Paris – the World’s Most Beautiful City
K and I are in Paris again. Happily. Nostalgically. Our first trip here was in 1976, halfway through my stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Chad, a former French colony in north-central Africa. The plan was to get married in the city, take a honeymoon along the Normandy coast, and then spend the first year of our life together in Africa.
We were unable to get married there (Welcome to French Bureaucracy!), but we went ahead with our honeymoon in Normandy before returning to Chad as planned – except that the day after we got back, a rebel group launched an attack on the government, starting with an assault on the president’s house, which was a five-minute walk from the apartment where I lived.
Never mind.
I meant to say that although Paris is not our favorite city (Rome has that distinction), we believe it to be the world’s most beautiful.
If your aesthetic palate for cities includes history, art, architecture, and green spaces, Paris will certainly be in your top two or three. It has more than a dozen world-class public buildings, including the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and – if you include the city’s outskirts – the opulent Palace of Versailles and as many spectacular gardens, including the Jardin des Tuileries, the Jardin du Luxembourg, and Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.
If charm is on your menu, you’ll have your fill strolling along the cobbled streets of the city’s centuries-old neighborhoods, including Montmartre, Le Marais, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. And something that you may not notice but will affect you is the ubiquity of stately mid-19th century Haussmann-designed limestone-faced buildings with their wrought iron balconies and mansard roofs.
When we travel to our old haunts, K likes to find us highly rated new hotels. This time, it was the SO/ Paris Hotel, which opened in late 2022 and is a five-star facility in all respects. The décor, the common areas, the bar, the restaurant, the room configurations, and the service. It’s even got an indoor pool and spa, which I intend to use before we leave.
One Surprising New Frustration: My French Is Pas Bonne
Forty years ago, after spending two years living and working in Chad, my French had progressed to the point where I was dreaming in that language. Since then, the opportunities I’ve had to practice it have been fewer and further between – so when I returned to France over the years, it took me a day or two of pausing and stuttering before I felt fluent again.
This time, it’s worse. Because of six weeks of studying Italian several years ago and speaking to the gardeners in Spanish every day, I’m struggling. Italian nouns and Spanish verb conjugations are inserting themselves uninvited into the sentences I’m trying to speak. That’s making me nervous, which only makes my speaking worse. Something that’s never happened before is that bilingual French people are responding to my French by speaking English. Oh, the inhumanity!
K and I will be in Paris for a week and then may head over to Nice for a week. But on days two, three, and four, I’ll be at a marketing and copywriting retreat at Courtomer, one of the two chateaux that BB, my partner, owns in France. Here it is:
Chateau de Courtomer is one of the last grand 18th century chateaux built in France during the waning days of the “Ancien Regime” (1787 to 1789). It was purchased by BB in 2005, and has since been carefully and beautifully restored. As it says on its website, Courtomer is an architectural salute to “a way of life and a system of privilege that ended conclusively with the execution of the French king Louis XVI in 1793.”
Today, it is used primarily as an event center – business retreats, like the one I’m attending, or weddings, as you can see from the image below.
This is my bedroom…
Nice, huh?
If you think this might be a good location for something you’re planning, you can book here.
As for the conference itself, it was organized by GG, VV, and JJ, three marketing and copywriting experts I’ve known and worked with for many years, The attendees are senior marketing executives and freelance copywriters who have come here to catch up on the fast-changing landscape of sales and marketing since AI disrupted the way products and services are sold today. The presentations and discussions so far have been intense and high-level. I’ve been taking notes of what I think are the best ideas, which I’ll be sharing with you in coming weeks (starting with my bit in “Business & Marketing,” below).
