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Friday Feel Good! Open Your Wine Bottle With Your Shoe!
It's no wonder the French make the top-10 list of countries that consume the most alcohol per capita — they appear to have a special talent for opening wine bottles, without a corkscrew, even when they're totally plastered! Well at least one Frenchman can do such a thing. To get in the happy hour spirit, let the French teach you how to open a wine bottle with your shoe.
Top Official: Burqa Not Part of France's "National Identity"
Cheese. Wine. Baguettes.
Au Revoir! Flocke Flees For France
With all the talk of Knut and his Italian mate, Gianna, it seems the world had nearly forgotten about that other totally adorable (maybe even more so?) polar bear. That is, until now.
Nuremberg Zoo's Flocke, who turns two this December, departs Deutschland for France come early 2010.
Before and After: From Scary to Shabby Chic
Côté Maison reader Serge purchased a dilapidated retirement home in the Bordeaux region of France after leaving a duplex in Paris. The exterior had already been partially restored but the house still needed a lot of work. Two years and thousands of euros later, he and his wife had redone the roofing, floors, bathrooms, bedrooms, electricity, tiles, garden, pool, and even planted 360 saplings!
Hi, Kumba — This Big Hippo Babe Measures Up!
Just weeks after we first met that lil pygmy pachy, a new hippo babe steals the scene! Check out Kumba, a (standard-sized) hippopotamus who entered the world on Oct. 11 at 110 pounds, and learn some neat hippo trivia along the way!
Coveted Crib: An Art Collector's Curated Minimalism
When you are an art collector, you don't need an interior designer or even color on your walls to have a painfully coveted crib. In the town of Lille in northern France, a French art collector turned a former textile factory into a 557-square-foot loft with a patio. He kept the mill's original crisscross shaped trusses and painted everything white, including beautiful features like cast-iron columns.
Say What? The Brits Know the Truth About Beauty
“The English at heart know that beauty is a cheat; it is an unfair advantage, a distraction from the real qualities that you want in a girl: the ability to fry a breakfast with a hangover, have sex in the rain without complaining, flatten an intruder with a left hook, sink a pint, tell a joke, take a joke, be a brick, be a mate, be a mum."
— Reporting from the south of France, British columnist AA Gill explains that while French women might have the chic, unattainable beauty thing down, English women know that a free spirit is a beautiful thing, too. Perhaps the male writer's extensive musings on the differences between women is just another way to say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
France Develops Wine Lower in Calories, Alcohol
Call it wine lite: Vintners in the Languedoc region of France have developed a new type of wine that's low in sugar, calories, and alcohol. The vino, developed by the French Wine Research Center, only contains 60 calories a glass and is virtually free of sugar.
This is achieved by growing grapes that contain 30 percent less sugar than traditional wine grapes, and with a new distillation process that lowers the wine's alcohol content from 13 percent to nine.
Home Away From Home: Hôtel Duc du St. Simon
You can stay in a modern, white-walled, Kartell'd hotel in any city in the world. But if Paris is your getaway, why not surround yourself with quintessential French style? Hôtel Duc du St.
Judge These Baby Leopards by Their Baby Spots
All clean! Would you have guessed that these were leopards without me telling you? (Hint: It's in the spots.) Regardless of whether you got the big cats confused with their similarly spotted relatives, we can all name cute when we see it.
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