What a night! The most unusual Paris walk of all time?

... plus a look into where all The Earful Tower listeners are.

Imagine this: Last night, I hosted a walking tour for 30 people through the Latin Quarter of Paris. They had earpieces and I had a microphone. We were all wrapped up warm against the early December chill. And - unbeknownst to the crowd - we were about to have a very unusual surprise.

The first stop was the Saint-Etienne-du-Mont church, the steps of which were made famous by Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris. I turned to the guests to share some facts.

And right as I was mid-sentence, I was interrupted by a tap on my shoulder. I turned. The crowd looked on, confused. Or… excited?

Beside me: a serious man with a moustache and a notebook. I swear I could smell whisky on his breath.

It was none other than… Ernest Hemingway. And he appeared to know my name.

If you think I was stunned, you should have seen the crowd. Through the magic of Christmas, we’d stumbled into the past and found Ernest Hemingway himself, who was struggling with a line in his latest book.

Hemingway and I chatted as the audience took notes, then Hemingway vanished, and we were off towards the Pantheon. And would you believe it, every five minutes from then on, we bumped into yet another character from over 1500 years of Paris history.

By the time the audience had figured out what was going on, we were well into what may have been the most unique Christmas party every hosted by an Australian podcaster in Paris.

The goal was for the crowd to listen carefully and catch specific clues dropped by the characters. The crowd had a paper to jot down answers for occasionally bizarre questions. What was the name of the goat at Notre Dame… what was the other middle name of F Scott Fitzgerald… what was the book that Hemingway was halfway through writing…

All the while, the audience was picking up more clues to determine who from French history would be performing for us at the final stop.

An hour later, we entered the final venue, grabbed some Champagne, and listened to a wonderful performance by a little woman with a big voice.

It was one of the most memorable nights I’ve had in Paris. The annual Earful Tower Christmas Party, done and dusted, and I’m not ashamed to say it: a success!

I’ll share some more pics from the night when they come through, and if you’re a Patreon member I’ll share the whole audio from the evening, which I was surreptitiously recording the whole time.

Otherwise, this is your wink, wink, nudge, nudge moment to make a note that my events in Paris are unparalleled. Hope to see you at the next one, whenever that may be :) Or perhaps on a tour (I’m doing one on Monday and Tuesday morning this week, spots left for both - email me quick!).

Vegan dining in Paris

In other news, this week’s podcast episode featured Amanda Bankert aka “the goddess of vegan Paris”. She’s the American pâtissière who runs Boneshaker Paris.

Amanda explained how Paris is evolving to have more vegan restaurants, and also how she secretly transformed her traditional donut shop to be entirely plant-based. Read more and listen to the episode here.

And… I hate to make excuses, but I lost my voice this week, so tomorrow’s episode will probably come out on Tuesday. Yikes!

Podcast stats

Speaking of the podcast, it’s pretty rare that I talk podcast stats. I started The Earful Tower 7 years ago to the day, and podcasting numbers were always sketchy in the beginning. People would ask “How many listeners do you have?” and I’d say “I don’t really know”.

But things have changed a lot in seven years. In fact, while I was busy focusing on other things, podcasting statistics improved tremendously.

And I was gobsmacked to learn this week that The Earful Tower has 50,000 listeners on Apple, and 25,000 on Spotify. That’s way more than I would have ever guessed.

I was also bamboozled to see that the average consumption of an episode is about 95 percent. In other words, if someone turns it on, it’s almost a certainly they’ll listen until the end. That’s almost daunting! Thank you all for listening - and for listening so attentively!! What a pleasant surprise.

More stats? Top ten cities for Apple users are: New York, Seattle, Paris, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Denver, Sydney, Chicago, London. Top five countries: US, Australia, France, UK, Canada.

And specifically, it was quite astonishing to me that there are 5,000 Earful listeners in New York City. We could really fill a room if I ever get over there again :)

OK OK, stats are dangerous, let’s not go too deep down the rabbit hole. That’ll do for now.

Thanks to all who’ve listened over the past seven years. And a special thanks to the Patreon members who’ve allowed me to keep the show ad free for so long. As a thanks, Patreon members have just received my 2024 PDF guide to Paris for free. They can access it here. It’ll be on sale later this week for everyone else.

Oliver