17 February 2008

Mashing Up the Parisian Café Scene

It's clear that I have been deprived from NYC/Paris for too long... Now that I finally have the opportunity to take the pristine virginity of my Moleskine Paris, I spent a couple of hours today compiling the Google spreadsheet containing lists of all of Paris's bars, restaurants, shops, cafés and places that I can remember visiting (couldn't possibly just dive in without preparation). I did already have a bare-bones Excel version but Google is much better - not least because the rest of my family will be asking for Bexquisite's latest guide to Paris before too long, even if they don't really get into the Google spirit and ask me to email the info as an Excel spreadsheet rather than via collaborating online... Never mind.

Hopefully, this next trip will fill the book up a bit more - I've been to Paris dozens of times (there was a time, while I was at primary school, when we would go at least once a term: Papa would fly out on Friday morning in time for a meeting and then Maman, the brother and I would leave school at lunchtime and skip down to Heathrow) but mostly with my parents and mostly before my parents got cool. A few trips with Monsieur Exquisite, combined with the wisdom of Gridskipper have helped me update the "trendy bars" section, although a lot can change in a few weeks or months.

In the meantime, I thought I'd try my hand at a Google Maps mashup; the preview thinks this is going to work but I may be too much of an HTML muppet to have entered the code correctly. What should follow below is a list of seven of my favourite cafés and assorted purveyors of coffee, chocolat chaud and other hot beverages. The upshot is that I know now the French for all of the little Googley commands and functions - for some reason, it thought that as I was looking at the Google Map of France, I wanted its info in French! "Essayez avec cette orthographe," for example, is French for "Did you mean...?" Fascinant, n'est ce pas?


Agrandir le plan

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