I’ve still got about 8,372 photos from my Europe trip to show you, but I realised I’d done specific posts about Sweden and Germany and Czechia, but not a single one about Paris!
So here’s a post about the experience I loved most in Paris:* The walk from the Bastille to the Seine.
Really!
All the meticulously planned things we did in Paris (museum exhibitions, restaurants, etc) were fabulous (my friend the Comtesse who you may remember from her amazing, fabulous, meticulously planned graduation dinner, showed me around, and she knows how to plan!), but there’s something special about the things you discover just by stumbling across them.
The walk really felt like discovering Paris. On every corner there was something absolutely stunning, or new and amazing related to some bit of history that I already knew.
We started at the Place de la Bastille.
The Bastille is gone, but plaques in the pavement show the outline of where it stood.
The Comtesse immediately got asked to take photos of an influencer, which I feel is one of those ‘if it doesn’t happen to you than you haven’t been to Paris’ things. So we can check that off our bucket list!
From the Place de Bastille we headed down the Rue Saint-Antoine, stopping to photograph particularly spectacular bits of architecture, and particularly attractive street-views, along the way.
I also photographed particularly unspectacular bits of architecture that amused me greatly as someone from Hawai’i:
So old! So narrow and quirky! So unlike NZ!
I annoyed the Comtesse by wanting to stop at every single fruit shop we passed. They were so tempting…
At 62 Rue Saint-Antoine we found something we both wanted to stop for: the Hôtel de Sully. What a stunner of a 17th century building!
It looked like we could go through the arch, so we did…
And found a stunning courtyard!
With fabulous architecture:
And statues:
And mysterious basements:
And another tunnel:
Leading through a stunning arcade of shops:
We could have explored for hours (and oh my, did I dream of photoshoots in historical dress!), but we had places to be. So we continued on!
Past more fabulous alleyways:
And then at we found La Petit Versailles du Marais:
And we sat outside the cafe and I had my first patisserie of Paris and fancy tea and it was all my Paris dreams come true! I could have just sat there and eaten patisserie and watched the world go by every day I was in Paris, and I would have been delighted!
But there were places to go, but after just enough, but yet not enough, of a treat, we carried on down the Rue X, to see one of the oldest houses in Paris:
Further on there were more fabulous old half timbered buildings:
Through more narrow streets, now with dazzling plays of light and shadow:
And then out into the bright sunshine:
And the Seine!
Delightful.
*I loved everything in Paris, but in a ‘mad, frenetic, 4 days of amazing sensory overload’, not in a ‘I want to move to Paris’ way. Four days was just right for me.
