I chose mid-afternoon on my first full day as the time to break up my Paris post because mentally I have a divide there, as after the Orsay museum is when I started to finally get the hang of Paris and start to like the place. After touring the museum, I was definitely read for dinner, and so decided that, if trying to find a good place on my own was frustrating, I would use my brain and the technology of the 21st century and ask the internet (thank you Orsay Museum for the free wifi!). With a plan now in mind, I walked along the Seine towards le Marais for some Breton crêpes. Le Marais is an interesting neighbourhood, previously built on a marsh (as the name suggests). After being re-energized by some delicious buckwheat crêpes, I proceeded to stroll the neighbourhood, taking in the sites, smells, and macarons.
I also managed to revive my very efficient way of seeing the famous sites. Since I feel obliged to see famous things, but not necessarily interested, I basically just see them, take a photo, and keep going. This is what I did with Notre Dame while walking to the crêpes. After all, absent a particular interest in a certain site, it's not entirely pleasant to stand in a throng of tourists all trying to see the same small thing.
The next day, I had a more concrete plan. I started with the Luxembourg Gardens, having discovered my love for European gardens, and then went to Montparnasse Cemetery, which hosts many important thinkers, authors, etc. (though I was only able to find Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's grave). From there, I headed to the Institut du Monde Arabe. This wound up being the only place where I paid to enter a museum-not because I had to, mind, but because I accidentally went to see the special exhibit on Osiris first, thinking you had to to get into the museum. This turned out not to be the case, but it was an interesting exhibit none-the-less. I had also learned my lesson from Versailles, and planned my trip to the IMA museum for the time of the day when I usually crash, so that I could be leisurely strolling through interesting exhibits rather than stuck in a crowd of tourists. At the end of the Museum, a staff member recommended heading up to the top floor's viewing deck, and sure enough there was a fantastic view of Paris.
I wasn't particularly interested in the main tourist sites other than to see them, and very much did not want to be stuck with the crowds paying too much for coke, so I had made the plan to sit down, enjoy a nice coffee at a café, and steel myself for an afternoon of efficiently and briskly walking by the main attractions. After reaching a zen-like state at a Quartier Latin coffeeshop, I braced myself and headed for the Eiffel Tower. Not going to lie, I was a little surprised at how much I liked it-it's an impressive structure (moreso from a distance, where it towers over much of the city). After about 5 minutes, I was rather done with that, and continued onwards to the Arc de Triomphe and then the Champs Elysées, in the direction of the Louvre. The Champs Elysées is, as promised, mostly filled with major international companies now (I certainly didn't come to France to go to H&M), although this has its advantages, if, like me, you're cheap enough to go into McDonald's solely to benefit from the 1€ drinks (I resisted the urge to buy a Royal with Cheese just for the Tarantino reference).
A friend had told me I wouldn't be able to do the Louvre in an evening-seeing as I'd been knocking museums out at a rate of several per day, I took this as a challenge. In truth, I walked through maybe 40% of it, and actually took in about 30% of what I saw. The scale is inhuman, and I can't help but think it would be better to split it up into smaller museums in different cities, to spread the tourist dollars just a bit (after all, Paris is hardly struggling to attract visitors). I did the Louvre the same way I do most museums-focusing on the things I was interested in, and only seeing the rest if I walked by. Yes, the Mona Lisa is impressive, and I saw it (though not up close, due to the throngs of tourists), but it's also not as though I don't know what it looks like, and so I felt my time to be better spent seeing the rest. It was also interesting to me what was and wasn't highlighted on their maps-the Hammurabi Code, the world's oldest legal code and the source of "an eye for an eye," was very unceremoniously just sitting in a room. This did have the distinct advantage of there being no tourists around it, making it actually approachable for an awestruck law student such as myself. By about an hour before closing, however, I had reached my limit of museums for this trip (though I saw everything I wanted to see), and left the Louvre to enjoy some more crêpes and walk through the Marais some more.
My last day in Paris was another long one-I left the hostel around 9 AM, but my bus didn't leave until 4:30 PM. My plan, which I followed well, was simply to walk and buy pastries all day. Crème Brûlée for breakfast, Opéra for slightly-after-breakfast, a nice noisette (hazelnut) coffee in the Quartier Latin for lunch, browsing through some bookstores and taking a snapshot of the Assemblée Nationale before tracking down a bottle of wine as a souvenir, and some brie and baguette to eat on the bus.
Overall, I liked Paris, although not at first. Chalk it up to a cold, bad planning, or simply the fact that Paris is a hard city to really get into, but I didn't think I liked it until I was there about 24 hours. When I came home, though, I realized that I really did love Paris, just not as a tourist city so much-I'd rather travel through the French countryside than join the masses wandering down the Champs Elysées. But I also think it would be a great place to live, since much of its most attractive features-the little bookshops, cute cafés, and bakeries- seemed better savoured over time rather than crammed into a few days. I was also didn't realize how nice it would be to be back in a place where I speak the language (being able to respond appropriately to cashiers is such an underrated pleasure), or how much easier that would make getting around. Unlike in Montréal, where my bizarre mix of accents is often taken as an excuse to just address me in English, it turned out to be true that Parisians love a good Canadian accent. I also definitely appreciated Paris as being an easy place to get back into the swing of travelling-remembering little things like taking a bottle around for water, taking breaks from attractions to actually eat, etc. Being in a place where I spoke the language, where the climate wasn't too much hotter than Maastricht, and where tourism is well developed (and thus infrastructure exists) really helped with that.
No comments:
Post a Comment