La Ville Lumiere - Paris, France

…The pavement is bustling with people, bicycles, scooters and cafe tables. Young couples are actually standing in the street, or sitting on the saddles of their scooters tongue kissing, just like in the movies…

Marc picks us up at St Malo, and luckily for us he is going to Paris, so it looks like we will get there easier than we thought. He drops us off on the roundabout of the Arch De Triumph. I fall in love.

We sit eating a melon Marc gave us and staring in awe at the massive monument in front of us. The gigantic trois couleur undulates between the columns, and I am deeply moved.

As we sit there a scruffy looking guy sidles up and tries to do the ring scam on us. We don’t know its the ring scam until he starts asking us for money, but we quickly get the picture, and the Paris spell is broken abruptly. In ten minutes the city of lights has stolen my heart, and then broken it. C’est la vie.

We walk the Champs Elysees, and we’re dismayed to see beggars everywhere. Homeless people, handicapped people, and scammers impersonating handicapped people (one guy has his leg tucked up inside his pants to try and pass himself off as an amputee).

As we walk west, the mood of the city becomes warmer. The sun sets, and despite our fatigue we are charmed by the charismatic street life. The pavement is bustling with people, bicycles, scooters and cafe tables. Young couples are actually standing in the street, or sitting on the saddles of their scooters tongue kissing, just like in the movies.

(Public water fountains are available throughout the city ;-) )

It takes us nearly 2 hours to walk to our BeWelcome host, Vincent’s, house. We arrive hot, tired and very grateful to sit down.
Vincent is an animated, effusively friendly young engineer who is passionate about everything: Paris, Kung Foo, tea, alcohol, cinema, languages, art and computer games. He invites us in and we collapse gratefully onto his red plush couch.

Vincent seriously coaches us on must-do Paris activities and attractions. The list includes; Notre-Dame, Le Louvre, Hotel de Ville (The Town Hall), Le Pompidou, and The Eiffel Tower.

Saturday morning we are up early, and head into town armed with cameras, water, and blister pads.

The weather is hot and sunny. We wander through Paris gaping at the scale of the architecture. Notre Dame, magnificent, dark, grimly medieval. Le Hotel de Ville, hectically embellished, gratuitously grand, oozing imperial decadence. The Eiffel tower, overwhelming in its grandiosity, a monument to technological ambition.

(This is a box for keeping dead saints bones in.)

(Notre Dame.)

(That tower… even the line-up to climb a million flights of stairs was an hour long.)

On sunday The Louvre makes sense of everything. Walking around the massive building, we survey the whole history of human creativity and ingenuity. The collection of the Louvre draws together the threads of geography, history, culture and belief. As I go from one room to another I see the evolution of Meditteranian civilisation unfold before my eyes. Climb a flight of stairs and you travel in time from classical Greece to Napoleonic France. Turn a corner and walk down a hallway and the religious idols of Mesopotamia mutate into the regal flourishes of neo classical sculpture.

The Louvre is an exciting place, and after 8 hours we are absolutely exhausted, footsore and brain-dead, and we have only seen 25% of the gallery.

Back at Vincent’s apartment he comforts us with a Taiwanese tea ceremony, and we dine together on baguette, blue cheese, and rabbit pate.