Living in Paris is a state of mind. Every day is a mix of beauty, stress, good food, arrogance, traffic jams, films noir and the ever-flirting Frenchmen. It does something to the soul. The whole nerve system, I have discovered, is on chronic alert. Because the city, on the one hand so generous, is on the other hand so exhausting, so omnivorous. Coming from this setting to Madrid, I realized how the Spanish capital made me change mode. How I suddenly relaxed, how I let down my guard, how it was easy and uncomplicated to interact with other people. 

In Madrid everybody seems to have enough time. It’s among the fastest growing cities in Europe, as my colleague David tells me, and yet the Madrileños are so unstressed. They have the time to be kind and even the time to make fun - very unusual for somebody used to grumbling Parisians.

The whole city exudes a human surplus. From the guy dressed up as a devil who scared the hell out of me, when he jumped from a house and landed just in front of me with his black eyes and pointed ears, to the waiter at the trendy restaurant, La Musa Latina, who took out 15 minutes of his life on a fully booked evening to explain the whole philosophy of the Spanish kitchen.

I don’t normally believe in sociological generalizations, and it would be too easy to state that all Madrileños are happy. Of course not, but it struck me how the Spanish are optimistic, planning for the future. How they have wishes, ideas and visions, while the French, for the time being, are stuck in a national malaise and nostalgia, still longing for the past. 

A guidebook, a cleverer one, suggests that the Spanish are still celebrating democracy. That the death of Franco and his fascist dictatorship 33 years ago set off an explosion of creativity and cultural innovation that has lasted ever since.

I don’t know if this is the explanation, the famous movida. But I know that the rhythm of Madrid is so welcoming that I could easily settle here. The lazy waking up, the long afternoons in the shadow of the plane trees, the tapas, the night life and the women’s right to have broad hips. The hot chocolate in the morning, the experimental architecture popping up all over, and the continuing offer of a quick catholic confession with a mild old monk to forgive most human errors.

I came back from there and knew that Madrid just had to be among our highlighted momondo cities in the future. It’s unfair that sparkling Barcelona gets all the publicity because this city really deserves a visit. Or maybe even a longer stay…    

Is it normal for the travel editor to recommend a sex toy shop? Maybe not, but the guidebook, Un Grand Weekend à Madrid – French of course – gave me an alibi to go to La Belle Isabelle, and frankly, this was an experience.

Coming from Paris, where most sex toy shops are located at Pigalle and surrounded by a cheap and unappetizing atmosphere – I have never been tempted to drop in – this was differently elegant. A tiny boudoir with rose coloured wallpaper and yummy pictures of Dita von Teese, the pin-up who has made striptease an art. Not more than 15 square meters, but packed with sexy accessories – and people. Or, should I say, women. Because that is actually, what makes this shop so different. It is clearly designed to attract a female clientele, and is therefore less aggressive and more glamourous.

Here, eroticism is staged in small still-life arrangements with masks, silk corsets, long gloves, handcuffs (but tiny ones, I guess you can unlock them yourself, if he throws away the keys!) feathers and ultra-tiny strings with leopard-spots.

Of course, the shop also has a wide range of clitoris-ticklers, black bath-ducks with built-in vibrators and love-balls. Not to mention the stock of dildos. It was extensive, but without including the classic skin-coloured plastic-enlargements, the later being much too anatomic for La Belle Isabelle. Here the dildos are pink and turquoise, mint-green and golden; so aesthetically correct that they could appear in a coffee-table book showing Scandinavian design.

The little sex den is squeezed in between a sandwich bar and a vegetable shop in Corredera Alta de San Pablo 3, a narrow and popular shopping street in the old and picturesque Malasana district. And what is the most exceptional is that the clients enter and leave with out any hang-ups, as if they had just bought a cauliflower and two litres of milk.

While I was there, the shop was packed with women who were studying, touching, and smelling to find the right gear. A lady who looked like a diplomat’s wife with hair slides was discussing the functioning of a bright red silicone penis with the shop assistant. And another one, a tall woman who reminded me of a much sexier version of the gentle English teacher we had in high school, was buying a whole basket full of accessories, including a purple-coloured vibrator that was – of course – done up in rose tissue paper.

The only one seeming shy in here was a well-dressed man in his forties. He was the only man, and I never figured out what he was looking for. He waited for more than an hour, until everybody – including myself – had left the shop. So either he had some really naughty wishes, or he was simply, in the old-fashioned way, in love with the shop assistant.

La Villa Paris

We thought it was a purely English phenomenon. However, Bed & Breakfast has become at huge hit in France, yes even in Paris, where Parisians hire out rooms and serve homemade jam for breakfast. Vi took the grand tour and found both luxury, four-poster beds and funny people.

I still don’t get it. After twelve years in Paris, how come I never discovered this place? I, who thought I knew the city so well that I published a guide to its secrets. Me, the one who combed the capital to find the best restaurants and tried the first 37 different versions of foie gras,,,I had never even heard about Chez Léna et Mimile. And that, I recognize now, was an error. So if I ever again write a guide to my city, I promise, this restaurant will be in it.

I only found it, because my morning paper, le Figaro, wrote about it. Le Figaro which is dreadfully conservative and wimpish when it comes to its political reportage, always making PR for the president, but which I still keep on buying because it has such brilliant restaurant reviews. Especially in its two weekend magazines.

It was here I recently found a guide to the most beautiful Parisian terraces and the reviewer wrote about Léna et Mimile as if he had eaten a picture of Michelangelo. So of course I booked instantly and invited my journalist colleague Pia.

She is one of those people who have a genetic instinct for good places and an address book worthy of publishing. But not even she had heard about this resto which is hidden on a corner in a narrow, paved street at the back side of the Panthéon.

We got the best table at the terrace which is stuck to the house as a balcony on the second floor. It’s blooming with flowers and overlooking a little place in the middle of this 5th arrondissement, which was once a real student quarter, but nowadays one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in Paris.

The students can’t afford the rents anymore and have to live far away or – at best – in a maid’s room under the roofs, while the nouveau riche and the most fortunate part of French bourgeoisie have taken over the Sorbonne district (often paying more than 8,000 euros per square metre).

Never mind, that’s a sociological regret. The quarter is still hyper-charming and that Thursday I got one of my best afternoons this summer. Léna et Mimile is driven by Christelle and Marie-Martine, who have transformed this former, 70 year-old family restaurant into a high class bistro.

The kitchen is still simple but full of personality and imagination. I had cold aubergine mousse for an entrée and Pia had the ‘Tartare de courgettes with fromage blanc et caramel de vin rosé’.

That was followed by a carpaccio, so immense that it could have also fed her husband and two adult (& always-hungry) sons. I had the scallops with a super tasty emulsion of small shrimps.

At 2 p.m. the restaurant was full of businessmen in impeccable suits, girlfriends like us, and good looking guys in their forties who were taking out women that were certainly not their wives. But that’s also a part of Paris, and Léna and Mimile, I would say, is a perfect hideout.

Chez Léna et Mimile; 32, rue Tournefort, 75005 Paris 

Normally I always prefer an old-style hotel. You know, one full of high-flying stucco, heavy fireplaces and Louis XVI furniture.

But Madrid is not normal. Or at least to at Scandinavian-born paleface living on the border of rainy Normandy, Madrid in high summer, 36 degrees’ Celsius, is not normal at all.

So I went deliberately for at cool design hotel with even cooler air-conditioning. A minimalist, four-star with freshly ironed bed linen and a king size bathroom worthy of a coffee table-book.

I got it at Vincci Soho, and I wasn’t disappointed, even though – admittedly – the design part was a little far-fetched: Shredded tinfoil looking like old Christmas decorations glittering in glass bottles and hundreds of silver butterflies fastened to the wall-paper. Not exactly my vision of chic design. But what a luxury to enter the ice-cold room, aesthetically cleared of everything besides a huge bed, two armchairs and free candy at the mini bar.

I was just lying there in the end of the afternoon with my swollen feet, exhausted by heat and too much good art at theThyssen-Bornemisza Museum a few blocks away. Now I understand why the Spanish hide for siesta all afternoon. It should be a human right, and in Madrid the only way to recover before night (when the city really wakes up).

I truly enjoyed this hotel, and even though the so-called design seems a little tired and the fake blonde cleaning lady sees it as her right to yell out all details of her life – in Spanish – at 7:30 in the morning just outside my room, I still recommend it.

Not many hotels could boast a better address. Vincci Soho is placed right in the epicentre of the Spanish capital, and the hotel’s terrace bar, wedged between two buildings, is such a cosy little pocket. To start the night here, after a long, cool bath, I felt happiness close by. Sipping a Tinto de Verano, a wonderful *** mix of red wine and lemonade, life couldn’t be much easier. And it doesn’t hurt the design that the neighbour of the bar is hanging her washing out of the window.

Plaza Santa Ana

For winter-goers, however, the bar might be less charming. The interior part of it is totally sexless – so stripped of life that even the Wallpaper guide, who normally praises a shaven design, says it lacks atmosphere. But okay, that’s a minor fault for a hotel situated 200 steps away from the bars and tabernas at Plaza Santa Ana and with the nightlife in Calle de las Huertas right in the backyard. With an address like this, nobody is obliged to stay in the hotel bar. But Vincci Soho is nice to come home to – and cool to wake up in.

Vincci Soho; C/ Prado 18