Disneyland Paris Opens The First Luxury Hotel Dedicated To Immersive Disney Royal Stories

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jaclyn Sienna India, the founder and CEO of Sienna Charles based in Beverly Hills. It has been edited for length and clarity.

A renovated hotel restaurant harkens back to a beloved era in Paris, and a century later, it’s both a local gem and a social media star.

Well, we’re almost there.

Season one streamed into 58 million households in 2020 during the pandemic and in 2022, Emily in Paris was the most watched show on Netflix. Its popularity turned locations around the French capital into tourist hotspots, with depictions of Paris that not everyone found favorable—as season four goes into production, not everyone wants to be in this version of Paris.

It’s clear from the sign on the wall of the patisserie Bisou Bisous at Albany Bahamas, the luxury resort community, that the guests and residents there are often different than most: it warns to not take photos of anyone not at your table. That no photos/no autographs rule applies to other places on the 600 acre property as well whether it relates to Tiger Woods, one of the shareholders and members, on the golf course or Alicia Keys and Mick Jagger, two recent occupants of the new recording studio apart from Justin Timberlake, another shareholder.

The first time I spoke French in front of my 12-year-old niece, she was shocked. She'd never heard me speak in a foreign language before, but there I was, ordering a couple of croissants and some bread from a curbside storefront in Paris.

Every year, The Economist publishes a list of the most expensive cities in the world, and the 2023 rankings are in. To determine which metropolises will snag a spot, the publication looks at the cost of living index, which compares prices of hundreds of products and services in 172 cities around the globe. In addition to looking at how different locales ranked against each other, The Economist’s data found that inflation remains extremely high across the board, with the cost of goods and services rising on average by 7.4%.

Valentine’s Day is for lovers, right? Lovers of airfare deals, that is (at least for us travel addicts). And we’ve admittedly fallen hard for the two-for-one sale launched by all-business-class airline La Compagnie that is running through February 14.

If you are an English speaker planning to move to Europe in 2024, you might want to find a country where you’re likely to be understood from the get-go.

Seen one way, at risk of over-exercising the cliche we have of the French as world-class gourmets, the January 28 "soup attack" on the Mona Lisa was the most purely "French" of the long-suffering masterpiece's many dispiriting, and occasionally ridiculous, travails. The raison d'etre of the attack was, in fact, about food, carried out by activist foodies, who threw food at the painting. A protest trifecta, in other words.

We wanted to pack a lot into our few days in Paris: the Mark Rothko exhibition at La Fondation Louis Vuitton (until April), and, for my techie husband, the new Maison Poincaré maths museum near the Sorbonne (monoglot polymaths can relax: it’s bilingual). We’d been too late to book for Serge Gainsbourg’s house on the Left Bank (already sold out for 2024!) but the new Quai de la Photo floating contemporary photography museum was showing work by the late Jane Birkin’s daughter, Kate Barry. We also wanted to wander round galleries in newly arty Rue Béranger in the Marais and maybe catch Franco-Gabonese artist Myriam Mihindou at Musée du Quai Branly.

I've lived in Paris for over two years and have visited many times before since my husband grew up in France.