Sally and I are SO fortunate to have spent the month of March in and around Paris.  We did a few day trips – Versailles, Disney Paris (don’t laugh, it was fun!), the Champagne region and an overnight to Normandy, and who can forget “museum week,” but we mostly just explored and enjoyed this GREAT city.

It is a bustling city of 10 million people with 2.2 million living in the City center.  They claim to be the densest city in Europe and denser than anything in the US.  It is divided into 20 districts called arrondissements (ours was the 12^th) and is split by the Seine River into Right and Left Banks.  It is a city of neighborhoods centered around civic places like museums, train stations, parks, grand boulevards, churches, rivers & canals, shopping streets, open air markets or islands.  Our neighborhood was the Bastille, where the old prison used to be before it was disassembled by the citizens during their first revolution.  Add to the population around 40 million visitors a year and you can imagine the bustle.

 

We loved their Metro subway system.  The Metro has 16 different lines, 300 stations and carries 5 million passengers per day.  Within the City center there is a station within a 10 minute walk wherever you are.

It works with an equally effective bus system above ground, an RER train system that connects the outlying areas to the City and, at the train stations, grand lines that connect you to other cities and the rest of Europe.  Our monthly transit pass was the BEST investment of our trip (although I am surprised they did not tail us given our pictures on our passes).

The mostly underground stations are well-signed showing you how to connect to connecting lines.  There are also neighborhood maps showing where different exits would daylight.

Most also have an attendant to answer questions or hand you a map.  I can’t imagine the kind of investment they had to make to install the system and that they continue to make to update and operate it.  They apparently started planning it in 1900.  You have to be crazy to drive in Paris, and from what I saw of the drivers they ARE crazy.  Sally and I marveled at how they would use every last inch of parking space.

Their well-established subway system allows the City to function with many fewer cars and all the infrastructure needed to support those cars, like highways and parking lots.  We saw a fair amount of bikers in Paris but they too were crazy, often zipping down narrow roads and weaving among the cars and buses, usually without helmets.

Paris has great central city architecture.  Like so many cities in Europe Paris was an old Roman city.  It used to have a lot more narrow, winding streets until Baron Haussman oversaw a modernization in the mid-19^th century that cleared medieval roads and buildings to create broad boulevards.  He could have been a bit more flexible with his design criteria but it is beautiful to see block after block of almost identical five-story buildings with angled, black slate, mansard roofs and formal facades with balconies at every window.  The City to this day maintains strict height limits in most areas of the central city and requires developers to dedicate 2% of their construction costs to art.

One area on the edge of the central city where the design criteria was dramatically revised is called La Defence.  The City planned for taller buildings to house approximately 150,000 employees and 55,000 residents conveniently accessible to the rest of the City.  The buildings appear to house many multi-national firms in the types of offices they are used to elsewhere in the world.

There is a large shopping mall among the buildings, lots of active park spaces and water features, and all the transportation functions (roads, parking, bus routes and Metro stops) are below ground.  It is less charming compared to the rest of Paris but very effective master-planning.

Paris has a great system of parks throughout the City.  We were fortunate to have a notable one, Promenade Plantee, right in our neighborhood.  It is a former railroad viaduct converted to a park and was the model for the High Line in NYC.

Sally and I loved going to the City’s many parks.  Their trees were just beginning to bud.  It was fun watching the Parisian families enjoying their parks in the Spring weather with their well-dressed children.

One last thing I loved was the café culture.  There are thousands of cafés all over the City.  The cafés are mostly along very wide sidewalks sometimes with wind screens, heaters and/or overhead covers.  The corner cafes with their better views of all the activity are generally more crowded.  Sometimes they are right in their parks and make for a great spot to sit and watch all the activity.

Probably 2-3 times a day we would stop at one for our morning espresso (sometimes with a pastry), lunch while wandering (our big meal of the day) then our afternoon espresso to wake us up from our big lunch (sometimes with a pastry).

We loved to sit and share – what we liked about our day, about the fashion we were seeing, about the pastry we were eating.  Did I mention their pastries are very good too?

We LOVED Paris!

Bob