It turns out that writing a travel blog while travelling is a surprisingly difficult experience, particularly when one’s implement is a budget chromebook tablet thing with a kind of shitty keyboard. Thank you for bearing with me, and I’ll be sending out my drafts from now.
After our train to Gare Du Nord from the airpot, we were confronted with what would be our greatest enemy in our first stint in Paris - rain.
After dropping off luggage for storage in one of Paris’s innumerable phone accessory shops (whose proprietor, a softly mannered Bangladeshi man asked if I was a New Zealander as he was watching Bangladesh play the Kiwis in the One Day International as we arrived), we somehow managed to stumble into a New Zealand themed cafe nearby to get out of the rain.
After this we decamped to our accommodation, which was technically in Malakoff, just outside the municipal boundaries of modern Paris. Residence De La Tour Paris-Malakoff is perhaps the epitome of a 3 star hotel - functional, dated, a little weird, but good value. Space is scarce in Paris, and our room was no exception.
Malakoff itself was beautiful and interesting. One of Paris’s most interesting dynamics is the constant tension between Paris proper, and its surrounding suburbs. Paris has had seven sets of walls, with each enclosing a larger area than the proceeding set, with the last municipal expansion occurring in 1859. Even central areas of modern Paris such as Montmarte only became part of the City of Paris at this time.
But it was also only a ten minute walk from a Number 13 Metro station. And (transit hat slightly back on) the Paris Metro is extraordinary. 308 stations! 16 Lines! Over 4 billion annual riders! Line frequency of down to 2 minutes during peak, 3 minutes at most other times. 226km of track moving 4.1 million passengers a day.
The scale of the volume of people that flow through the Paris Metro is difficult to comprehend, as is the revenue of the RATP group that operates it (along with other Parisian rail and bus services), which had a consolidated income of 6.1 billion euro in 2022 (10.11 billion AUD) and employed 64,000 people pre pandemic. It’s a public transport company twice the size of the Australian Army with a revenue similar to the Australian Federal Government’s funding for public schools annually.
I loved it. I loved being in a city where the fastest way to move around was by metro or by bike and not by car.
The rain cleared up on the afternoon of our first day, and we metro/walked around the Left Bank, including past the Notre Dame, which I highly recommend in its current state. You will potentially have the opportunity to see an intact Notre Dame at at any time, but to see it under reconstruction is a rare opportunity that will (hopefully) never come again in our lifetimes.
Dinner at Le Petit Pontoise, which I recommend. The French are custodians to some excellent culinary traditions, including the complimentary bottomless bread basket. At this point we headed back to Malakoff to sleep in a bed for the first time in around 40 hours and 18,000 kms.
The rain returned the following morning with a vengeance, which on one hand led to an incredibly thematic walk through a cemetery, and also foiled our first attempts to visit the Catacombs of Paris. We did make it to the excellent Musée du Général Leclerc de Hauteclocque et de la Libération de Paris – Musée Jean Moulin (Museum of Paris’s Liberation) next door however.
As with the previous day however, the rain cleared up in the afternoon and I made an obligatory stop at Shakespeare & Co (an incredible bookstore whose amazing vibe is dimmed by the sheer quantity of tourists passing through it), before dinner at Breizh Café Charles Michels | La Crêpe Autrement (eating in nice restaurants on a budget in France can be difficult, but savoury crepe places make it easy).
After that we realised that we were within spitting distance of the Eiffel Tower, which wouldn’t have made the cut as an independent destination, but seemed worth a night-time jaunt. As noted in my previous post on Paris, the actual tower is nice, but its surrounds are the exact kind of touristy hell trap you imagine it to be, even quite late at night.
The following day - Saturday the 23rd of September - was a travel day, and after bidding adieu to Le Tour (and also my favourite pair of PJs that I left behind), we began the cross city trek to Gare De Lyon, and with it (unsurprisingly) the fast train to Lyon.
On the way we passed through Île Saint-Louis, and the charmingly named Minicafe, and were served another example of the European interpretation of the flat white. In Australia, the main distinction between a cappuccino and a flat white is less foam and no chocolate sprinkingly, but in France, the flat white is a weird mid-point between a cappuccino and a straight expresso shot, a milk coffee with a minimal amount of milk, to the point where it comes in a different size cup to regular milk coffees.
After a brief stop over at the Pavillion de l’Arsenal (one of Paris’s many museums on urbanism and architecture in the city), we barely made our train, and with it, began our journey to Lyon.