Bars, cafes, and restaurants abound in the City of Love. But did you know that there are an estimated 9,060 of them with open terraces where you can sit down and take in the beauty of the city?
Basically, if you were to spend each day of your life in Paris visiting a different open terrace of a bar, cafe, or restaurant, it would take you about 30 years to see them all – and that’s just the current ones… there’s probably a new one opening already as you are reading this!
French architect and structural engineer, Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel was not only responsible for the build of the world-renowned Eiffel Tower (designed by the two chief engineers in Eiffel’s company Emile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin), but he also had a hand in the Statue of Liberty in the United States.
When the Statue of Liberty’s initial internal designer, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, unexpectedly passed away in 1879, Eiffel was appointed as his replacement. Eiffel and Koechlin rejected Viollet-le-Duc’s original idea to make the bronze exterior of Lady Liberty bear all her weight and instead installed an iron skeleton inside of her for support.
George Whitman founded the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore in Paris in 1951 with the motto “be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise”. It is said that Whitman travelled the world as a self-proclaimed “tumbleweed,” blowing from place to place, “sheltered by the grace of strangers”.
He opened the doors to all sorts of writers, artists, and intellectuals who needed a place to rest their heads for a night or two. In exchange, the “Tumbleweeds” are asked to read a book a day, help out in the shop for a couple of hours, and write a single-page autobiography for Whitman’s archives.