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Paris 2009 Menu | Around Town | Cathedrals | Museums | Versailles
Arc de Triomphe | The Sunday Bird Market | Context Tour "The Belly of Paris" | The Eiffel Tower | Houseboats on the Seine | Jeux Mathematiques (Mathematical Puzzles) Fair | Luxembourg Gardens | Miscellaneous | Montparnasse Tower | Paris Velo Rent-a-bikes | Shops and Storefronts | Toyota Showroom on Champs-Elysées
Context Tours offers a number of intellectually stimulating tours of major European cities. We picked one called "The Belly of Paris," which used Emile Zola's novel of the same name as inspiration to look at the Les Halles district of Paris from a gastronomical and historical perspective. It was great! A small group of us (four in all plus the guide) met Carolin C. Young, a published scholar of food history, at a small cafe just north of the Louvre for an afternoon walk about the district which used to contain a gigantic wholesale market called "les Halles" that once fed the entire population of Paris. It's not there anymore – Paris traffic simply became too congested to handle it – but the area still has echoes of its imprint in the open-all-night cafes, cookware shops and patisseries.
It was a great tour and a real highlight of our trip
This particular image shows the royal mark of Catherine de Medici on a tower know as the Medici Column on the south side of Bourse de Commerce de Paris. Catherine tried to take credit for bringing cooking as an art form from her native Italy to the backward French. Of course, the French tend to disagree.
For more on Context Tours, go here, and for details about the Belly of Paris tour, go here.
Arc de Triomphe | The Sunday Bird Market | Context Tour "The Belly of Paris" | The Eiffel Tower | Houseboats on the Seine | Jeux Mathematiques (Mathematical Puzzles) Fair | Luxembourg Gardens | Miscellaneous | Montparnasse Tower | Paris Velo Rent-a-bikes | Shops and Storefronts | Toyota Showroom on Champs-Elysées