I think this is something I’d like to do for these Weekends Away, an itinerary detailing what I did (although the next two in my calendar aren’t really going to lend themselves to it). The thing is, I’m not sure my actual itinerary is one that other people are going to want to recreate, especially if it’s their first time in Paris – or if it’s not. So this is going to be a post with two itineraries: one a 48-hour introduction to Paris, and the other what I actually did.
A 48-hour introduction to Paris
Friday
In an ideal world, you’d be arriving late afternoon on Friday. If you’re flying, you’re probably going to take the RER, the réseau express régionale, the commuter train, into Paris. I’d get a 2-day Paris Visite pass on a Navigo Easy card from the machine next to the platform although those of you further into the 21st century than me would probably get it on their phone. This allows you two days of use on buses, metro and RER throughout the Île de France region, including the airport – there’s a supplement for going out as far as Orly or Charles de Gaulle on other passes.
As with most places, you can spend as much or as little as you like on accommodation. I’ve stayed in so-called hotels that my mum still holds up as examples of “the kind of places you stay in” (where she wouldn’t even approach the front door) or you can spring for balconies, room service and iconic Eiffel Tower views. Being within easy reach of Gare du Nord is logistically good but not too easy – it’s perhaps not the part of Paris that sells the City of Love to visitors, unless perhaps that particular kind of love comes with a price tag and some unforeseen consequences. These days, I like a nice boring mid-range chain hotel with a 24-hour front desk and a room I can be reasonably confident won’t have rats or illegal smells. Whichever Ibis Budget is cheapest on those dates, usually. The one at Jaurès was my choice this time: three or four stops north-east of Gare du Nord is a good compromise between easy connections and not being too close.
Go and drop off your luggage and then head for the Latin Quarter for dinner, drinks and soaking up the atmosphere of Paris. That’s where Mr Moore used to leave us to fend for ourselves for a couple of hours on the 6th form French trip, before we all trooped back to the coach for an illuminated tour of the city. Of course, being unsupervised teenagers, the occasional person might drink far too much and redecorate the coach on the way back to the hotel… But you’re an adult, you’re not an unsupervised teenager and you’re also not using me to plan your language & culture trip, so you’ll drink sensibly.
Saturday
Skip breakfast at the hotel and find your nearest bakery for a pastry of some kind and either coffee or hot chocolate. Even the most basic cheap bakery will have better croissants, pains au chocolate or raisins or whatever else you fancy than you can get at home. Paris is also riddled with parks and unexpected green corners so find somewhere to sit and enjoy your breakfast rather than juggling pastry and cup as you walk the busy streets.
We’re going to start the day by getting your bearings and seeing most of the big sights, so a boat trip along the Seine. I like the Batobus which is a hop-on hop-off service which runs a continuous loop from Jardin des Plantes in the east to the Eiffel Tower in the west, via the big stars like Invalides & Place de la Concorde, Musee d’Orsay, the Louvre, Notre Dame and Hotel de Ville. Hop on wherever is nearest to wherever you’re staying. They’re very much sightseeing boats – you won’t find a bar on commentary on them but they do at least have vending machines and no one minds if you bring your own snacks on board. It takes about two hours to do a full loop so sit back and enjoy the views.
For the afternoon, we’re going to do a little tour of a few of the sights that are a little bit away from the river. Start at the Arc de Triomphe, a memorial to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier underneath it; for €16 you can explore the museum hiding inside it and take in the view from the top of it. It’s not the highest or most spectacular one in Paris but it’s probably the one you can see the most road starbursting out from.
Then take a stroll along the Champs-Élysées, the most famous street in Paris and one that you could quite easily skip. It’s lined with expensive designer shops, but it’s also lined with gawking tourists who aren’t going to be able to afford anything along here. If you do want to skip it, you can take the metro (line 1) directly underneath from the Arc de Triomphe to Place de la Concorde, because that’s where I’m taking you.
Place de la Concorde is the largest square in Paris and the bloodiest, because this is where executions happened during the French Revolution, when it was known as Place de la Revolution. This is where Marie Antoinette herself met her end. It was renamed in 1795 (and then unrenamed and re-renamed) Place de la Concorde in a gesture of reconciliation. Now it’s just a large cobbled square with the classical-style La Madeleine church at one end and a bridge over the river leading to the National Assembly at the other. It’s worth spending a few minutes just trying to imagine the events of the early 1790s here. The spike in the middle in the Luxor Obelisk, a 3000-year-old actual ancient Egyptian obelisk once at the gates of the Temple of Luxor, presented to France in the early 1830s, not as a gesture of friendship but in thanks for France’s help in deciphering hieroglyphics.
Next to the Place de la Concorde is the Tuileries Gardens which you should stroll like a lady (or gentleman, or person) of leisure. Get a drink, sit under the trees, sail a boat around the fountain, just relax for a little while.
On the other side is the Louvre. If you’ve only got 48 hours, I wouldn’t bother popping into the Louvre – save that for when you’ve got a bit more time unless you’re desperate to see the Mona Lisa. If you see any ladders propped against upstairs windows, probably best to just walk on past. But stop to appreciate the architecture and the atmosphere of the courtyard, both the original Palace du Louvre, which was built and renovated in so many chunks that it’s impossible to say even which century it dates back to (bits of it go back to the 12th century) and the 1980s glass Pyramid. Underneath, believe it or not, there’s a shopping centre where you can discover that the Pyramid actually the upper half of a kind of diamond, with an inverted pyramid underneath.
Behind the Louvre you’ll find the first of three bridges that cross over to Notre-Dame. If you’ve got time and the inclination, you can queue for anywhere from ten minutes up to potentially four hours to go inside and explore but if you’re into Gothic architecture, I tend to gravitate towards Sainte-Chapelle, just across the other side of the island. It’s actually two chapels, both elaborately painted. The lower chapel has a low ceiling and colourful pillars and houses the gift shop and then you go up some spiral stairs into the upper chapel, which is high and soaring and illuminated by hundreds of tall blue and red stained glass windows supported by more elaborately-painted pillars. I’m glad I crossed Notre-Dame off my to-do list but Sainte-Chapelle is far more my kind of Gothic.
I’ll leave you for the rest of the afternoon, if there’s any afternoon left by now.
On Saturday evening, it’s finally time to get up close and personal with the Eiffel Tower. I know, it’s almost too cliché to put on the list but it’s iconic for a reason. I like to sit at the Trocadero viewpoint and look at it for a bit, especially if I can time it for the sparkling lights, which happens for five minutes or so every hour on the hour after dark. Fun fact: for copyright reasons, it’s technically illegal to take photos or videos of this, but no one cares. Then it’s time to go up the Eiffel Tower!
I admit, I tend to go to Paris in the winter months but I found it was so much quieter in the evening than the afternoon, and Paris absolutely comes to life after dark when the lights are on. You can climb the steps if you want but if you have the slightest doubt in your knees, then take the lift. There are tourist lifts in three of the four legs and you can choose to go just to the second floor or all the way to the top. The website recommends you go straight to your ticket’s highest level and then work your way down to the floor/s below you. There are shops and cafes/restaurants on the top and the second while the first is mainly a series of museums with a view straight down to the square below that, even at just 57m, I find somewhat dizzying. Maybe the view from the top, 276m, is just too high to see down; you see across Paris instead. I think the Eiffel Tower is maybe not something you’re going to want to do on every visit to Paris but the first time, especially if it’s likely to be the only time, it’s something you can’t miss.
Sunday
You’ve already seen most of the sights so on Sunday, let’s go up to Montmartre, Paris’s Bohemian (and red light) district. Take the metro to Anvers and go up to Sacré-Cœur. You can either walk up the hill or take the funicular (which is what I would do, mostly because a funicular is just fun). If you’re not into churches, you don’t have to go inside Sacré-Cœur (or any of the other churches up here on this hill; if you’re into Gothic churches, you’ll be spoiled for choice) but it’s another viewpoint on Paris and from a very different angle.
When you’ve seen enough of Sacré-Cœur and the view, go back down to the street below and either walk or take the metro two more stops to Blanche and see the Moulin Rouge. In my actual itinerary below, I go to the show but that’s very much a late night thing and it won’t be open right now. Still, you can have a look at the iconic red windmill and use it as a jumping-off place to explore the narrow streets of this district.
Now we’re running out of time before you have to be back at the airport so if you take the bus 68 from Blanche to Chaussée d’Antin, Galeries Lafayette on Bd Haussman is as much an architectural gem as it is a shopping centre – and has yet another rooftop view. Bd Haussman is the heart of the Napoleonic-era renovation of Paris at the hands of Georges-Eugène Haussmann to demolish overcrowded disease-ridden areas of the city and rebuild them with wide, light, boulevards intended to promote airflow as much as to beautify Paris. These days, the Haussman style is pretty much what you picture when you think of Paris streets.
And now you really are running out of time. If you’re heading to CDG, take the metro to Châtelet – Les Halles to get the RER B, or Gare Saint-Lazare is just off Bd Haussman if you’re taking the metro 14 to Orly. And that’s your taster, a 48-hour introduction to Paris!
My actual itinerary
Friday
Because I was determined to fly from a local airport rather than go all the way to one of the big London ones, I was a bit limited on flights in so mine arrived (early!) just after 9.30pm on Friday night at Charles de Gaulle. It’s quite a hike from terminal 2B arrivals to the RER, where I bought a Navigo Easy card with a single journey ticket on it, took the RER B to Gare du Nord and then the metro line 5 to Jaurès, arriving at the aforementioned Ibis Budget at 11pm almost on the dot, which isn’t bad considering how far the plane had to taxi, how far the station is, two journeys and a four-minute walk. So I did nothing else Friday night! I was in bed within ten minutes of arriving at the hotel.
Saturday
Because I couldn’t reserve tickets in advance, which I’ve talked about extensively both on the Notre-Dame post and on Instagram, I set my alarm for 7am and headed straight for Notre-Dame to be in the queue ready for when it opened. It took about 45 minutes to actually get in (arriving half an hour before it opens will automatically add half an hour to your wait time but it’ll also get you a lot closer to the front of the queue) and I then spent an hour, maybe an hour and a half enjoying Notre-Dame.
Next I walked along the river and then into the Latin Quarter for breakfast – a croissant and juice rather than coffee or hot chocolate, and mine came from a mini supermarket rather than a bakery. I sat in the gardens of Cluny Museum, the National Museum of the Middle Ages and also the ruins of a Roman bathhouse. It’s just shut off enough from the streets to feel quiet and peaceful.
When I’d finished eating, I got on the metro at Cluny La Sorbonne right outside and got off at Javel – André Citroën to walk down to Parc André Citroën to investigate the balloon. That’s got a whole post of its own but in short, it’s a secret Paris viewpoint where you can appreciate views across the city without – probably – being overcrowded. The gondola can take 30ish people; on a sunny, warm October Saturday morning, there were 9 of us.
Then I walked back to Javel along the Seine and got on the RER C one stop to Champ de Mars Tour Eiffel. I was actually here to investigate the Pont de Bir-Hakeim which is apparently “the bridge from Inception” (but it’s been so long since I watched Inception that I don’t remember a bridge at all). I was under the impression it was the weird brick structure where half the supports seem to be upside down but it’s not. However, it is the location from Mission Impossible: Fallout where Ethan doesn’t shoot the French policewoman – it’s right underneath Passy metro station at the other end and in real life, a couple of hundred people would have either descended from the metro or walked off the end of the bridge straight into that stand-off.
I hadn’t realised two things about Pont de Bir-Hakeim. The first is how popular it is for photoshoots. I’d taken the metro across from Bir-Hakeim to Passy but I walked back across and as I went, there were no fewer than three people having a bridal photoshoot. I don’t for one moment imagine even one of them had got married that morning. I’m not at all convinced all of them were married at all. The second is that you get a really good view of the Eiffel Tower from here!
I got back on the RER and went on to Invalides, which is at the south end of the Pont Alexandre III. I skipped the Hôtel des Invalides which the station is named after; home to several military museums and the massive tomb of Napoleon and instead went to the Petit Palais, as has become my habit. That’s partly because it’s free to enter and has free and pretty clean toilets downstairs and partly because it’s just a pleasant place to sit and rest your feet. It’s an art museum – turn left and you’ll find a room full of sculptures, turn left and… well, that massive room is echoingly empty. Out the back, they’re renovating the entire back half of the Palais, so it’s all covered in white plastic but the cafe is still open, if you can find it, and you can sit outside in the garden in the shade. I did also go over to the Grand Palais but despite the website’s assurances that it was open, it definitely wasn’t, which is a pity because I’d have liked to explore it, if only for its massive wrought iron roof.
From there we take a bit of a weird turn. I got on the metro at Champs-Élysées–Clemenceau and went to the Gare Saint-Lazare because it seemed to be the easiest place to find a supermarket. It’s probably two or three o’clock in the afternoon by now and all I’ve eaten all day is a croissant and half a bar of Crunch chocolate. I have ARFID so just going into a cafe or bakery isn’t necessarily an easy option for me. But Gare Saint-Lazare has a rather elegant, for a station, shopping centre with a medium-sized Monop’ at one end and a reasonable-sized Carrefour at the other. I can’t remember for the life of me which one I went in. The one on the bottom floor, whichever that is. Then I sat on a bench upstairs and ate bread and cheese and juice and watched the same adverts play over and over again – one on the incredible existence of sunny destinations in winter and one about free range chickens. I was tired by now – I’d arrived late last night and got up pretty early so I took the metro to Place de la Concorde, decided I didn’t have the energy for it and went back to my hotel.
But that wasn’t it for Saturday! After a couple of hours of just sitting, reading and snoozing, I put on my red sequinned dress and headed for the Moulin Rouge! That’s a direct metro journey from the station five minutes down the road to literally outside the Moulin Rouge’s front door. That’s also got its own post but in short, I was there for the 9pm show, it’s a spectacle of spectacles at which it’s impossible to feel overdressed, even if you’re in red sequins and I was home and in bed shortly after 11pm. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s something I’d recommend as a must-do in Paris – it’s expensive, it sells out weeks if not months in advance (I booked my ticket for early October back in the middle of June) and it features a lot more toplessness than I’d expected. It’s hugely fun and I absolutely don’t regret it.
Sunday
On Sunday I packed up my stuff and headed straight for the Tour Montparnasse, which is another good Paris viewpoint. As for any city with a tall thing, there’s the usual joke about “the best views are from the top of it because it’s the only place you can’t see it!!!” but in this case, it’s correct that it’s spectacularly ugly and it does have great views. I think they’re probably best at sunset but I only got one sunset and I spent it heading for the Moulin Rouge. There’s an indoor viewing area with VR headsets taking you through the history of Paris or if you climb up two flights of stairs, you reach the open air viewing platform. On a bright sunny day like today, both options were very hot and blindingly bright. It also reveals a level of pollution you just don’t see anywhere else – from ground level, it was a bright sunny day, as I’ve said, with clear blue sky. From the tower, half the city is almost hidden by haze and a lighter haze sits on the rest of it.
I have no idea how long I spent at the Tour Montparnasse but when I descended, I had a bit of a dither. I had only a couple of hours before I needed to be on the RER to get back to the airport. Where to spend those last few hours? How about the Jardin du Luxembourg? Something chilled. It turned out the Jardin du Luxembourg was 15 minutes away by bus or 16 minutes away by foot, so I decided to walk. It turns out I’ve been picturing the same thing when I think of the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Tuileries Gardens and this is a completely different park It’s the grounds of the Palais du Luxembourg, it’s a whole kilometre south of the river and nowhere near the Louvre. It’s a fun place to spend some time.
I sat for a while not far from the gate and watched people playing tennis. Then I noticed a lot of small children being slowly walked through the park on small horses. Then, as you get closer to the fountain, you discover that entire central landscaped garden is packed with deckchairs and metal chairs and half of Paris is just sitting there enjoying the sun. The other half, the under-10s, are sailing small boats around the fountain, as they’ve apparently been doing ever since the fountain existed. These days the boats have little motors and “sailing them” means prodding them with a stick to send them off again when they reach the edges. I bought a drink from a kiosk and sat in the shade of the perfectly landscaped trees to the east of that, finished off whatever food I’d collected over the last day or so and then stepped out of the park and onto the RER that, it turned out, would deliver me directly to the airport.
So that was my actual weekend. It was great but I think you may understand why it’s not necessarily what I’d recommend to someone else.
I Am A Polar Bear 