The city of love and romance! That’s where I went at Easter. It seems such a long time ago though as so much has happened since. Firstly I have a child back home for summer! I have them both back home for the weekend, but one is here until September and I love it when they come back. The novelty did wear off a little bit when he was left home alone for a week while I went to Spain. Let’s just say it looked like he’d had rather a good time in my absence. 😆 But the damage was minor and I can let these things go, in the grand scheme of things, as they are not that important…………..well except the lawn damage. I have a little chunk of plaster missing from a wall due to a small accident he had with the weights during a workout …………………… but during his boys back garden BBQ gathering, a patch on my lawn has been used as a toilet! Because you know how difficult it is to walk from a garden to a toilet (when you have 4 to choose from) when you are 20 years of age. So now my pride and joy……….my lovely green and striped lawn is complete with a couple of circles of dead yellow grass. 😂 But it will grow back and I’m not going to sweat the small stuff, I don’t do that anymore!
Other than that I’m just trying to avoid all things general election. I’m not affiliated to any political party but will cast my vote as I think it’s important that you do. I read the news so I will just choose who I think will be the best person going forward and I’ll probably not decide until a minute before I vote. I haven’t got the time in my life to listen to a group of people having a live argument and slanging match on TV for one hour and taking up valuable airtime night after night until 4th July. Honestly, it’s like standing out in the Key Stage One playground at work for an hour. And you just never know who to believe. Anyway, off my soapbox and onto my little trip to Paris.
It was a trip with a bit of a difference……………I’d gone to run the Paris marathon so I don’t know if that skewed my perception of it a little, but here I am, still in one piece, to tell you about Paris. I’ll do a separate post on the Marathon as I’m still processing my thoughts on that, and what I felt about Paris and what I felt about the marathon are at bit of a juxtaposition.
I arrived on the Wednesday after Easter Sunday, mid-afternoon and had three full days to spend in Paris before the Marathon and my return on Sunday.
However, going as a tourist and going as a marathon runner do not sit well together, as I now realise. I did see a lot of the city but tried to limit my walking miles and use the metro as the objectives of those three full days were to acclimatise, sleep a lot, feed well and mentally prepare myself.
Being in a city as big and vibrant as Paris made that quite difficult, certainly the sleeping, resting and mental preparation. Paris is not the place to do that!
I might be in the minority of people when I say I probably would not return to the city. It was ok, but for me there are much nicer cities. I’m not a fan of the huge cities, I prefer smaller ones. I found it overpriced, overated and far too chaotic and busy for my liking…………but like I say, that might be because I was trying to get myself into a place of calm and focus and I found that hard here. It’s just my opinion, and millions of people love it, so don’t let me put you off, I just don’t think I was in the right frame of mind to enjoy it properly. It’s still definitely worth a visit.
There were, however, elements that I loved………….I didn’t dislike it all so here goes………..my whistle stop tour and opinion of Paris.
First of all, getting from the airport to the city…………cheapest and most efficient way I found was the RER B rail line which runs right from the airport to the city centre and links with the metro. It’s a 30 to 40 minute journey and will set you back 11 euros. More expensive than the transfers in other cities like Madrid for instance but lots cheaper and quicker than a taxi which would no doubt get stuck in the traffic and will cost you at least 4 to 5 times the price. The inner city metro in Paris is very similar to that in London, it’s a cost effective way of getting around the central city, but like London it’s very overcrowded, extremely old and is filthy dirty………….I hated it but it served it’s purpose.
In terms of accommodation I absolutely loved where I stayed. I’m always looking for that bit of peace and quiet in the middle of the throng of the city and I found it……..my little oasis. I did not want to be in the middle of the hustle and bustle and noise. In the middle of the River Seine there are two natural islands. One of them, the Ile de la Cite is quite large and contains the Notre Dame Cathedral so that one is quite busy. However, next to it, over a bridge, is the much smaller and very cosmopolitan Ile Saint-Louis.
It is so quaint, quiet and pretty. Full of gorgeous old architecture, nice cafes, restaurants, independent shops, a pretty park, small boutique hotels and best of all………with hardly any cars or traffic. It is like a little haven in the middle of the city.
I loved it on the island and I particularly liked the hotel I stayed in which was Hotel Saint-Louis L’Isle. It was a nice small hotel but the rooms were so lovely, spacious, spotlessly clean and the bed was so comfy. There were the usual tea and coffee facilities in the room and lots of lovely toiletries. It had a lovely 24 hour reception staffed by really helpful and friendly staff. The only minor improvement would have been the addition of a bathrobe and slippers as I do like to lounge around in a fluffy bathrobe and slippers on a night 😂 (doesn’t everyone, or is it just me!?), particularly as I was trying to get into my calm and relaxed pre-race state. But it’s a minor thing and I’d definitely recommend the hotel.
The hotel offers breakfast but not dinner. It’s quite cost effective to have breakfast and they serve a really good continental breakfast in a basement breakfast room. Each table has a huge dish of pastries and the self service buffet offers eggs, meats, cheeses, cereals, yoghurts, cakes, fruit juices and a selection of tea and coffee. It was a really good arrangement and good value for money as Paris is not like Spain and Italy where you can nip in a café and get your breakfast for less than 5 euros. I don’t think I bought one cup of coffee alone that cost less than 5 euros in Paris.
The island is full of lovely restaurants, and fortunately there are all sorts of different nationalities of food available. I’ll tell you more about restaurants when I tell you about my marathon as unusually I was not that adventurous and stuck to Italian as decent portion sizes and carbs were my priorities. I love French food and I love seafood, but neither would have fulfilled the objective and would have been a bit of a risky strategy. So unusually, this post is not going to be my usual foodie post telling you all about the local food.
It was also slightly different to my usual trips in that I spent 4 and a half days in total in Paris and not a drop of alcohol passed my lips! 😂 I absolutely love a drink or two when on holiday and 4 days of questionable quality coffee and carbonated water took it’s toll, I was quite tetchy by day 4!
Wednesday night consisted of a very good pizza in a restaurant on the island followed by an early night in my very comfy bed.
Thursday I had planned to do some sight seeing as I was still 3 days away from the race. The one place I definitely wanted to go was the Louvre art gallery so I booked a ticket and walked there as it was just off the island and a little to the left. Now this was the day that it rained so hard all morning, so a good day to visit an art gallery, but I got soaked on the way there. What did I think to the Louvre? A bit of a mixed bag really.
Building wise it’s impressive, the iconic glass pyramid is striking both from the outside and the inside. You definitely need an advance ticket or you would spend most of your day in a queue, the line is enormous. You also need an audio guide, although the quality of the audio tours when compared to that of the Prado in Madrid are poor. The directions around the museum aren’t that easy to follow, the console is not as user friendly and the GPS jumps around.
In terms of artwork there’s some good stuff, but again, nothing that gave me goosebumps and there are far better pieces in the galleries of Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Florence and London. The Mona Lisa is disappointing, well it was to me. It was much smaller than I expected and there is nothing particularly unique in that painting that you cannot find in many more.
However, there are some lovely frescoed ceilings and some gorgeous sculpture in there. I’d always choose sculpture over a painting and I can walk around and look at a sculpture for ages. Some of them I find just breath-taking…………I still can’t comprehend the skill it takes to take a solid piece of white marble and end up with such a perfect, reconstruction of the human form, including the muscular profile, veins and proportion. But what astounds me even more is the sculptors ability to portray emotion in the face. Take for instance probably my favourite piece in there, ‘Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss’ by Canova. It has to be one of his best works and depicts the mythological duo engaged in a loving gaze. How do you sculpt a loving gaze!?!? I’ve no idea but Canova a has done it perfectly, somehow making a solid form fluid and human.
The light filled Grande Galerie is also quite impressive and leads to another one of my favourites ‘The Sleeping Hermaphrodite’ by Bernini. He is my favourite sculptor and the genius behind ‘The Rape of Proserpina’ in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, which if you like Italian sculpture is an absolute must see.
So there are a few good exhibits in the Louvre and it’s definitely worth going, but I do think it is overrated, is not as good as the galleries in other major cities, and in terms of it’s organisation, it was far too busy and chaotic for my liking.
The afternoon was spent doing marathon things. I had to travel to the outskirts of the city to collect my race bib, register and have a look around the Run Experience Exhibition. It was open Thursday through to Saturday, but attracting around 60,000 runners I wanted to get it out of the way on Thursday when it wasn’t too busy as mentally, I was starting to panic about the whole thing, and just wanted to collect it and then try to forget about it for a few days.
The evening was spent in a lovely little Italian for some pasta, and then a wander over the bridges of the island to look at the Seine all lit up at night.
Friday morning I got up and I just could not face sightseeing. To be quite honest I was in a bit of a state. I cried into my croissants, and filled with self doubt, my marathon demons were getting the better of me. “Snap out of it”, I told myself! I’m normally quite upbeat………I just needed peace, quiet and calm to get my balance back. So where did I go………………..the cemetery!! Yes, I spent half a day in a graveyard!😂 If there is one place you can guarantee peace, calm and serenity it’s in a graveyard. Paris has a huge one called Pere Lachaise. It spans 110 acres and is full of green trees, maze like paths and birdsong. It houses a rich ecosystem which includes includes cyclamen and orchids. According to Wikipedia the cemetery also hosts a population of foxes and 100 species of birds, including flycatchers and owls. It’s a really nice space and is the chosen resting place of more than 1 million people.
I downloaded a map and went on a bit of a grave hunt………………….a bit like a treasure hunt but for dead people. 😆 It’s most famous residents are Edith Piaf, Georges Bizet, Frederic Chopin, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Olivia de Havilland, Sarah Bernhardt, Jim Morrison and Sir Richard Wallace, along with a memorial to Maria Callas, whose remains were there before they were stolen, recovered, and scattered in the Aegean Sea off Greece. It was a really interesting and peaceful morning and I would definitely recommend a visit there if you fancy a quiet, interesting stroll away from the chaos. I was in a much better frame of mind afterwards.
On the way back I walked through an area of Paris called Le Marais. There you will find pretty streets, lots of independent boutique shops, the Jewish quarter and an ice cream shop! Just like a small child……an ice cream always makes me feel better! Outside the ice cream shop is the very lovely Place des Voges where Victor Hugo once lived. It’s a very lovely green, grassed square, with chestnut trees in the middle, a perfect ice cream eating spot. 😋
I then had a little job to do for the architect student of the family. That was to go to the Pompidou Centre and get some photographs. It houses a centre for art and culture but I was just tasked with getting pictures of the outside. It is a quirky building designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, and is one of the iconic architectural masterpieces of the 19th century. It is instantly recognisable for its unusual design, in that a large part of its infrastructure, such as the lifts and utilities, are on the outside of the building. There are four primary colour coded colours visible on the exterior: blue for air flows, yellow for electricity, green for water circuits and red for pedestrian flow (escalators and lifts). Anyway, pictures duly taken and sent by WhatsApp, my mission was accomplished.
Most people when they visit Paris go up the Eiffel Tower, but not me! Being scared of heights I went for a little look but decided this was a definite ‘NO’! I could see it just fine from the ground! I would be running past it on the Sunday, and whizzing almost 300 metres up a man made Meccano set in a glass lift, and having to part with £50 to do it, is not my idea of fun! It would have been a complete waste of time, similar to the time I paid to go in the cable car in Barcelona and spent 10 minutes laid on the floor in the bottom of the cabin until I was ejected at the top gasping for breath.😂I have some lovely pictures of what it would be like and you’ll have to make do with those. The Arc de Triomphe and Champs Elysees are also very much worth a visit.
If you want to visit when it’s a bit quieter, night time is also good as they look wonderful lit up with laser lights emitting from the top.
Friday night involved more pasta and another alcohol free early night. Like I say, not my usual holiday night out!
Saturday was a gloriously sunny 24°C day and I’d promised myself I was not leaving the islands and was having a very easy day. I had a quick early morning walk over to the other island before it got too busy to look at Notre Dame Cathedral. It is huge, but sadly closed at the moment following the fire a few years ago. Renovation looks behind schedule and it does not look like opening is imminent. There is a nice viewing platform and lots of information boards to read about the renovation.
The remainder of the day I spent on Ile Saint-Louis. I wandered around the little shops. There was a pretty flower shop, the most inviting and colourful fruit and veg shop where I bought some home made fig roll biscuits, a delightful little sweet shop and the smelliest cheese shop. I love a cheese shop, the smellier the better. Top prize though went to the antique puppet shop, a very eccentric shop with some of the wierdest wooden puppets I have ever seen. Some of them were really old and some of them were really creepy. The shop appeared to be manned by a real life Geppetto…………it was honestly like walking into Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio but in real life………….I was mesmerised!
I had a couple of little coffee stops and watched the world go by and made my way to the park at the end of the island where I had a couple of hours chilling with my book, a little cat nap and ate my fig rolls.
The final carb load followed, with yet more pasta, and before I knew it my sightseeing time in Paris had come to an end. Just time to organise my little piles for the following morning: running kit; measured out piles of race nutrition, race bib, emergency pain killers; first aid; post race bag and warm dry clothes. Just 12 hours remained which was plenty of time for me to have a restless night and a pre race meltdown! 😂
So that’s my whistle stop tour of Paris. I’m sure there is so much more to do and see but the remainder of my time was given up to the primary purpose of the visit which was the marathon, which I’ll tell you about another time. Like I say, Paris is probably better than my experience portrays it, but marathon running and sightseeing don’t go together, both physically or mentally. So my advice would be, if you want to see Paris properly and enjoy it, don’t run the marathon, just stick to crepes, croissants and Cabernet Sauvignon! 😝