Paris must be the global epicenter of this — the enormous exhibit for marvelous food and drink.

Four years ago, we were here at the same time as the salon of independent wine producers, and wandering through that was a kick in the pants.

Later in 2011, we visited the Salon Saveurs food fair, and seven months after that we went to the spring edition.

This time? The Salon du Chocolat … and it is exactly what it suggests. Well, aside from the “and we haven’t yet mentioned … top-end chocolate producers”.

More than 200 of them, in the same exhibition building (through the weekend) at the Porte de Versailles convention center and nearly all of them happy to give you a taste of their product.

Sometimes calling out for you to come over to their booth and have a taste. (Well, if you insist …)

We didn’t quite eat our body weight in world-class chocolate, but we certainly earned back the 14 euros ($16) we paid to enter the salon.

All that chocolate in so many forms … it was an amazing sight.

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This is something I love about France, and Paris, in particular.

The bakeries.

A trip to the boulangerie is a treat.

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Paris has two major American churches and, curiously, they are only about 800 yards apart, with the Seine River filling much of the gap.

We checked out the American Cathedral on a Sunday evening back in 2011, and today we had a look at the American Church in Paris — and the experiences were markedly different.

The American Cathedral seems to be hanging on, in a secular era (in the West, anyway), while the American Church, across the river, appears to be thriving.

It was today, anyway, as a crowd of at least 250 turned out for the 11 a.m. service one day after the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1965 visit to the American Church.

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For at least four decades, I have been wearing the Stan Smith model of the Adidas tennis shoe. Going back to my early days in college.

Perhaps you know the Stan Smith. The tennis shoe.

(As opposed to the tennis player, for which the shoe was named, a world No. 1 in 1972 and a U.S. Open and Wimbledon champion now little remembered, 43 years later.)

The tennis shoe had uppers made of leather, dyed snow white, with white laces, and a green patch at the heel embossed with the Adidas logo.

I was a fan from the start. I liked the idea of all-white tennis shoes; wearing them, back then, set you apart — for good or ill.

However, more than once, during my four-plus decades of wearing them, the shoe seemed to be on its way out. It was difficult to find, sometimes.

I can remember a time, in this century, when we discovered a store (in Maryland, I think it was) that had the shoe in supply and we bought three pair at once, fearing we may not be able to find them again.

Now, in 2015, the shoe seems to be more popular than ever — if the pedestrians of Paris are an accurate indication.

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A curious reality concerning the 11th arrondissement, where we are staying: It is the most densely populated quartier in Paris but it has very few major … anythings. Landmarks, stores, parks.

So, if you want a bit of greenery on a cool cloud-covered afternoon, you very likely will make a zig-zagging trek up into the 19th, where the sprawling and quirky Parc des Buttes Chaumont is located.

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So, here we are again, in the City of Light, nearly all of that light generated by electricity, given that Paris has been sunk in a not-atypical late-October cloud of gloom.

But, still …

We landed at gray Orly, after taking the Transavia flight from sunny Valencia.

Transavia is one of Europe’s dozens of budget airlines, and the first I have flown. Not an empty seat in a Boeing 737 (the Southwest Airlines workhorse), but not too awful an experience because it was 1) a nonstop and 2) we each had an aisle and 3) they sold food and drink for not-outrageous prices — and 4) we were in the air only about 100 minutes.

The ride into town was a bigger test.

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Altea is amazing.

Benidorm is appalling.

Altea is a few blocks of 19th-century charm crowned by a 115-year-old church atop a hill.

Benidorm is miles of urban sprawl built around “the most high-rise buildings per capita in the world”.

And the amazing thing about this … is that these two cities are about five miles apart.

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One of those random things that happen when traveling: An unpredictable intersection of simpatico people.

In this case, nine Americans meeting at a mojito bar early in the evening in the Old City of a small Spanish seaside town in the autonomous region of Valencia.

When the whole of the city of Altea may not, at that moment, have included two dozen Americans. (We had not identified one, in four days.)

When the “Yank total” hit six, the proprietor, since 2009, of the popular AlteArte bar (photo courtesy AlteArte), declared: “This may be more Americans than have ever been in here!”

And that was before three more Yanks came through.

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Seems like the older a town is, the more likely it is to have been founded on a hill.

Such is the case for Altea, a city of 25,000 between Valencia and Alicante on Spain’s Costa Blanca.

People have been living here for 2,000 years or more, and eventually they gravitated to the hill near the water, building a church at the summit and walls around their little city, which they white-washed, as did the citizens of other little towns around the Mediterranean Sea.

Which yields to heaping helpings of charm.

And lots of people from chillier climes saying: “We should visit that place.” And in some cases, after visiting, saying: “Why don’t we live here?”

Which is what we are experiencing here this week.

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How many consecutive days of eating plates of tapas (Spanish for snack) for dinner would a person need before he or she became tired of it?

A week of it? A month of it? Ten years of it?

We have had tapas on consecutive nights here in the Valencia region of Spain, buying seven or eight little plates of food and making it dinner for three, and it’s hard to imagine getting bored with it. Maybe ever.

The first night, we went to a traditional tapas place in the main plaza of the old city of Altea. Tonight, we tried a place just down the street, a tapas bar known for “experimental” offerings.

And we could live with this for a very long time, I am pretty sure.

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