Last week, I took a trip to the Metropolitan Museum. Along my way to the 77th St train station, I passed by the Cultural Services building of the French Embassy. In my past years walking by this building, the doors were always closed. But this time, the doors were wide open and banners hung on both sides of the front steps, saying “Albertine: Books in French and English” with the hours listed below. It’s a bookstore! I went inside to check out this new addition to the city and it was more or less like the bookstores I visited in France, but most definitely like museum gift/book shops.

Here are some photos of the exterior, the main lobby and the bookstore. (Apparently, there is a reading room upstairs, but I did not know I could walk up the stairs!)

I did some light researching and discovered that this bookstore recently opened in September this year. This is a very new addition for the French and francophile community in NYC. I also picked up a flyer while roaming around the building. It was for an event called Festival Albertine. This Festival takes place from October 14-19, 2014. It is a series of debates and lectures on various intellectual topics, such as the Post-May university uprisings of 1968 in France, French fashion and global style, Tocqueville, and the tension between the visual and the word as explained by graphic novelist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi and critic A.O. Scott.

I tried to RSVP for two of these talks (free and open to the public), however, all of the events were already full. Fortunately, the Cultural Services are live streaming the events at this link: http://new.livestream.com/frenchembassy. I watched part of the “French Fashion and Global Style” talk, however, I will re-watch it later and do a formal research journal entry then.