Written by the husband, AKA The Blond.
Some years ago when Gaia and I were planning a trip to
Paris we had a simple agenda: walk the city, eat pastry, smell perfume, dine on
fine vegetarian cuisine. Of course, there is no Paris guide for veg
fragonerds on Amazon, so I ended up spending hours surfing and collecting
addresses and putting them in Google maps (Perfume
Stores, Vegetarian
Restaurants). In case you've been wondering, finding Perfume is a lot easier than fine Vegetarian
food. These maps served us well and I do the same thing now when
we travel (Montreal, for example).
Youtuber Frunkinator (Twitter: @ScentTrails) took it several steps further. He launched a new site called Scent
Trails that enlists our collective knowledge to make life easier
for scent lovers on the go.
Allowing and encouraging people and retailers around the world to
share address and information about perfume stores, the site
now has over 500 locations and growing. You can use the interactive map of the
world to research destinations or search for a city /zip code. Each location offers information like store hours, brands sold and shop website link. Scent Trails also lets people add fragrance related events and can be a great place to check on what’s
happening in your neck of the woods or at your travel destination.
From a brief exploration, NYC looks very complete while the
Paris map needs some TLC (calling all Parisians!); this is the beauty of
crowd sourcing, as Scent Trails will get better over time with our ongoing contributions.
Thanks, Frunkinator, for the great initiative. It will save me
hours planning our upcoming London trip.
That looks like a great resource. In a parallel initiative spearheaded by Undina of Undina's Looking Glass, perfumistas and bloggers are pooling tip offs about perfumeries based on their own travel experiences. These are then added on a rolling basis to a page called "Perfume Shopping Around The World", hosted on the sites of a a number of bloggers, myself included. It is currently a lot more "spotty" than Scent Trails sounds, but there is more on Paris, say, thanks to Denyse's definitive guide.
ReplyDeleteDear Blond, I met you and your lovely wife last week at The Afternoon of a Faun event in NYC.
ReplyDeleteI cannot add to the perfume shopping list, but way back in 2000 my vegetarian husband and I went to Paris, and we too were worried about finding good restaurants. We asked friends and scoured vegetarian travel blogs. Much to our delight we found a number of incredible vegetarian and even vegan places! Definitely some of the finest vegetarian food I've ever had. The best were: Les Granier de Notre Dame on rue de la Bûcherie, Piccolo Téatro on the right bank on rue des Ècouffes, and La Victoire Suprême du cœur on rue des Bourdonnaise. The second one I can't find on the Internet (probably my spelling - I am using my meager two years of high school French from over 30 years ago) and the third sadly may have closed, or reopened somewhere else. But the first I solidly recommend for your next trip if you don't already know of it.
Thanks Sujaan, it was great to meet you too! and thanks for the recommendations, we'll need to check them out.
DeleteWe did end up finding a few really good places and discovered that most Moroccan restaurants have a vegetarian CousCous dish.
Unlike London or New York where you can go to any good restaurant and ask for a vegetarian meal, in Paris you need to plan ahead. I can still see the waiter at a Korean restaurant in Paris picking the chicken pieces out of my soup with his chopsticks to try and make it "meatless"..
Yes, I had a similar experience in China where they thought a dish with very little meat meant it was vegetarian! Vegetarian travel blogs were definitely our greatest resource.
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