That, up until this November, I had never hopped on a Eurostar train from London's St. Pancras International to spend a weekend in Paris — or jumped on a plane, for that matter — is only my fault, really. You've read it right: this autumn's visit to the City of Light was my very first one in nearly 27 years, but this was somehow to my advantage.
To say that, having watched all the most iconic, and even bizarre, Paris-based films, from Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 , Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, and Richard Linklater's Before Sunset to the ever-uplifting animated comedy-drama Ratatouille, I had a vague idea of what it would look like is, of course, a euphemism. But the greatest thing of all was that the reviews of the French capital I heard from friends, relatives, and colleagues' reviews, with as many positive as negative ones, canceled each other out, allowing me to form my own opinion about it. That's where Hôtel Dalila, the freshly revamped boutique stay that served as the base of my anticipated Parisian getaway, comes in.
