City of Love with the Loves of my Life

I followed the pattern not to book my tickets early, so that all direct flights are insanely expensive and I have to take a detour. It seemed that the cheapest option is going via Paris this time, spending a day and a half there! However, all my usual and highly missed travel companions were either in Provence or New Zeland and I didn't find Paris to be a place to visit alone. As I was complaining about this to my parents over skype, my always busy dad surprised me:

    - Which dates you said they were?

    - Umm, 8-10th January.

    - Oh, actually I have those days free ish, we could continue the tradition of starting the year with a trip together.   (the year before we all drove to Birmingham in a car visiting Bremen and London on the way)

Can you imagine the look on our faces? Dad was the only one who has been to Paris before, and still only for a couple of hours. My mom had always wanted to visit it (not as much as Iceland but still), my brother was happy for a chance to skip school (joke, he's a genius, he doesn't mind going to school), and I was excited to visit the City of Love with the ones I love the most. 

Embracing the new Ryanair's luggage policy all four of us took a bigger and a smaller luggage. Not that we needed that much, just because we can. Joking, it was my stuff in all eight of them. I'm not a fan of travelling light you know. Not stressing out that the plane missed it's slot leaving us inside of a not moving plane for additional half an hour and taking the longer route afterwards, we arrived to France. France, not Paris, because Paris was more than one hour away on the shuttle bus. Not the cheapest thing I must say! So in the late afternoon of a beautiful Wednesday here we were, standing in Paris and ready to inhale the beauty of the City of Light. (by the way, did you know that it's called City of Light because of the intelligentsia that made the city famous for its education and culture and attracted artists, writers? Yeah, I did my homework)

We began by not following our plan and postponing the visit to La Défense in order to check-in to hotel first. Easier said than done! Let's just say that hotel wasn't the best part of the journey. The best part about the hotel was it's location though, just by the Place de la République, five steps from metro station. We decided to make use of this advantage and made our way to Montmartre. First stop - Moulin Rouge. I never expected I will need to explain what Moulin Rouge is to a guy but here you go - meet my brother. I was quite surprised how small it was, I don't know why but I expected something bigger. 

We then hurried up the hill to Sacré-Coeur while it was still open. The interior of this basilica is as beautiful as the exterior and as the panoramic view from the top of the hill. Though the weather wasn't perfect - it was showering but really warm; walking around the narrow streets lit with old beautiful lanterns and small cafés on the sides gave a really French feel to it.

I guess my dad has a sixth sense for amazing places because as we were walking through a square he just randomly pointed at a café-restaurant and said we should go in. And really - live music, people singing along, excellent service and charismatic staff, gorgeous food and brilliant wine. I couldn't stop smiling even for a moment. Except when I was trying to figure out how to use that thing called oyster because I was laughing my heart out then. I could say that our time at Chez Eugéne was the most French moment of the stay.
P.S. there are never too many photos with food, don't judge me.

As we didn't feel like going home yet, we decided not to delay our visit to La Defénse any more. And it was a brilliant choice to go there after sunset - vividly illuminated glass skyscrapers combined with colourful reflections on the wet pavement and crazy modern sculptures created the sense of another world. As if we were in a comic.

On the way home as we were having fun in metro I noticed how chatty my dad is. He simply had to start talking to everyone who seemed interesting, e.g. a musician carrying a heavy contrabass or a tall guy presumedly a basketball player. I wish I was that brave and such an extrovert!

Day 2 - too much and never enough

I can say three things about the second day:

1. trying to the the whole Paris in one day is insane;

2. Paris is beautiful - I didn't get enough of it;

3. I need to come back.

Centre Pompidou

Beautiful carousel by Hôtel de Ville

Notre Dame was gorgeous. One of the advantages of visiting Paris in winter was that there weren't many tourists, so we could walk around pretty relaxedly. I've read stories how you have to wait in the queue to get in and then just move with the stream of people before you are spit out. So we were really lucky there. Not too lucky with weather though as it was showering most of the day and raining heavily for a bit.

The architecture in Paris is gorgeous. I would have taken pictures of almost every single building if I had time and there was a point in that.

As some might have noticed I have a thing for bridges. However, Paris didn't charm me with that. And the yellowish color of Seine made it even worse. But hey, one place can't have it all! Unless it's Vilnius, of course.

As we had less time for the whole of Paris than is needed to visit Luvre alone, we've been to it like the pictures below show.

In Luvre. Went there for like 5mins.

Though it's the middle arc of the axis, the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile was the last one for us to see. I sincerely was surprised by the size of this beautiful structure! Napoleon might have seriously wanted to compensate for something; you know, hummers weren't present at the time.

To be fair, we came across the bridge accidentally. It's strange I didn't have it on my route because it's a thing worth seeing not only in movies. It's crazy how many locks there are! There's not a gap even for a lice to get through (except the bit where the load of the display of people's eternal love was too much for the railings of the bridge), there are locks on locks on bicycle D-locks, and the lanterns are covered in them like a watermelon with bees. And in case you get caught in the moment and haven't prepared for it don't fret - the One Euro! One Euro! guy is at your service with a choice of highest quality locks. All in all, it looks absolutely breathtaking in real life and no pictures can convey it. I tried though.

To our great disappointment the pantheon was under reconstruction, so we took pictures without the dome. Such a loss! The church nearby was really pretty too. There are a lot of lovely churches Paris (and we've been inside most of them - the same thing that I have for bridges my mom has for churches) but I still get why Napoleon would have wanted to bring St Anne's Church from Vilnius.

Finally we reached the symbol of the city. Which was intended to be a temporary structure by the way. There are many pictures of better quality on the internet but I just love these. 

The Eiffel Tower was still Christmassy!

Having guided for the whole day approximately there - after everything on the plan was seen - was the point when I could just relax and use only two maps out of four we had. 

A guide at its natural habitat.

Having visited everything on our humble itinerary and still in possession of the daily metro ticket we visited a couple more places including the Army Museum, the Statue of Liberty, Opera house. And by visited I mean the usual - saw the exterior.

Our last stop  - two men and Juliet.

The next morning my darlings left at 5am to catch their early flight, and I stayed in the hotel for a bit longer before taking my megabus back to the UK. We drove through Boulogne, which has stunning scenery! Maybe not as stunning as to stay in the bus for 7 hours just for it but I will try to make a slight detour next time I'm visiting Paris. Moreover, this time megabus didn't take the ferry but went through Euro tunnel instead. To be honest I was disappointed - the tunnel wasn't made from glass and you couldn't see fish and mermaids swimming around. What a poor engineering! And with that idea I gathered my motivation to step out of the swamp of laziness and enthusiastically continue my studies. Well, almost.