CultureShock! Paris is an indispensable guide for anyone planning a stay in the City of Light. Let Frances Gendlin, with her invaluable Parisian insider knowledge and non-native perspective, take you through the process of settling in, whether for short or longer stays. From finding your own pied-a-terre and navigating French bureaucracy to discussing haute cuisine and French wines, all the practical information you need is at your fingertips. As a guest in France, should you kiss your host or shake his hand? Is it rude to be late or a faux pas to be early for a party? And what about meeting t.

When Australian Jane Paech moves to Paris, her visions of afternoons in bijou bistros and bookshops on the Left Bank are kept in check by the needs of a young family and a long to-do list that includes apartment-hunting, school selection, and multiple trips to IKEA.

The charming, funny, and improbable tale of how a man who was raised on white bread--and didn't speak a word of French--unexpectedly ended up with the sacred duty of preparing the annual Christmas dinner for a venerable Parisian family. Hemingway called Paris "a moveable feast"--a city ready to embrace you at any time in life. For Los Angeles-based film critic John Baxter, that moment came when he fell in love with a French woman and impulsively moved to Paris to marry her. As a test of his love, his skeptical in-laws charged him with cooking the next Christmas banquet--for eighteen people in their ancestral country home. Baxter's memoir of his yearlong quest takes readers along his misadventures and delicious triumphs as he visits the farthest corners of France in search of the country's best recipes and ingredients.--From publisher description.

As Spang explains, during the 1760s and 1770s, sensitive, self-described sufferers made public show of their delicacy by going to the new establishments known as "restaurateurs' rooms" to sip bouillons. But these locations soon became sites for extending frugal, politically correct hospitality and later became symbols of aristocratic greed