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Does the world really need more pictures of Paris?

Yes of course when it’s things you don’t see every day such as the French counterpart of Target, chocolate-scented postage stamps and mail being delivered on stilts! As usual I’m posting pictures of things I’m pretty sure you’re not going see to anywhere else, with one or two exceptions.

I know, the Postal Museum sounds less interesting than watching paint dry –

but trust me it’s riveting and absolutely worth a visit.

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Paris: obscure corners of the Louvre, pâté in the convenience store, Saul “New Yorker cover” Steinberg exhibition

Coup de cœur means “a delightful special thing you’ll fall in love with” or “personal favorite” as I’ve mentioned elsewhere and I’m using the term half-ironically because the French  use it so much. They’re crazy about it. You can’t go five minutes in France without seeing it, at least in print; I think not really in everyday speech. But these really are some of my coups de cœur.

Subway poster for exhibition “Baudelaire: Melancholic Modernity”

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The Relief Map Museum in Paris

The Relief Map Museum (Musée des Plans-Reliefs) in Paris is one of my favorite sights anywhere. It has about 30 big, meticulously detailed scale models of towns, ports and forts and their surrounding landscapes. The models were built for military planning purposes from the 1670s to the 1870s.

In another room they show how they made the models, for example, grass and foliage were made of silk fibers trimmed into tiny bits using this device.

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Paris – Museum of Trades and Industrial Arts

The Musée des Arts et Métiers (“Arts and Trades”) is an historical museum of engineering, communications, construction, transportation, materials and scientific instruments. Nowadays we’d call it technology but the word wasn’t in use when the museum was founded in 1794.  The term arts et métiers dates back to the middle ages and meant any kind of economic activity that isn’t agriculture or trade.

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