Au revoir Paris

Aaahh… Paris. I know I haven’t visited very many cities in the world but I’m going to go out on limb and say Paris would have to be one of my favourite places in the world. It’s just magic and I was sad to leave it. There were still so many places I’m sure we could’ve visited.

I love being in cities that seem to encourage you to discover it by walking. Even when it was raining, Paris always seemed to whisper that you should be outside walking her grand boulevards, ambling through her pretty parks. It was such a pleasure to be there and I know it’s somewhere I will visit again.

And all this rubbish about the French being rude is just that – rubbish. The people we talked to were always polite and friendly. I think that particular stereotype has gotten around because the French still have manners and it is considered rude to not greet someone when you enter a premises, in French of course. I got a handle on that really quickly but I kept saying ‘thank you’ instead of ‘merci’. At least I was trying, even if it was in the wrong language. (And I must say it’s normal for me to say thank you when the situation warrants it. It’s not like I’m rude all the time or anything!)

The next time I visit France, it’s going to be after I’ve learnt some basic French. It was such a pain not being able to read menus. I also didn’t like having to rely on people being able to speak English. Made me feel like an uncultured lout! The majority of menus do have English on them but it would’ve been nice to be able to order in French. The restaurant we went to our on final night only had a French menu so the poor waiter had to tell us everything that was on it and then we had to try to remember what he’d said.

The croissants in France are so much better than the ones we get in Melbourne. There was a boulangerie very close to the hotel so we’d stop in the morning before heading off to wherever we were going. It has to be said that the macarons we get in Melbourne are just as good as the ones in Paris – not that they weren’t yummy of course! And now I need to find a crêperie in Melbourne because I’ve developed a love for nutella and banana crepes.

Now that I have visited both the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, I can say that I prefer the Louvre. I loved the grandeur of it all. And yes, we did go look at the Mona Lisa and the Venus De Milo but I didn’t feel compelled to get a photo of me standing in front of either of them. I don’t understand why people do that. I don’t need a photo to remind me, I know I’ve been there. We skipped entire sections as there was simply too much to see but we did spend quite a while in Napoleon III’s apartments. What really astonished me was that they had the throne of Neopleon Bonaparte. I would’ve thought that something like that would’ve been destroyed when they deposed him. There were so many beautiful things to look at and the Louvre definitely needs more than one visit to do it justice.

Notre Dame Cathedral. We didn’t go in because the line was huuuuuuge!!

Okay, these kinda creeped me out when I realised they didn’t have a head underneath the helmet.

Yes, really. It wasn’t that far away from our hotel but I know you’ll all be terribly shocked when I say we didn’t go there.

Avenue des Champs-Élysées in the rain.

The forecourt of the Louvre.

And this is the queue to get into the Louvre. We already had tickets so we got to go in a different entrance.

Au revoir Paris.