Dear You,
first week of June over - and no entry here!
If you come to Berlin: this would be a perfect time. The Linden (lime) are openening their millions of little flowers, soak the warm (well: at the moment: very hot) air, make your head giddy, make your soul sing with joy, your whole being can bathe in it - gorgeous!
(You see: it really gets me too :-)
And for a day that might not be filled with that natural drug, yesterday I bought a reminder in a bottle: at "Frau Toni's" near Checkpoint Charly they produce a room-perfume "Linde". Normally I abstain from all these scented things for the house - but this is simply great.
(A month ago I found there a real perfume - for me to wear - which contains a lot of "violet". It was the favourite perfume of Marlene Dietrich. Violet is very difficult to get in Germany - I told you that I found a sufficiently nice whiff in my preferred perfume 'Balenciaga - Paris". And now I found out, that Serge Lutens, who works for Shiseido and on his own, has created a very deep violet perfume, too - but: he only (!!!) sells it in Paris, in his own shop.
So:
one good reason more to go to Paris.
On the other hand: I would feel becoming dangerously near to an excentric man, whom I truly and deeply despised when I was young: an arrogant dilettante cook, Wolfram Siebeck. In the early Eighties he wrote that he 'always hopped on a plane to Paris' - every time he needed the little "haricots verts" (those very slim beans, almost as slim as knitting needles) - not available in Germany then.
At that time, hearing it I thought furiously about lamp posts and 'cake for hungry people'-quotes, and revolution, (later my mother's blue blood diluted all that and made me more gentle).
I hope that there are thousands of other good reasons to go to Paris - as many and as intoxicating as the scent of lime-flowers.