I went to Paris with Peta from Thu 27 May to Mon 31 May to have a long weekend around the UK May bank holiday.
She had never been to Paris before, so we took the touristy route around Paris.
I arrived in the afternoon, and ran around Charles de Gaulle trying to find out which terminal Peta's plane would arrive at. We finally met up, and took the RER downtown. We had a hotel room in the heart of the Marais district, so it was pretty expensive even though it was quite small. The location was very good, though, close to the 1 metro line. We had dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant in the Marais.
Friday morning we got up early to get in line for going up the towers of the Notre Dame. I still think it's one of the best views of Paris, although you have to be there early to not spend hours in the queue. We went on to visit the Arc de Triumph before taking the metro to Montmartre to see the Sacre Coeur and such in the ambience. We had an evening dinner at an Italian restaurant on Isle St. Louis.
Saturday we walked over to the Sainte-Chapelle, one of the prettiest churches in Paris. Unfortunately, it was being refurbished, so they had covered up one end of the church. We felt slightly ripped off from having paid 8 euros per head to see this. We went on to look at the Eiffel Tower. When we got there, the area and the surrounding park was completely filled with people in yellow and red outfits. Apparently there was some rugby event going on. We walked over to the Dome des Invalides to look at Napoleon's tomb, before taking the metro to the Latin Quarter to look for a place to have lunch. We didn't find anything to our liking there, so we went on to Bastille, and ended up having lunch at a really crappy lunch restaurant. We retired to our hotel room with a bottle of rose and some Ben & Jerrys to lift our spirits.
Sunday we were getting up early to go to the catacombs, only to discover when we got there that there had been a water leak in the surrounding area, so the catacombs were flooded. It looked like a severe leak as well, because we could see running water in the streets. We decided instead to walk down to the Cimetaire de Montparnasse , one of the more famous graveyards in Paris, featuring among others the graves of Sartre and Serge Gainsbourg. From there we walked down to the Tour Montparnasse to go up to the observation deck to look at the view. It was very expensive, but the view was really good. We had a very nice lunch in Montparnasse, before retiring to our hotel room for some Sancerre and chocolates. In the evening we had dinner at a very slow restaurant, and ended up waiting 25 minutes for the bill.
On our final day we went to see the obelisk at Place de Concorde, and visited L'Orangerie to look at Monet's water-lily paintings. We had some crepes with chestnut spread for lunch before going to the airport, very Parisian!
Pictures are here
