Madrid is the first city we lived in (seven weeks there, seven months Berlin, three months Paris) and is the cleanest of them. Every day, I believe, Plaza de la Paja, the oldest square in Madrid, on which we lived, was hosed down, and garbage collected. Contrary perhaps to stereotype, Berlin was dirtier than Madrid (and Paris dirtier than both).

The City of Love has had a falling out with literature. And in its quest to get back to its literary pinnacle, Paris is turning to outsiders for help. This weekend, Paris hopes to turn around a several decades-long literary decline with an international conference of literary leaders, featuring names like Salman Rushdie, John Banville, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi. Various city cultural organizations have donated to the efforts to get Paris back on the map, including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Louvre museum.

Gao, the largest city in northern Mali, is a place of extremes. It’s a sprawl of one- and two-story mud-brick houses that lack power lines and running water, but it’s also home to the garish, McMansion-style estates of Cocainebougou, or “Cocaine Town,” a deserted neighborhood that once belonged to Arab drug lords who controlled the region’s smuggling routes for hashish and cocaine but fled, fearing reprisals from local citizens who blamed them for the Islamist invasion.

In the capital of haute cuisine, fast food is getting complicated. For starters, it's not always fast. At Le Camion Qui Fume, a food truck, the lunch crowd can wait up to an hour to get a made-to-order burger. And in a city where chefs can easily find everything they need to make sophisticated sauces and posh pastries, getting the goods for some fast food isn't so easy.

A week ago, the chef to the French President was serving François Hollande, as he does regularly. But tonight in Washington DC, he’s a guest, serving himself at a buffet line of high-end American comfort food: fried chicken, collard greens, fresh corn and tomato salad. Off duty and dressed neatly in a polo shirt and slacks, he places a piece of fried chicken on his own plate, then picks up another in the tongs, and with a gracious nod, places a crispy drumstick on the plate of the person behind him in line.

Raising the ante in the confrontation with the Assad regime and its international supporters, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius this week called for the use of force in Syria. Across the Rhine Valley in Berlin, however, his German equivalent Guido Westerwelle urged caution: "Before speaking of consequences we must first have clarification." French daily newspaper Le Monde ran the outsized headline "Toxic Gas Massacre in Damascus". Most German newspapers that day led with the Bradley Manning verdict.

In 2025, France will have no unemployment, no debt, and tapping the housing market will be a "pleasant" experience - a tleast according to four of its government ministers. The finding came after France's president, Francois Hollande, asked his ministers to present their "holiday homework" on Monday, which was an essay entitled "What is your vision of France in 2025?" Happily for Hollande, the general tone of the homework suggested everything will be just grand in 2025.

Before I moved to Paris three years ago, although I’d already been to the city and was lucky enough to call French my second language, I still held more than a few romantic preconceived notions. Every metropolis has a set of stereotypes linked to it, and Paris exists in many people's minds as a charming, luxurious, timeless hub of style and sophistication—in fact, so many people expect the City of Light to be what they want it to be that the reality has rendered some tourists physically sick with disappointment.