I found this in Yahoo News today.  I have no idea what the Japanese are expecting that Paris isn’t delivering…

PARIS (Reuters) - Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

Already this year, Japan’s embassy in Paris has had to repatriate at least four visitors — including two women who believed their hotel room was being bugged and there was a plot against them.

Previous cases include a man convinced he was the French “Sun King”, Louis XIV, and a woman who believed she was being attacked with microwaves, the paper cited Japanese embassy official Yoshikatsu Aoyagi as saying.

“Fragile travellers can lose their bearings. When the idea they have of the country meets the reality of what they discover it can provoke a crisis,” psychologist Herve Benhamou told the paper.

The phenomenon, which the newspaper dubbed “Paris Syndrome”, was first detailed in the psychiatric journal Nervure in 2004.

Bernard Delage of Jeunes Japon, an association that helps Japanese families settle in France, said:

“In Japanese shops, the customer is king, whereas here assistants hardly look at them … People using public transport all look stern, and handbag snatchers increase the ill feeling.”

A Japanese woman, Aimi, told the paper:

“For us, Paris is a dream city. All the French are beautiful and elegant … And then, when they arrive, the Japanese find the French character is the complete opposite of their own.”

The law that all workers must have no more than a 35 hour work week sounds like a dream, but in reality it means lost wages and lost tips to thousands of workers.  Next time you’re in Paris and the waiter is a grouch, keep in mind that by law he can’t work longer hours and bring home more money.  (Not that Parisian waiters are grouchy…but just in case…).  Maybe leave an extra euro or two!

Here’s an article that appeared in Yahoo News about the impact this law has on the service industry.

Delanoe, the mayor of Paris, is no Chirac.  Back when Chirac was mayor, it was common for City Hall to serve up to 1,000 bottles of its fine wine per year.  These days, they are lucky if they serve 30.  (Delanoe seems to prefer champagne receptions to wine dinners.)  So what to do with a cellar full of wine that is increasing in value every year?  Sell it!  Paris will auction off its wine collection this weekend.

They have bottles that are valued at up to 1,000 euros each.  They hope to bring in 750,000 euros.  But not everyone is in agreement.  Here’s an article that appeared in the International Herald Tribune if you’d like to know more:

Rather than sipping, Paris sells 
By Craig S. Smith The New York Times

Published: October 20, 2006
 
 
PARIS Only in France can selling wine be construed as a political act, but that is what the Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, is being accused of by auctioning off most of City Hall’s “grands crus,” the finest wines accumulated during the tenure of his center- right predecessor, Jacques Chirac.
 
“It’s demagogic!” Anthony Rowley, a French food historian, huffed Thursday, rankled by the mayor’s highly publicized purging of the municipal wine cellar.
 
Vast collections of vintage wine have been a mark of prestige for centuries in France, and City Hall’s cellar is not unique. Tens of thousands of aging wine bottles sleep beneath some of the country’s most powerful institutions, including Élysée Palace, the National Assembly, the Senate and several government ministries.
 
The municipality’s collection is kept below the fanciful Hôtel de Ville, on the Right Bank of the Seine. It was started when Chirac became mayor in 1977 and eventually grew to 10,000 bottles, stored in a state-of-the-art vaulted cellar six meters, or 21 feet, underground, where the humidity is kept at 87 percent and the temperature never varies from 12 degrees Celsius (54 Fahrenheit).
 
Chirac used the collection to impress guests, pulling the cork on bottles of Château Petrus for President George H.W. Bush, Leonid Brezhnev and Pope John Paul II. Bernard Bled, then Chirac’s chief of staff, says the mayor’s office annually consumed hundreds of bottles of fine wine at fancy dinners. “Drinking even 1,000 bottles a year is not enormous,” Bled said Thursday.
 
But times have changed. Delanoë entertains less, and when he does, it is usually at Champagne-and-hors d’oeuvre receptions. The city’s independent auditor reported last year that the mayor’s office now serves only about 30 bottles of fine wine a year.
 
“There’s a puritan side to this,” sniffed Bled. “I was always an epicurean.”
 
But the auditor noted that many of the best bottles in the city’s wine cellar had appreciated in value to a point that they are worth too much to drink at city functions. “No municipal reception can justify the consumption of a wine costing hundreds, even thousands of euros,” the auditor’s report said.
 
Claude Maratier, the expert called in to appraise the wine, called Bled “clairvoyant” in his purchases years ago. Bottles of Château Haut-Brion that Bled bought for the equivalent of €50, or about $63, a bottle now cost as much as €600 wholesale or €1,000 retail.
 
Delanoë has responded by putting 4,960 bottles of the most valuable bottles up for auction. The official reason given by City Hall is that the wine cellar is at risk of flooding and that it wants to reduce its stock to what it can store above the high-water mark from the flood of 1910, the last time the Seine overflowed its banks in a big way.
 
“There’s a limit to what we can put up high in the cellar,” said Nicolas Milosevic, chief of protocol at the mayor’s office.
 
But offended oenophiles say the real reason is political. “This is propaganda,” said Rowley, the food historian, adding that the city could easily reduce its stock without so much publicity.
 
He suggested that the auction had more to do with upcoming municipal elections than it did with the risk of a once-in-a-century flood. “It underlines the modesty of the current municipal administration compared to the past.”
 
What is lost, both Rowley and Bled say, is the prestige that comes from giving city guests the best that the country has to offer. “In London, they receive you with a sumptuous Porto, and in Rome, the mayor serves absolutely exceptional wines,” said Rowland.
 
Instead, Delanoë “thinks it is fashionable and modern to serve little democratic wines.”
 
Maratier, the wine expert, who arranges periodic auctions of wine from private cellars, said the City Hall auction was unique because all of the wines are from top classifications and have been stored under optimum conditions without being moved. He has estimated the market value of the wine to be sold at €550,000 but said that based on the interest that the auction has received, he believes it could bring in as much as €750,000.
 
“We have a Russian buyer coming from Moscow, and this morning there were two Chinese here to see the wines,” he said, standing amid glass cases displaying a sampling of bottles as if they were in a museum. The wines were to be auctioned Friday and Saturday at the Crédit Municipal, which normally auctions off goods pawned to the state.
 
The lots for sale include bottles of Château Margaux, Château Cheval Blanc and Château d’Yquem, a favorite of Thomas Jefferson and Queen Elizabeth II. The most expensive bottle offered is a 1986 Romanée Conti, valued at €1,500 wholesale.
 
Bled talks lovingly of the wines he bought. “I remember them all,” he said, adding that he purchased most of the wine while it was still in the barrel.
 
“I’m proud to have built such a collection, but I’m a little sad that they didn’t drink more.”
 
Maia de la Baume contributed reporting.
 
 PARIS Only in France can selling wine be construed as a political act, but that is what the Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, is being accused of by auctioning off most of City Hall’s “grands 

Every Friday night, up to 20,000 people rollerblade through the streets of Paris. Everyone is welcome to join in, but you have to have decent skills. Here’s a great video of the event.

“The problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure.”

The opening lines of “Natural’s Not in It,” by the Gang of Four, are the first words in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” and they suggest one of that film’s paradoxical themes: The pursuit of sensual delight is trivial compared with other undertakings — just as “the problem of leisure” is surely more of a privilege than a burden — but pleasure is also serious, one of the things that gives life its shape and meaning.

It may be tempting to greet “Marie Antoinette” with a Jacobin snarl or a self-righteous sneer, since it is after all the story of the silly teenager who embodied a corrupt, absolutist state in its terminal decadence. But where’s the fun in such indignation? And, more seriously, where is the justice? To say that this movie is historically irresponsible or politically suspect is both to state the obvious and to miss the point.

“Marie Antoinette,” which will be shown tonight and tomorrow at the New York Film Festival and opens next Friday, is a thoroughly modern confection, blending insouciance and sophistication, heartfelt longing and self-conscious posing with the guileless self-assurance of a great pop song. What to do for pleasure? Go see this movie, for starters.

“Natural’s Not in It” (speaking of great pop songs) blasts over the electrifying pink-and-black opening titles, kicking us into 18th-century Versailles with a jolt of anachronism. (Later there is some period-appropriate Rameau to go with the 80’s post-punk Ms. Coppola favors, and a high-top sneaker tucked amid the fabulous ancien régime couture.) But despite all the bodices and breeches, the horse-drawn coaches and elaborate perukes, “Marie Antoinette” is only masquerading as a costume drama. It would be overstating the case to call it a work of social criticism, but beneath its highly decorated surface is an examination, touched with melancholy as well as delight, of what it means to live in a world governed by rituals of acquisition and display. It is a world that Ms. Coppola presents as exotic and unreal — a baroque counterpart to the Tokyo of “Lost in Translation” — but that is not as far away as it first seems.

Ms. Coppola, who drew upon Antonia Fraser’s revisionist biography of Marie Antoinette, “Marie Antoinette: The Journey,” in preparing her script, is less a historian than a pop anthropologist, and her portrait of the young queen, played with wily charm by Kirsten Dunst, is not so much a psychological portrait as a tableau of mood and atmosphere. Highly theatrical and yet also intimate and informal, “Marie Antoinette” lets its story slink almost casually through its lovingly composed and rendered images.

The costumes, designed by Milena Canonero, are arresting; K K Barrett’s production design is appropriately sumptuous; and Lance Acord’s cinematography catches both the swirls of high-fashion color and the quieter, candlelighted tones of the French court. No mere backdrop, Versailles, where much of “Marie Antoinette” was shot, is the film’s subject and, in some respects, its star. Like Hollywood — which it resembles in some interesting and hardly accidental particulars — Versailles is a place with an aura and a power of its own, with an almost mystical ability to warp the lives of those who, by accident or choice, come to dwell on its grounds.

Marie is, at first, very much an outsider, summoned from Austria as a 14-year-old to be the bride of the future Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman). Crossing the border, she is stripped of her clothes and her beloved pug, Mops, and welcomed into a world of rigorously observed, often ridiculous forms.

Her chaperone, the Comtesse de Noailles, is played by Judy Davis, who seems to have had extra tendons added to her neck for the role. The comtesse’s job is to instruct Marie in French protocol, and she is only one of several figures who shuffle into the princess’s line of sight every now and then to offer scolding, advice and instruction. Others include Count Mercy D’Argenteau (Steve Coogan) and Joseph of Austria (Danny Huston), Marie’s beloved older brother, who also counsels her husband on some delicate matters of conjugal duty, about which the young man seems to have no clue.

The poor would-be king is in some ways even more lost than his bride, who has a spark of mischief and an extravagant sense of style. Louis is overshadowed by his grandfather, Louis XV (Rip Torn), a rambunctious old goat whose fleshly appetites seem not to have been passed down to his heir.

Mr. Schwartzman mumbles and bumbles, looking younger and softer than he has in previous films, and quietly showing the pathos of this hapless boy’s situation. He is happiest out hunting with his pals or tinkering with locks, and he quite literally does not know what to do with the girl that fate has tossed into his bed. The royal marriage is unconsummated for seven years, and the absence of new blood in the royal line becomes grist for gossip and a potential political crisis.

Molly Shannon and Shirley Henderson are two of the principal mean girls of Versailles, and their chosen scapegoat is the elder Louis’s mistress, Madame du Barry (Asia Argento), who is also Marie’s rival for influence at court. The mingling of private matters with affairs of state is a hallmark of this kind of monarchy, and in Ms. Coppola’s hands the analogies to modern celebrity culture are simultaneously clear and subtle. Marie’s life is one of obscene entitlement, but it is also heavily constrained, and the story the film tells is of her efforts to accommodate her headstrong, spirited individualism to the strictures of her role as queen.

She is profligate and self-indulgent, yes, impetuously ordering up shoes, parties and impromptu trips to Paris. She breaks with tradition by applauding at the opera, and then appears onstage herself. She takes a lover — a dashing Swedish nobleman — and turns Petit Trianon, a royal retreat that was a gift from her husband, into a kind of Versailles V.I.P. room, where she drinks, gardens, reads Rousseau and plays shepherdess. These activities have often been mocked — and were the source of scandal and outrage in the years before the revolution — but through Ms. Coppola’s eyes they are poignant as well as a bit silly.

And the film’s visual extravagance somehow conveys its heroine’s loneliness as well as the sheer fun of aristocratic life. We know how this story ends, and Ms. Coppola refrains from showing us the violent particulars, or from sentimentalizing her heroine’s fate, preferring to conclude on a quiet, restrained note that registers the loss of Marie’s world as touchingly as the rest of the film has acknowledged her folly, her confusion and her humanity.

“Marie Antoinette” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has glimmers of sexuality and brief glimpses of naked flesh amid all the fabulous clothes.

The Fete a Neu Neu funfair has been a longstanding Parisian tradition.  Carnival rides, games, cotton candy, everything you would want in a fair will be there.
BOIS DE BOULOGNE
Bois de Boulogne 75116 PARIS
(Between Porte de Passy and Porte d’Auteuil) 
 
Dates and times
Daily through October 22
2pm-midnight 
 
 
 
 
 

On November 20 you can participate in a wonderful celebration of the 250th year since Mozart’s birth with this presentation of “The Magic Flute”.  The opera will take place at the Palais des Congres and will be in German.
The opera will be performed with music by the Minsk Orchestra conducted by maestro Wilhelm Keitel,and will include a puppet show by students of the Stuttgart Conservatory of Music and Performing Arts.  

 
PALAIS DES CONGRES DE PARIS.
2, place de la Porte Maillot  75017 PARIS
Metro : Porte Maillot  
RER : Porte Maillot  
http://www.palaisdescongres-paris.com