Urban Vacation: Paris Notes

Champs-de-Mars as seen from Le Palais de Tokyo

Note: This draft for this article was written a little over a week before it’s posting.

I pull out my netbook to write this review as I begin the second leg of a nineteen-hour, transatlantic journey back home to Calgary. A cup of coffee has put me in the right mood to reflect on and write about my travels as of late. This morning I was in the top floor of an apartment in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, about four blocks from Musée de Louvre. Aweek before that, I was finishing up packing my room after a year of postgraduate studies in Nova Scotia.

It’s been a long week.

Since this was a longer trip than I had for my previous reviews, I’m going to go about this slightly differently. Instead of having the trip broken down by each day, I’ll go by topics and give my impressions of each.

Accommodations

We were located on the sixth storey and had two views: one west in the direction of the Champs-Élysées and the Eiffel Tower, the other southwest towards Île du Cité and Forum des Halles. This apartment was cheaper than staying in a hotel and located in the very heart of the city. It was an extremely narrow, with two bedrooms on the opposite ends of a winding kitchen. Windows opened inwards, allowing one to take in the hot summer air without the nuisance of a screen.

Our unit and an adjacent one shared a hallway, about 3m in length, outside of which was another corridor containing a bathroom. To get up and down the building, a staircase wound around an Otis elevator that could carry three people weighing up to a collective 225kg. The stairwell exited into a dim atrium with a marble floor, which itself ended in a large metal door. The courtyard outside was oriented around a fountain which never seemed to have any water flowing. At the north and south ends of this courtyard were tall metal gates which locked in the evening.

I’m unsure of the age of the building; the residences had a style reminiscient of other buildings built in Paris during the nineteenth century. Some nearby buildings dated back to 1818 CE.

Transit

When we landed at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, feeling a bit jetlagged and in a hurry, we made our way down to the transit terminal. At CDG, we had access to taxis, buses, RER and TGV. We had to consider payment options as well. Since we were going to spend a week in Paris, we opted for the smart card with a single week (ending on Sunday, rather than being a full seven days) of rides loaded. Residents of Île de France received the Passe Navigo while those from outside got Passe Navig Decouverté. This card had an RF chip which is used by simply hovering the card a few inches over a turnstile or in front of a reader on a bus. It was an easy system to pick up on, but sometimes it could be difficult to tell whether or not the card had been read (the gates gave off a “beep” sound which was at varying volumes). A small number of people I saw were tall enough that they just hopped over the gates. There was virtually no fare enforcement that I saw, nor did one see any personnel down in the tunnels (outside of ticket booths).

Signage tended to be fairly simple. Each line was represented by a number within a colour-coded circle and had an arrow pointing to in the general direction of whichever platform you needed, accompanied by text indicating which direction the line was running. Any confusion to be had with this system came from the odd misplacement or overuse of signage. I’ve had at least one case where the signage seemed to indicate that one had to go down a stairwell to the left of the sign when, in fact, it meant to head down a corridor behind said stairwell.

The rolling stock tended to be a little on the older side — a mashup of steel-wheel trains from the sixties and seventies,  rubber-tire trains from the eighties and nineties, and a number of refurbishments. One of my favourite features were the fold-down seats next to the doors, which can be very useful if you are dragging luggage around (or a stroller, I guess).

There were fourteen Métro lines and five RER lines that zig-zagged around the metropolitan area. Métro trains had about a five minute headway and were six cars long. Each station was equipped with a set of overhead displays detailing the time before the next arrival.

Attractions

Paris, of course, is a city brimming with tourist traps, many of which I walked into willingly. Between le Tour Eiffel, Arc du Triomphe, Montparnasse, Champs-Élysées, Montmartre, Palais Royale/Musée de Louvre, Notre Dame, La Défense, Versailles… that’s just a very small sample of what Paris had to offer and that doesn’t even start with what you can get out of the city, especially if you are a shutterbug like me. In fact, there was so much history strewn about that I began thinking that it would be boring and repetitive to bother capturing it, so I limited many of my photographic subjects to themes (such as the narrowness of the streets or buildings near water).

The most memorable of our hikes were probably up the hills of Montmartre as well as the walk from the Bastille to the Sorbonne. La Défense is also highly recommended for fellow skyscraper geeks or if you prefer a jaunt through something a little more modern. I generally stay away from tours unless prodded into it. And I did manage to avoid it on this trip, if perhaps because I put up with the guided tours in NYC during the previous year. For me, it’s far better to walk and breathe in the city and discover everything through my camera.

Cuisine

I’ve been considering how scathing a review I ought to give dining in Paris. I think, being generous, that on the whole it was an average experience. I came away with the feeling that the restaurant scene in the city isn’t very diverse, though it might be a different story for the suburbs. The “meat and potatoes” of Paris’ cuisine were basically cafés and brasseries, along with sandwich shops and crêperies. These were broken up mostly by the odd Chinese, Thai, Japanese, or Italian restaurant. What I found lacking were Vietnamese, Indian, Lebanese and Greek establishments, among others.

Eating out in Paris is also relatively expensive. A 250mL soft drink goes for about 4.10€, while a beer of equivalent size is about 4.20€, and water is even more expensive at 4.30€. About the only thing which is cheap is wine. A plate of pasta (say spaghetti bolognese), bread included but without salad, reaches for somewhere between 13€ and 16€. Now, mind you, all these prices include taxes and gratuity, which makes it seem not all so bad (except for the soft drinks — mind-numbingly expensive in many places).

The worst meals we had were at La Campanella – a small place on the corner of Rue Saint-Dominique —  L’Aristide —  just down the hill from Basilique Sacre-Coeur — and Indiana Cafe — an American-style diner near Forum des Halles. The common thread between these places was poor service, with extremely long waits before you could order or pay your bill (we had at least a forty minute wait to pay the bill in L’Aristide, when it was mostly empty). In addition, my father made the mistake of ordering a burger in Paris, which turned up on his plate looking vaguely like beef tartare in a bun.

By far the best dining experience in Paris was at Le Relais de l’Entrecôte, which was a suggestion from a friend. The one we went to was in the Montparnasse district, a short walk from Gare Vavin. This line of restaurants is a family-owned chain that serves only one menu item – steak and frites – as well as a wine and dessert menu. The steak comes thin-cut with an in-house sauce. The service here was absolutely fantastic and the drinks, bread, andmeals were served very quickly. A quirk of l’Entrecôte is the practice of holding back the second half of your meal, so that it will be warm when you finish the first half (and we didn’t even have to ask for the second half, the staff was attentive enough to bring it to us on time). The portions were large enough that I, as a North American,was impressed. And the total bill for the meal only came to about 90€ for three people, so the value was just amazing.

Generally speaking, we had good times at most of the cafes and brasseries, although most of what they serve is just wine, cheese, and deserts. However, the only outing to a brasserie I can specifically recall — mostly because of it being near the end of the trip — was Le Café des Initiés, right around the corner from our apartment. It wasn’t busy around our area later on at night (the 1st arrondisement is the least populated district in Paris) so we could relax outside of the crowds.

Overall

Paris was a great experience and my first time overseas. A week was just enough time to get accustomed to the city and see much of the more touristy things in the first four days before settling into a groove and just taking in the city a little more casually for the last two (the “last” day was for travelling back to Canada, of course).

This trip was also a great chance to practice my stunted French (something  I allowed to lapse after primary school), which I am now considering putting more effort into. It would at least make me slightly more competitive in the job market to be bilingual (okay, maybe not so much out in the Prairies…).

My desire to travel is sated for a little while, though, and I perhaps I will make my next trip to a different hemisphere than the two I have now been in.

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