Certain cultures give off different feelings to the viewer, resonate different auras. Two places, that are only a few hundred metres apart geographically, can give off a totally different emotional response on an outsider. After London, I took a train along the coast to Scotland. I instantly fell in love with the area and all [...]

While this was my first experience underground, Fuentes and his wife Virginie have shown hundreds of people this unique environment since 1992. "The oldest person to go was 74," Fuentes said in his limited but enthusiastic English, as he helped adjust my safety belt before we started out. When I had arranged the equipment to [...]

The Gouffre Geant, just outside the village of Cabrespine, is not well known outside of France because it wasn’t discovered until 1968 and not opened to the public before 1988. Most visitors now enter the cavern through a short tunnel bored like a mine shaft into the side of the mountain and view the giant [...]

A French Cave Crawl After three hours underground, the acetylene flame on my friend’s miner’s hardhat guttered down to the size of a pencil tip and he stumbled into the darkness ahead, scraping his cheek on the dark blue marble ledge which overhung the stream we were following. Ahead of him now was only blackness [...]

Language Immersion "Vous tournez a droite," said Madame Olivier, "Vous tournez a droite," said Madame Olivier, and we turned right. "Continuez jusqu’a la pharmacie," and we went as far as the pharmacy. I had yet to set foot in a classroom, but it was clear that my French immersion course began the moment my hostess [...]

That goes too for the Pierre Loti Museum, where a mosque disassembled in Damascus has been reassembled in the museum’s ballroom. Wow! We prefer to relax in leParis pretty little faux bamboo lobby while Edith and Jack go off to Bernard’s. LaLanne’s enthusiasm about the future of Rochefort, Charente Maritime and the Atlantic beaches is [...]

No wonder the guide books ignore Rochefort; on Sunday almost everything is closed. Everything but patisseries: opposite the hotel a long line extends out the bakery door and up the street. The line moves slowly. I picture each patron going crazy over the selection of assorted fresh fruit tarts, layered and solid chocolate slabs, imaginatively [...]

Chance Meetings, Choice Places Nathalie Zeidman If my friend Edith hadn’t had a romance with a French sailor at New York’s Stage Door Canteen fifty years ago, I’d never have seen Rochefort-sur-Mer. It’s not even in most guidebooks. Still, after three hectic weeks of touring, it turned out to he just the place to slow [...]

Monet painted hundreds of local rural scenes in the vicinity: the haystacks, in the viled light of different times of day and seasons; the fields of grain, the landscapes. The artist sought always that subtle synergy of color that resulted in the quiet brilliance that is his mark. He made innumerable sketches of local citizenry [...]

About fifty miles northwest of Paris, on the route to Rouen in Normandy, lies one of the most graceful gardens in France, if not in Europe. It is a garden not only beautiful in itself, but, in its interplay of bright light and leafy shade, historically a source of inspiration to the beginnings of Impressionism [...]