We spent 2 days in the city of love and crammed a whole bunch into it! It started off to an exciting adventure by traveling on the Eurostar through the Chunnel from London. Tickets for this are available around 3 months in advance and I’d advise you book as early as possible! We saved a lot of money by doing this. We were excited to book our first train tickets so chose seats at a table in one of the train cars. I would not recommend this as it was very squished with two other people sitting very close across from. We would have been much more comfortable in just the regular train seats. Still it was fun, our ears plugged and popped a lot along the way as traveled underwater and at really high speeds. We were so jetlagged we slept a lot through it! Be sure to get there early since you actually have to go through security to board in London! We even got our passports stamped and everything. For every other train we just walked right up to the platform, but for this trip, plan ahead about 30 minutes. Also side note- we did not take advantage of this but your Eurostar ticket does get you entitle you to a “Buy one get one free” pass to the Musee d’Orsay. If that’s on your list, save your ticket!
Our couchsurfing host, Mayte, met us at the train station which was very helpful. Paris Nord is HUGE! She helped us buy our metro tickets, which you can purchase in a package of 10 tickets to make it cheaper. We went to her apartment to drop off our backpacks (which made walking much better than in London!) and then she took us to lunch at a very fancy restaurant. We weren’t expecting to eat at such a pricy place and promptly blew ALL of our money for food that day in one meal that I didn’t even really enjoy. I had some traditional French food that is like mashed potatoes that is 20% potato and 805 cheese which I didn’t love and Pablo got some sort of meat that we decided we did NOT want to ask any further questions about.
Our budget wasn’t off to the best start in Paris, but it was nice getting to know Mayte and she was so excited to take us there for lunch so didn’t want to turn her down. After that she took us around her neighborhood a bit pointing things out for us to see. In the end she led us towards the Seine River and pointed us in the direction of Notre Dame. This was one of the few days of our trip that it didn’t rain and it was HOT. But we had a nice walk (though very long) along the river getting towards more of the center of Paris. We stopped and sat in the grass along the way for a bit since we were still pretty tired and jet lagged. Our first lesson we learned from cousurfing was that Europeans stay up LATE. We hadn’t gone to bed til around midnight the night before and had gotten up around 5:00am for our train. That combined with the fact that we hadn’t really slept on the flight over meant I REALLY needed some sleep.
We stopped by some fountain that I don’t remember the name of now, and saw Pont de Neuf (Love Lock Bridge). Thanks to my Aunt Paula, we had a lock to add to it so of course stopped to do that and snap a few photos. That bridge is packed full of locks, it’s not hard to see how it collapsed in certain areas. And the replaced areas are already filling with more locks again! If you do forget to buy a lock there are many merchants on the streets more than willing to sell one to you. Notre Dame is right there as well so we crossed the bridge and went to see the church.
The line looked huge when we arrived, wrapping around the whole square. We weren’t sure if we wanted to spend a lot of time standing in line waiting to get in, but we decided to join the line and see how it went. Suprisingly it moved very quickly and we made it inside in no time. It was neat to see, and reminded me a bit of the National Cathedral in D.C. There were a lot of details on the outside and the amount of time and energy it took to create each and every figure was incredible. We stayed for a bit (maybe around 45 minutes total in the church) and then were on to our next stop: The Louvre.
The Louvre was in walking distance, though it did take a bit of time to reach. We went on a Tuesday when it’s closed since we didn’t plan on going inside and I figured there would be fewer people walking around outside then. The building is ginormous. I mean, really, really ginormous. While I’ve seen sky scrapers before which the Louvre is not, I had never before seen a building that literally just stretched on and on and on. I’d like to go back someday and walk the inside of it! Though I don’t know if you’re actually supposed to, the best part was stopping to cool off our feet in the three pools around the glass dome. It was so refreshing from the heat. We grabbed some more photos and continued our walk on through the Tuilerie Gardens.
The gardens were pretty and had lot of benches and chairs available to sit. I couldn’t believe the number of people who were sunbathing! We looked only for some that we could pull into the shade, but pickings were slim as there were a lot of people. We stopped so I could use a bathroom at the end of the gardens (you have to pay for these everywhere!!!!) which is also in the plaza near the Luxor Obelisk. We bought some crepes from a cart and snacked on those while looking around. It’s interesting actually from the Louvre you can look through the gardens and see the Obelisk and the Arc de Triomphe beyond that, all in a line. We could also see the Eiffel Tower from there as well.
We wanted to go to both the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe but at this point we had walked a LOT and were tired. We decided to grab the metro instead for a break. This introduced our first transportation dilemma of the day: how to find the metro? While London had wonderful signs that stood out and pointed us to the locations, Paris did not. In fact, the signs were tiny, indiscreet and in some cases non-existent! I think I’m generally a pretty good traveler, but who knows, maybe it was a personal problem. Regardless, we spent a lot of time looking for metro signs.
In the end we finally located one and took it over to the Eiffel Tower. It was huge! I had thought about going up it and taking the stairs the save money and time waiting in line. But when I saw how many stairs that would include, we quickly changed our minds. We decided not to go to the top as the lines were just way too long. You may be able to book tickets to this ahead of time, I can’t remember. But regardless we had fun looking around and sitting in the grassy area around it for a while. A lot of cities in Europe have really good deals on public bikes you can use for transportation. And I mean really good deals, like 1 Euro per day! I thought this would be both fun and affordable for us so we found a Velib bike parking station near the Eiffel Tower and decided to hop on and head over to the Arc de Triomphe.
Only we never made it. Paris is full of confusing signs and even more confusing streets. I had a couple of small maps that we were trying to use but couldn’t seem to get streets to match up for us, especially when going through round-abouts with 6 different exits! Maybe if we’d had a gps system that could guide us along it would’ve been better. But after biking around for an hour and ending up LITERALLY in the exact same place where we had started, we gave up. It was fun riding the bikes around but I was pretty frustrated and fed up after that :-). We decided instead to take the metro across the city to the Montparnasse Observation Tower. We had used points to buy tickets up to the 56th floor for views of the city and wanted to do this at night so we could see the Eiffel Tower all lit up.
We had a little time to kill with some dinner and found some more crepes to enjoy 🙂 Crepes are all over in Paris and we stuck to the cheap ones you could buy off the street. They have both sweet and savory options and we got some churros to go along with them as well. The pastries in Europe were so great 🙂 Another thing we quickly learned walking around Paris- there are not many water fountains available! I really don’t like spending money buying water, but that’s what we had to do. We happened to walk by one statue where I saw some people filling water bottles so I quickly grabbed ours and jumped in line- but you can see from the photo below I never would have known it was a drinking fountain otherwise!
Seeing Paris at night was cool and we saw the Eiffel Tower light up which was fun. I think I would’ve liked to be close by the Eiffel Tower when it was lit up, rather than see it from far away next time. The side of the observation deck with the Eiffel Tower was packed with people, but we squished our way through to get some shots. It was cool to see all the areas we had walked that day as well, I hadn’t realized how much it was!
From there we decided to call it a night and head back to grab some sleep. The next morning we were off to Versailles!
See below for some helpful resources I used in my planning:
Paris Public Transport: Map of the metro
Paris Walking Tour ticket: We didn’t end up doing this as our lunch ran too late, but it is an option for a Free tour around Paris. Here’s the website:
paris-metro-mini-map-2014: Another Map of Paris
More info for getting around the city:
http://parismetro.tourpackagers.com/detail1.aspx?id=19
http://booking.parisinfo.com/z6200e2x26827m466g2603_uk-tour-ticket-paris-visit-pass-transport.aspx
Info on Velib bikes (need to register for these ahead of time)
http://en.velib.paris.fr/How-it-works
http://blog.velib.paris.fr/en/2012/11/23/full-station-best-practice/
Fire Round the World 