Many Brits travel via low cost airfare deals. I've always been wary of those (for reasons including the bad publicity often heard). Deals of $1 to Spain are offered, as weird as that sounds! But for a simple three day trip, we thought we'd risk it. So onto the website for www.lastminute.com  to find trip and hotel package deals. We found deals for 310 pounds, but the flight times weren't very holiday maker friendly. So we paid 390 pounds for the total package (flights, 3 nights hotel & breakfast, and have been very pleased. We were told that we would have business class seats, but they weren't! Since we returned we've heard hundreds of complaints about lastminute.com but won't add to that burden. Will we use them again? Probably!

It would have been great to have met someone we knew in Paris, tried to contact Lionel Pichenet but didn't succeed. (We met him several years ago at Richard & Anouschka's wedding in NZ).

The weather forecast for Paris was cold & wet, so we packed our best winter woollies, including NZ possum wool gloves and NZ rugby beanie hats.

To prepare for the visit, we bought a Lonely Planet guidebook (always excellent reading) and a Lonely Planet French phrasebook - which was even more entertaining that expected. E.g. the 'social' chapter which offered a useful sequence of phrases in the 'romance section' including 

• Tu viens ici souvent ~ do you come here often
• Est-ce que tu as un fétiche ~ do you have a fetish?
• Je peux t'embrasser?~ can I kiss you?
• Arrête! ~ stop!
• N'arrête pas! ~ don't stop!
• T'inquiète pas, je fais ça tout seul ~ don't worry I'll do it myself
• Je ne veux plus te revoir ~ I never want to see you again!

Very useful!

Travel
We caught a taxi at 4:30am to Birmingham International Airport, though then had to wait until 5:15am before the ticket office opened! Fortunately our couriered tickets were there, waiting for us. Boarded the plane at 6:30 but then stuck at the end of the runway for an hour, waiting for clearance to land in fog-bound Paris. Finally arrive in Paris, and there's no fog to be seen!

It seems very novel to be able to pop across to Paris for a short trip - we're used to thinking of it as being a huge trip from NZ. But from here it can be there-and-back in a day so easily! We now wonder why we haven't been over more often, and plan to have weekend trips to Prague and Italy soon.

In-flight breakfast was a tiny chocolate muffin and a small glass of orange juice. No tea or coffee on this flight, grumble… Thank heavens we had bacon & eggs at the airport…

The plane was weaving all over the skies, as if the pilot didn't know where he was going! From the air, the landscape of Europe is surprisingly different to the UK - farms in UK are marked into grids with hedgelines, French farms are mostly open fields. The return journey was less interesting, as drab grey mist covered the fields. No gleaming green fields of mother England to greet us… My sense of Northern hemisphere geography is not very good, it surprised me to realise that from Birmingham to Paris is almost due South, not South-East as I had naively thought. Looking down on the Channel, it's odd to think of traveling in a train underneath it all.

Seeing traces of smoke from farms below hints at a strong Northerly wind, this means cold air blowing from the artic to chill our arrival… Reflections from the roads below hint at wet soggy conditions… No matter how horrid the weather on the ground, it's usually much nicer above the clouds! Another reason to do more flying!

Flying high over west London, planes are flying in all directions far underneath us. For such an over-populated country, the UK still has huge amounts of green space. The cities are so congested, jammed in, all multi-storey buildings, most in terrace buildings, living cheek by jowl…

Arrival
Paris Charles de Gaul airport is huge!!! After the plane touched down on the runway, we taxied for several miles (at quite a considerable speed) before parking some distance from terminal 2. Then travelled by bus to the terminal. The sound of the public address system was a surprise, a distinctive cheerful trill of sound.

Getting through the terminal surprisingly quickly made me realise that our passports hadn't been stamped. I guess that it's an effect of the EU that passports are no longer stamped. A shame, I'd been rather hoping that my passport would build up an impressive array of place names.

First Impressions of Paris
Graffiti - lots of it alongside the train lines, even more than we had seen in New York. There were lots of travellers with very little luggage - probably day trippers. We took the train to Gare du Nord station, whereupon we just had to stop at a pastry shop to have the first (of many) very tasty treats. A massive chocolate croissant for monsieur, a custard pastry for mademoiselle. Chris's eyes popped out at some clothing and lingerie shops at the station, but we exerted self control and saved those for later. Next, we went onto the underground metro system, to our hotel. Underground trains never cease to amaze me, such an incredible engineering feat, especially considering the long time ago that they were built, no fancy tunnel drilling machines in those days. The Paris metro has (on some lines) carriages that seamlessly join to another, like Auckland bendy buses, so they are like a 200 foot long tube. Looking from one end to another is quite eerie, as you can see the front of the train swerve, rise and fall, as it glides through the tunnels, like a giant worm. On the different 'lines', some trains were newer than others. The best ones run on a combination system of large rubber wheels and metal rails. Quite a powerful surge of power as it accelerates down the line.

At every station entrance, we were surprised to see so many people jumping over the barriers, especially by going the wrong way through exits, it seems to be quite the done thing! Even quite elegant business people were forcing their way through. The Paris metro is quite impressive, very efficient, not too crowded, a wonderful public transport system.

Hotel
We stayed at Grand Hotel Francais on Boulevard Voltaire, in the 11th district (Arrondissement) of 'Nation'. Our hotel was a small but quite nice outfit, in a residential part of town (very near the huge roundabout Place de la Nation). Not many tourists staying there, which suited us fine. The staff were friendly and happily spoke English. Some of the comments on websites about this hotel made mention of the fact that it is built on top of a metro line. This meant a rumbling noise every few minutes, but this wasn't at all a problem. Rather like the trains that go under the Hamilton Centreplace shopping centre, but not even as loud as that. Our key criteria for accommodation is that it is secure and clean. This hotel was perfect, and had a dining room in the basement that served a smorgasbord of endless fruit salad, yoghurt, cornflakes, croissants, jam, honey, chocolate croissants, apple pastries, cheese, ham, tea, coffee, and more. We'd spend an hour eating a treble serving of breakfast, and then not have to buy lunch!

The view from our hotel room was of a wrought iron balcony, looking over to a suburban park & playgrounds (Jardin de la Beauharnais?). Many of the windows across the way had shuttered windows, or external roller blinds that cover the windows. On Saturday morning we saw two council gardeners in the park, playing draughts/chequers for hours, while their workmates did all the work!

Shopping
France is now operating on the Euro currency, 1 euro is 86 pence, or about $2 of NZ money. We found a huge department store BHV (on Rue de Rivoli) in which everything was far too expensive, but nice to look at! Found a nice café upstairs and had our first language challenge - trying to order a cappuccino and received something with a huge dollop of thick cream instead. Yummy but fattening.

Chris continued her search for shoes and was blown away by the selection in a whole succession of shops along Rue de Rivoli.

We went into one glitzy fashion shop with well trained sales assistants, who insisted that every coat Chris tried on was 'savant' even though we could see that they were far too big to be stylish.

The People
For years we've heard the clichés of the French being rude and arrogant, but we're thrilled to say that that encountered none of that. Everyone was friendly and helpful, most were able to understand our pathetic attempts to speak the language. I'm sure that people coming with 'an attitude' will soon find trouble, but we were there to enjoy ourselves and achieved this quite easily.

Perhaps we found the people to be not as French as we'd expected, none of the very strong peculiar personalities as seen on too many TV programmes. Nowhere to be seen was the archetypal garlic chewing, bicycle riding, beret and striped jersey swearing, gesticulating Asterix like characters.

The French do have a certain fashion style, that is lovely, although nothing compared to immaculately groomed New Yorkers who wowed us earlier this year. Chris was visibly swooning over Les Hommes…

We saw a few beggars, but far fewer than in I see in central Birmingham every evening.

Cruising the Seine
Many workmates had told us that the best way to see Paris is on a river boat cruise. Our first day had quite nice weather so it was perfect for boarding the ultra-modern Batobus glass topped boat for a 10 euro cruise on the Seine. It is true that the view from the river is much nicer that from the road - so many beautiful balconies and trees. In the space of an hour we saw the Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, so many bridges and beautiful statues lining the riverbank. Paris is quite a clean city, not much litter, the inner city is quite tidy order.

So many of the bridges and buildings have been restored, the black grime cleaned from the stone. There's an amazing amount of gold used on public statues and buildings. Very decadent. The Notre Dame has scaffolding on some parts, and the remainder looking absolutely wonderful. Some of the stonework of the spires has obviously been recently replaced, and should last many hundreds of years more.

Up close, the tower looks quite different, lots of lovely twirly steelwork, less like a huge power pylon!

We didn't climb the tower, there were too many other places to go and things to see!

Eating!

Day one of our trip was a very naughty cake-only day - not good for our diets, but you've got to have some decadent days in our short time on this earth… (well that's my excuse anyway!). Day two was us slipping in Parisian style, eating dinner at 11pm with a lovely bottle of Bordeaux wine. We enjoyed a wonderful lunch at Café Richelieu in the Louvre, with the most wonderful fresh salad.

Refined atmosphere at nice restaurant at Bastille,  no loud music, no-one shouting, and with a wonderfully friendly waiter who helped us when our phrasebook failed us (often!). Day three and we had dinner at 'Flunch' near Les Halles. A low cost meal of smoked sausages and potatoes, accompanied by wine & cake. Very much a place for the locals, we seemed to be the only foreigners there!

Shopping
Chris bought a lovely red stole of rabbit fur, a necklace and a stylish watch. 

We discovered a wonderful square full of artists - Place des Vosges (Bastille area). There were exquisite miniature paintings, wonderful bouncy steel sculptures (photo of Geoff), and a bag lady listening to string quartet.

Museums
The Louvre - fantastically daunting. We arrived underground via the Metro underground rail system. This took us under the massive glass pyramid, which has become the icon for the museum, despite it is a very recent addition to the grand old buildings. Under the glass pyramid is an innovative open-topped lift for people in wheelchairs, which rises like a cylinder from the floor, rather like a Wurlitzer organ console. All the tourist guides warned of huge queues, delays and needing multiple days to see the Louvre, so we went directly to the 'star exhibit' the Mona Lisa (Da Vinci's 'La Joconde'). Sorry to say, we felt quite underwhelmed by it. I suppose this is a problem when you have already seen so many images of something famous, that the reality can be a disappointment. It is much smaller than we had expected, quite dark, behind thick glass and surrounded by tourists. My token attempts to photograph it were futile… The 29,999 other paintings more than made up for it. That's right, there are 30,000 paintings and ten of thousands of other works of art in the building. Some of these are magnificent ceiling paintings and sculptures, including the 'Venus de Milo'. We were awestruck at the incredible opulence of the Napoleon apartment rooms of the Louvre (right hand photo). Gob smacking… Max would die for one of the chandeliers!

Pompidou Centre - the first feature we saw was a massive world map on the floor, perhaps 50 feet wide, with crowds of people mingling over it, gazing over places visited or dreamt of, enjoying the serendipity of discovering places they'd heard of but not known exactly where they were. I love maps, and it was nice to see so many others really enjoying this giant sized one! Outside the centre is a huge sloping courtyard, which had several wonderfully inventive buskers, e.g. a large picture frame and 'Mona Lisa' with a hole cut in it, for an actors face to appear. She would make all sorts of facial expressions to make the audience laugh and throw money into her collection bowl. Also outside is a wonderful kinetic water sculpture pond 'the Ivor Stravinsky Fountain'.

Chris was particularly impressed to see some paintings by Kadinsky - they are famous for their use of colour, which marked a change in fashion of paintings.

Sadly the Pompidou centre museum shops were closed - due to solidarity for the protest march.

Notre Dame - there was a huge queue to climb the tower, but we were happy to just wander through the church itself. To our great surprise and delight, there was no charge for entry. We reciprocated with a generous donation. Stunning violet colours of the massive round stained glass windows. Intricate carvings in & out many quite gruesome.

Streets
So many of the streets of Paris look unchanged for a hundred years or more. In one street we saw a very old ½ timbered house, five stories high, gently leaning over the street on Rue Francois Miron.

A huge protest ('Manifestation') took place while we were there, first we noticed a police blitz on cars parked hear our hotel - picked up by crane and whisked away. Later in the day, we saw hundreds of police rushing to the area. When we arrived back that evening, we saw a site of ruin… broken bottles in the gutters, leaflets and banners everywhere, broken signs, graffiti sprayed on buildings, banners draped over the statues, fire jugglers, motley protesters milling around - memories of our new year at Waihi with the Turners. There were 40,000 people estimated to have been in the protest marches, against the war and other causes under the banner of "FSE - Forum Social European".

Much more peaceful were the old men playing boules on the lawn of the intersections.

One evening we accidentally happened upon Rue St. Denis - sleazy sex shops, in the same street as a lovely church and lots of crepe vendors…

For a taste of culture, we enjoyed listening to a piano accordion player in subway. Also listened to a jazz band in the street.

We had been well warned about the French drivers, there was total madness at the huge roundabouts, with lanes not marked so it's just a tortuous mess and cacophony of horns and gesticulation… Also, cars were parked at all sorts of odd angles on the footpaths. 

Lots of love,

Geoff & Chris
3 Loxley Square, Olton,
Solihull, B92 7DW
United Kingdom

Phone 0044 121 706 7991