Van Gogh, Cafe Terrace at Night

(Click here for the Romanian Version)
The lights grew bright along the Boulevard St. Michel and the cafe terraces filled with people ... Night settled like a blue blanket over Paris.
Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography

I came to a good cafe that I knew on the Place St.-Michel. It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast



Clarendon - part of the Arlington County, in Greater DC area. Spending sometimes the evening there. Not Paris, of course - it's very small, only one block actually - but it has style, and it has a certain taste for the savoir vivre.

People stay at the terraces of the cafes - La Tasca, with sangria and the tapas cuisine, marisscos, or Chorizo al vino, you have there the feeling of the South of Spain universe - then the Cheesecake Factory, with huge cakes and great wines - and the Harry's Tap Room, and a bit farther the Dr. Dremo's Tap House- there is also in Clarendon a wine store, very classy, then some other restaurants, each one with a personality of its own, and a coffee house - there I like to go often, to stay at a table on the small terrace, watching the scenery of the street, while nightfall is veiling everything with its blue sprinkles - Langston Hughes was speaking about his Parisian evenings - the terraces of the cafes, on Boul Saint Mich, I was once there, in 1999, only for a too short period - a week passed so quickly... the Paris of Hemingway and Henry Miller, the Paris from the movies of Pola Rapaport - and I remember now one evening in New York, the Gramercy Theater on the 23rd Street, a show with old Parisian documentaries, gathered in a lifetime by Jack Goelman ...

I'm leaving the coffee house, a bookstore is in close distance, I would go again there one of these evenings - or maybe in DuPont Circle, at the Kramer Books - I found a book by Philip Caputo last time, Horn of Africa.

Clarendon, or Bethesda, or the Friendship Heights ... the Washingtonian charme.


(Clarendon)

(Hemingway)

(Van Gogh)