Maybe its the French music I've been recording all day but it just dawned on me that we didn't have a topic for Paris. Though we are utterly spoiled now and get to bask in the brown hospitality of Marc Jacobs while we are there, Paris is actually great for all budgets and seasons - tout le monde, as it were.

Here's a Paris event to kick the topic off and I'll be back soon to post some suggestions. Feel free to start without me if I'm late..

from one of my e-lists:

quote:

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** THE RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES PARIS-BERLIN
FESTIVAL

The International Paris/Berlin festival, established in 1997, is a transdisciplinary action, favoring contemporary creation in different fields: film, video, visual arts and multimedia, to create a meeting space
for exchanges between various forms of artistic language and their audiences. The festival takes place each year in Paris and Berlin.

By bringing together the diverse mediums of creation and their respective audiences and allowing them to communicate, the Rencontres becomes an open event in which the specificities and links between languages and gazes can emerge within evolving contemporary production.Through our activities, we hope to coincide with and to
produce trajectories or paths between various contemporary creative practices, between different audiences, between artists and filmmakers, between diverse geographical, artistic and cultural spaces in Paris and
Berlin.

For more information, please visit our web site: http://art-action.org
(site available in English, French, German, Spanish)

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PARIS, France (AP) -- Paris tourism officials want to give new meaning to the term "Gay Paree."

The French capital has always wooed visitors with its reputation for fine dining and high fashion, and Paris continually cashes in on its mystique as the land of love and romance.

Now, City Hall has a new strategy: selling Paris as a leading destination for gay travellers.

At the mayor's office and the tourism bureau, officials call it the next frontier of tourism.

"We want to create a gay friendly spirit across the whole city," said Laurent Queige, one of the project's organisers.


http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/12/12/paris.gay.ap/index.html