Paris | France
Paris is the most visited city in the world for a reason.
You don’t need to have a plan or read a guide book before you go. You can just show up and wander the streets, surrounded by beauty: sweeping church buttresses, ornate storefronts, tree-lined streets, and the banks of the Seine. The city is the definition of romance, filled with lovers chatting close in candlelit cafes and artists showing their admiration for the city sketching its image from a window’s ledge. But Paris is so much more than a tradition of beauty and romance. It has a whole other side that pushes against this narrative: its also gritty, innovative, alternative, and is constantly creating new traditions that make it not just a beautiful city, but a complex, interesting, ever-evolving one.
I first visited Paris when I was twenty years old with my childhood best friend, staying in backpacker hostels and exploring all the sites. I visited again with my brother a few years later, traveling on $10 a day because some international glitch locked us out of our bank card, so we made full use of free public spaces and one euro baguettes. But it wasn’t until I visited Paris with my husband, who is half French, that I really started to see and appreciate the diversity of the city.
Stay
I will never forget my first few hours in Paris. Sleep-deprived from an overnight bus trip from London, my best friend and I arrived in the city at 2 am. Too tired to try and navigate the metro, we thought we’d splurge and get a cab to our hostel in Montmartre so we could get in bed as soon as possible. After 45 minutes of directing our driver to Colin Court (not how you would pronounce Caulaincourt in French), we finally wrote down the name and he sped us through the night and winding hills of Montmartre to our hostel.
I love staying in Montmartre when I am in Paris. When I was younger, we always stayed in the basic but clean rooms of the Caulaincourt Square Hostel. Situated on one of the many steep staircases leading up Montmartre, we’d open the windows and dry our sink-washed cloths on the wrought iron balcony overlooking the city or sketch elements of the neighborhood on the landing just outside the hostel entrance.
Explore
Years later, my husband and I returned to Paris to visit his family and stayed in their beautiful apartment in the same neighborhood. We’d get up early and walk through the streets, watching the neighborhood wake up and making the climb to the Sacré-Cœur early before the tourists. We’d ride the metro into town and visit all my favorite spots: taking in Degas ballerinas at the Orsay, visiting the flower and bird market next to Notre Dame, reading in the grotto at the Luxembourg Gardens.
My husband’s favorite past time is book browsing, so we’d spend hours sifting through postcards and novels from a hundred years past in the tiny bookstalls along the Seine. We also loved wandering through the packed aisles and full shelves of Shakespeare and Company, as much for the independent book selection as learning about the history of the store, which has housed over 30,000 struggling writers in its nooks and crannies since its opening.
One of my favorite days in Paris started wandering the gardens and historic graves in Père Lachaise Cemetery. After seeing the winged tomb of Oscar Wilde, we left the cemetery and wandered east through side streets taking in street art. We found a small Moroccan cafe and ordered multiple rounds of steaming sweet mint tea. We ended the day strolling hand and hand along Canal Saint-Martin, listening to a mix of music, teenage laughter, and city noises rise up into the night sky.
