Sarah and I had a great trip to Paris. We went for a week, arriving on June 13 and leaving on the 20th. It was a lovely trip, with many cool sights, amazing food, and a great little “getaway” from normal life.
Why Paris? And why now?
When we got married back in 2014 we talked about Paris as a potential place for a honeymoon. Ultimately we decided against it, as we didn’t want to spend the money at the time, and didn’t have much travel experience. Since then we’ve travelled to many places, but have never made it to Paris. While I was unemployed last year, we stuck around home, but this year I had been feeling like going somewhere. When we saw that WestJet had direct flights to Paris, that sealed the deal. We picked our dates, and booked our flights! It turned out that we would be going pretty close to the date of our 12th anniversary, so we’ll call it an anniversary trip 🙂
Our 6-hour direct flight was easy and uneventful. It was a red-eye, and we dozed a little bit. We had a light breakfast at the airport and made our way to the train station to make our way into town. This is where we had our first travel glitch.
The Paris metro services don’t yet have the ability to directly tap your credit card, you need to actually get a specific card and load tickets on it. This can be done virtually with a phone though, so we loaded our cards and tickets onto our phones and got onto the train with no trouble. However, once we got into the city, we needed to switch trains in order to get to our Airbnb. My phone scanned fine, Sarah’s didn’t. And then when she tried to scan it again, it wouldn’t work because it said it had already been validated. So we’re tired, jetlagged, and stuck on opposite sides of the turnstiles. Wonderful.
It wasn’t too bad though. We flagged down some workers, and they let Sarah go through another way. But this wouldn’t be the last time we had some trouble with scanning the phone. Oddly, mine behaved fine, but Sarah’s had trouble a few times.
We got to our Airbnb without any more glitches. The apartment was tiny, but very nice. We read that some people have had trouble with Airbnbs in Paris because of licensing issues, but we researched ours and it all seemed above board, and we had no problems.
We were in an area called Butte aux Cailles and our Airbnb was very close to a small grocery store, and, importantly, a boulangerie.
A boulangerie is a bakery, but not every bakery is created equal. In France, there is a law around the use of the term “boulangerie” on shop fronts. Basically, this means that if the shop actually markets itself as a “boulangerie”, then you know that the bread is baked from scratch on site, not reheated, resold, or using prepackaged or frozen ingredients. In other words: it’s the good stuff. And the one close to our Airbnb was one of these good ones.
We went out a grabbed some groceries, and picked up our first baguette and croissant. They were both absolutely delicious.
After lunch we went for a walk, ending at a large cemetery called Cimetière du Montparnasse. We walked along a boulevard, which is a beautiful tree-lined walkway beside the road. Many of the boulevards in Paris follow a route where the old city walls used to be.
The reason we went to the cemetery is because one of the people buried there is Alexander Alekhine, a Russian-born chess grandmaster and world chess champion who ultimately left the Soviet Union and emigrated to France. Being a chess nerd, I had heard of Alekhine a number of times, and he has a few different things named after him. Most prominent is “Alekhine’s Defence”, an opening for the black pieces which responds to white’s typical king’s pawn opening, e4, with a strange-looking knight move, Nf6. This opening allows black’s knight to get chased around by pawns for a while, but then white’s overextended pawns become a potential weakness that black can attack. Additionally, there is a formation called “Alekhine’s Gun”, where both rooks and the queen all line up on the same file, creating a very powerful battering ram against the opponent’s position.
Anyway, we went to the cemetery and saw Alekhine’s grave, along with many, many others. It was a huge cemetery, with over 35,000 graves. We also saw the grave of Samuel Beckett, who was the author of the strange and popular play “Waiting for Godot.” We also had a nice conversation in broken French with a security guard at the cemetery. She was very nice, and very forgiving of our attempts to speak in French! She told us that she is used to people from England, who often don’t know any French at all 😅
That was it for day 1. This was our “recovery day”, so the goal was to get out, get some sunlight, get some exercise, and start getting used to the new timezone.
Stay tuned for day 2, where we visited some gardens (including Jardin du Luxembourg), a Roman arena, a church playing the Star Wars theme on the organ, and even got our first views of the famous Notre Dame cathedral!
