Filed under: Arts and Culture, History, Festivals and Events, Food and Drink, Europe, France
As a concept, "spring forward, fall back" fits Paris to a tee.
The global collective consciousness may well hold the City of Light to be paradise in springtime -- spring rites and spring rain, the spring in the step of forward-looking dreamers who dream of April in Paris, and pipe that old tune. But what about the fall, alias autumn? If you ask me, the unsung season is an equally fine time of year to make Paris your own -- often without the crowds or peak rates.
Forget the foursome of three-syllable months with ponderous names: "September," "October," "November" and "December." Subtract the prosaic "fall" from the notation. Then try singing "Au-tumn in Paaa-ris." It's every bit as catchy as "A-pril." As with April, the "thrill" of autumn sometimes rhymes with "chill," though nowadays climate change can provide T-shirt weather right up to mid-November.
Weather -- la météo -- is the merest part of Paris' fall-back season. For the French, fall stands for the end of enforced rural isolation with in-laws and enfants terribles, the end of sunburns and heat stroke -- climate change again -- and a return to the stimulating animation of this self-consciously enlightened metropolis, la Ville Lumière.
Fall isn't l'automne in Paris anyway, it's la rentrée -- the re-entry. There's the "political re-entry," the "scholastic re-entry," the "cultural re-entry," and others still -- re-entries for food, wine, fashion and industrial action. Falling back into place in autumnal Paris is as natural as gravity, the metaphorical space-capsule of life drifting leaf-like back to Earth, or plummeting like a chestnut, the correlative objective of la rentrée.Continue reading Letter from France: Why I love Paris in the autumn.Letter from France: Why I love Paris in the autumn. originally appeared on Gadling on Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments
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