After leaving Venice in an absolute downpour, we took a flight from Venice to Paris for just over $100 each. It landed in Paris at 10:30pm, and having my index cards with hotel addresses on them was incrediblyuseful in this case, as it was late and dark and neither one of us speaks any French. We stayed at Hotel Home Moderne for $114 each.
We only had one full day in Paris, and like we did in Rome, we decided the best way to approach it would be to take advantage of the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus tour. If you haven’t read our post about Rome, I like to ride the route all the way through once to listen to the audio tour, and then decide which places I want to get off and explore at, and take the busses from site to site as I do that. The Paris tour goes past the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Musee d’Orsay, and Champs Elysees, among others.
We opted to spend $20 each to be able to go as high on the Eiffel Tower as we could, to get our bird’s eye view of Paris. While we didn’t actually go into the Louvre (neither one of us are huge art museum fans, and not even a long-distance view of the Mona Lisa could convince us), we did play the stereotypical tourists and get our staged pictures of us holding the point of the pyramid in the courtyard of the museum.
Shortly before sunset, we made our way back to the Tower to watch the sunset and to wait to see the Tower lit up. A lot of people plan better than we did and are less cheap than we are and bought wine and snacks to take with them. We, however, didn’t think like that, but decided when we got there that we still wanted something to drink. During evenings at the Tower there are lots of locals peddling little souvenir things, knowing that it’ll be swimming with tourists. Ultimately we did end up with a bottle of champagne, although it ended up being bought off a peddler who pulled it out of a storm drain. So we ended up drinking storm-drain champagne as we watched the sun set behind the Eiffel Tower.
Paris was interesting to us. I think we’re both glad that we went when we had the chance to, but compared to some of the other places we visited during this trip, it seemed much less friendly and quite a bit dirtier, which surprised us. It was also the most difficult as far as a language barrier goes. In most of the other places, regardless of the national language, the majority of people at least knew and were willing to speak some English, and most signs included an English translation, and we found that to not be the case in Paris. One of my favorite stories to tell is that after having spent the previous week in Spain, where I can speak and understand the language, and in Italy, where I can understand the gist of most things, and speaking to each other in English, I got on a bus at one point and attempted to ask a question that somehow came out as a combination of Spanish, Italian, French, and English all in one sentence (to which I got a reallystrange look from the bus driver).
Total cost for Paris (including transportation there, but not food/taxis/souvenirs/etc): ~$275
