managed to capture the sense of ecstasy at coming upon a distant view of the Iron Lady. I’m honored that he gave me first dibs to use it on France Revisited’s Photography Blog.

A close look at the shot shows that he must have taken the picture in summer because you can see the sandal tan lines on his foot (unless those are shadows from the beams), but the Eiffel Tower is timeless enough that, unlike in my apartment, a difference of 50 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t matter.

– Text and photos Gary Lee Kraut, 2010.

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* * *

This is a small garden in the heart of the Latin Quarter, between the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages and the Sorbonne. And its Siberian elm. Snow is rare in Paris. Many years there is no snow, and when there is it generally doesn’t stick… And this year, for the third day, the snow is still there.

Today, written on the windshield of a car : “Vive la vie!” Puts a smile on the face for the rest of the day.

Aujourd’hui, tracé sur le pare brise blanc d’une voiture : “Vive la vie!” De quoi sourire pour le reste de la journée.

But the snow doesn’t last long in Paris. The memory, however, remains because Va-nu-pieds was there.

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