C'est la vie, Paris!
Trip dates: January 27, 2017 - February 3, 2017
I took years and years of French starting in middle school through AP in high school and then promptly didn’t use it after graduation. Turns out, there is still some vocab and verb conjugation floating around in the back of my mind but there were a lot of cobwebs to dust off. However, with Lishan’s advanced context guessing skills and my French language attempts, plus generally helpful locals who know better English than they may let on, we didn’t run into many language issues in Paris.
We stayed in Paris for a week, hitting up most of the most well-known sites at a semi-leisurely pace since we hate having to get up early in the morning. The weather was also not very cooperative - we only had a couple hours total of sunshine in the course of the week, but thankfully, it only drizzled a little bit the rest of the time. Otherwise, it was lots of gray skies and cool to cold temperatures.
I was (kind of) surprised at how gritty a lot of Paris felt - maybe I had a more glamorous idea in my head just because of learning about it when I was younger, but it was definitely a bit of a shock when we first arrived in Paris. By the end of our week there, I really felt like there were 2 sides to Paris - the really frustrating day-to-day Paris experience (people can't seem to walk without running into you, the metro is super crowded and people are pretty passive-aggressive, there's dog shit everywhere and smokers everywhere) countered with moments of beauty and bliss from the grandeur and history of the art/buildings/environment around you.
I’m splitting Paris into three blog posts since we spent a good amount of time here - museums/art, all the other stuff we saw, and of course, the food! This post is about our general time in Paris and the sightseeing we did outside of all the museums.
We stayed in the Latin Quarter, as it seemed like a good base for operations being close to Notre-Dame and the numerous metro stops there, plus it was close to restaurants and shops. Our hotel was Alice in Wonderland themed and the room was quite whimsical; Lishan approved!
For our overall itinerary, we spent our first weekend just kind of wandering around and getting our bearings. Then we did a 2-day Paris Museum Pass, which allows unlimited access and sometimes a priority line to get into a number of the most popular museums and attractions. Finally, we rounded it out with more fooding and sightseeing at Montmartre and the Eiffel tower.
Over the weekend, we visited the Arc de Triomphe and Champs-Élysées first. The Arc is pretty impressive, though we didn’t pay to go up. The surrounding traffic circle looks like shambles with all of the possible ingress/egress points and with tourists running across the street to get to the Arc (which you really, really shouldn’t do). Champs-Élysées was just a big, popular street with fancy stores on it. We saw some of the cafe prices along the street, with their can of Coke for 7.20 euro, so we passed on that.
We walked and saw the Petit Palais and Grand Palais museums and Les Invalides from afar, before continuing on to Concorde and seeing the Egyptian obelisk (which seems kind of random btw). We also checked out the Pantheon but didn’t go inside that either.
We stopped by Notre Dame multiple times since it was so close to our hotel and in between us and other attractions. In terms of going inside though, we did it on two different occasions - once to do a tour of the towers (lots of spiral staircases) and see the Chimera gallery and views and another to see the actual interior. To go to the top, we had to wait in line, which sucked a little. It was also super crowded on top and you have a limited amount of time, but the Chimera gallery was a really interesting sight to see. The belfry was also closed when we went, which was a bummer. Guess Quasimodo was taking a holiday..
The line to go inside Notre Dame was super variable each time we went by, but luckily one of the later times we went, there was a very short one so we went inside. I was not prepared for how huge and intense the inside was with all of the different shrines, paintings, and exhibits (not sure what else to call them...) around. All in all, this Notre Dame was pretty impressive, although we found the one in Amiens to be even more impressive from the outside, as it had a lot more detail and was more gothic.
Near Notre Dame on the Île de la Cité is Saint-Chapelle, which possesses some crazy intense stained glass windows. The stained glass tells many different stories from the bible, so it was fun trying to read the different panels to see what parts we might recognize. There wasn't a very long line when we went and it's pretty small, so it's a relatively quick stop on the sightseeing tour if you're in the area.
Of course, on a trip to Paris, you need to go Montmartre where the painters of yore got their inspiration on the high hilltop overlooking Paris. We checked out the Sacré-Cœur, climbed to the top of the dome (more tiny, spiral staircases) and worked on our photography skills while appreciating the views.
One ridiculous thing - when we went back a separate time to see the the front of the Sacré-Cœur, there were multiple groups of guys hanging around on that path who would try to grab your hand/arm and put a "friendship" bracelet on you that you would then pay for. Most other tourist trinket sellers were generally fine once you said no, but these guys were extremely forceful and in your face. Fortunately for us, a local who was jogging by helped shove us through a group of them when we were there. Not a fan of pushy touts/vendors! We saw other tourists paying them to get away, which was painful to see.
After that, we walked to the nearby Moulin Rouge. We had looked into the shows ahead of time, but decided we weren't feeling the $$ touristy cabaret, so settled for a view of the outside in homage to the movie and continued onwards.
While we were at Montmartre, we stopped by the Montmartre Cemetery. It sounds a bit morbid to go visit a cemetery but it really wasn't. There are actually quite a few cemeteries in Paris that are big sightseeing destinations, I think partly because it's more serene and an escape from the city but also due to the numerous sculptures and memorials that make it seem like you're walking through an open-air gallery. The Montmartre Cemetery isn't the most famous, but still has a number of famous residents from the past and plenty of interesting memorials and statues inside. It was also a great opportunity to work on more photog-ing skills!
We only made it to the Eiffel tower on our last day in Paris. It was a cloudy, gray, drizzly day, but since it was cooler, it helped us not overheat when we climbed up to the second level of the tower! To back up a little bit - the pre-paid tickets to go to the top were more expensive and also sold out for the entire time we were in Paris, so instead of waiting in line in person to buy elevator tickets, we decided to walk up the steps. Since we had done a bunch of steps previously, we figured we could walk up to the first level (300ish steps) and then take an elevator up to the second level. There was no wait and after climbing up to the first level without too much difficulty, we figured we might as well save some euros and walk up another 300ish steps to the second level.
We were a little bit more tired after climbing to the second level but it was pretty worth it for the cool views. It was super windy at the upper parts of the tower but at least the light drizzle had stopped when we went up, so that was nice.
However, the real treat was when we went to the east, above the Trocadéro Gardens, and had really great views as the sky darkened and the tower lit up. We had seen the light show from the Louvre before (every hour starting at 6 PM for 5 minutes) but now we got to see it up close. I wish there was music to go along with it! But that might be a bit distracting, blasting music from the Eiffel tower every hour :)
Stay tuned for the next posts on the museums and food!
