Paris

[cos]

I'm going to Paris a week from today, for my first time there.

Any suggestions?

[ Going with Alice, visiting her sister who lives in Paris, and also visiting my friend Christine and seeing one of her gigs. ]

Comments

[whipchick.livejournal.com]

The Louvre - go early-ish in the day and do a couple hours, then go back to your hotel, take a nap, have lunch, relax, and go back in the evening. Otherwise you will be EXHAUSTED. Go in through the "groups" entrance at the back - it's allowed, and the line is a LOT shorter. Pick a day when it's open later - it will also be less crowded after 7PM. Mona Lisa's great - then turn around and notice the GIANT ROOM SIZE PAINTING that no-one is looking at because they're all crowding around Mona Lisa.

Sainte Chapelle is magnificent. The best stained glass ever. Totally worth a visit.

There are rental bikes - the kind you pick up at one place and drop off in another, if you're into that :)

This will be beautiful spring weather - enjoy just walking around, eating out of bakeries, grocery store picnics, etc.

If you're good with heights, the roof of Notre Dame is worth the climb - it's amazing how the city falls away and everything is silent.

My favorite museum is the Rodin museum, and it's lovely to walk in the garden there, too.

If you've got enough French to say "Hello" and "excuse me" and "I would like to order...", French people will often start speaking English with you, saying they want to practice, but you have to start in French or they get pissy :) Generally, though, Parisian rudeness is not real rudeness, it's New Yorker rudeness - they just don't have time to dick around with tourists.

[cos]

I have enough French to carry a conversation with someone who doesn't know English - a frustrating, halting conversation, where half the time is spent in me asking them to remind me of a French word by describing its meaning, then going back and using that word in the sentence I actually wanted to say.

I got as far as "Advanced French Conversation" in college, where we did things like write skits and perform them. So much of that ability to speak French is gone now, and I really hope this visit will bring some of it back by the end of our time there.

Which means I want to practice, dammit! :)

Fortunately, one of the things I'm best at with foreign languages is pronouncing them (though I've never tried a tonal language), so I've had natives mistake me for a native speaker in places like Italy and Finland when I only say something brief, knowing only tiny scraps of the language ... but saying them correctly. On my recent few-hours stopover at Charles de Gaulle airport on a return trip from Israel, I bought food in French and asked guards questions in French and they answered in French, most times. But those were simple tasks for which I knew all the words.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Warning about bike rentals: you have to have a chip-based credit card in most places. I learned this the hard way in Lyon.

Frankly you have to have one in most of Europe anyway. Be prepared to hit ATMs and pay cash, and to wait in lines because you cannot use automated purchasing with a 20th Century swipe card.

[electron100.livejournal.com]

Depends where. I never had trouble at restaurants with ordinary swipe cards two years ago. I usually prefer paying cash anyway though, since I usually found credit card international fees to be higher than my ATM fees, although that varies with your bank obviously.

[ellipticcurve.livejournal.com]

Ditto on the chip-based card for bike rentals. It's been required everywhere I've done the bike thing (which is completely awesome, by the way)--that would be Toulouse and Lyon--and I believe Paris is the same.