Traveling in Style Magazine

I’ve never been to Paris. Somehow, I’ve allowed life, and excuses, to get in my way. Maybe it was just another routine assignment for S. Irene Virbila, but her “A Perfect Day in Paris” (Oct. 15) warmed my heart. What a lift she gave me! She reawakened in me my own dream: to see, smell and taste the “everyday” Paris. To see the Champs-Elysees that I’ve longed to see! She captured it, perfectly. If men can swoon--I swooned.

WILLIAM C. DAVIS

Century City

*

As a dedicated chandelier-viewer and recent visitor to Paris, I thoroughly enjoyed your 24 hours there. Now, rather suddenly deposited in Los Angeles at a new job, I was happy to vividly remember my trip there in September. Being there in the last days of summer was a change for me--to see the Medici Fountain with a full canopy of foliage and swimming ducks, and flowers coloring the garden planters, was the sharpest contrast to my previous experience of the city in January, austere and regal in a spectrum of grays. I wish you’d had space for the other nine days!

K. WINTER

Los Angeles

*

It would have been quite a feat to enjoy the view of Boston Garden from the Ritz-Carlton bar in Boston had it still been standing sever-

al miles away at North Station (“Perfect Hotel Bar,” Side Trips). However, that venerable, decrepit building, former home of the Celtics and the Boston Bruins, has long since been torn down.

The lucky person downing a nostalgic highball at the Ritz bar can enjoy, instead, a view of the Public Gardens, where generations of Bostonians have spent leisurely Sundays afloat the famous Swan Boats. Now that is “nostalgic!”

JUDITH GOLDSTEIN

Woodland Hills