Paris

Every year, approximately 46 million visitors will walk the narrow cobblestone streets of Paris, and when you live in Paris, you sometimes feel like you are personally responsible for about half of them. That may be a slight exaggeration, but it is true that when you live in the City of Light, everyone you know will want to visit at some point, and you’ll find that once the spring season has begun, your spare couch will suddenly become the busiest hotel in the city.

It makes every last member of the Académie Française fly into a panic, but the truth, hélas, is that English, not French, is today’s universal language. Tongue of technology, patois of the 20th and 21st centuries, dominant more than any other language in history, English is omnipresent in the mouths and minds of much of humankind. You’d think that would put native Anglophones at a huge advantage. But I'm here to tell you that it does not.

Within the French education system, the transition from maternelle (pre-school) to primaire (primary school) is an exciting and huge step for children. The Cours Préparatoire (or CP) is the first year of primaire, or primary school. AAWE is holding "Moving Up to CP" at the American Library of Paris to offer parents insights and practical advice to help their children thrive in this next stage of their education.

I have been always very careful to which of my French friends I would reveal my spiritual search. For in this country, spirituality and religion are very much a private matter. Why is this topic to be handled with care? Today’s France is a society firmly entrenched in the separation of church and state. And the rocky road to a secular republic has taken a few centuries to achieve.

INSPIRELLE gets up close with Daisy de Plume, an American journalist whose Parisian museum treasure hunts have been such a bit hit she's taking them to London.

As PAD Paris (Pavillon of Art and Design) celebrates its 20th anniversary, a collectible design expert at Artecase gives us the highlights of the crème de la crème of the city's design fairs.

At Alléosse, cheese is king in the beautiful store. Made of lightly colored wooden slats, the store’s décor is very elegant and highlights each cheese’s true value. Cow cheese, goat cheese, ewe cheese – no cheese is left behind. Like stars they shine, and like stars they mask a fascinating “behind-the-scenes” life.

For expats whose jobs, spouses or dreams brought them to France, 2015 was a year when one could legitimately wonder whether the pleasures of life in this country were going to be compromised by the increasingly alarming trajectory of violence, and tension, which resulted from the attacks of January and November. The refrain of "they shall not win" could not eradicate a general feeling of unease felt by many Parisians, and not only expats, in the weeks after November 13.

Isabelle Risacher Moogalian is a bicultural coach whose life aboard a peniche on the Seine seemed idyllic with American-born husband Mark Moogalian, until they were victims of an attempted terrorist attack on a Thalys train from Amsterdam to Paris.

Who can resist learning the “Secrets of Paris”? And who knows them better than Heather Stimmler-Hall, the creative founder of an extraordinarily popular website and unique French tours. Heather began writing about the City of Light on the Internet when few of us even knew what a blog was.