When I landed at the Paris airport in June of 2018, it was great there was free wi-fi since I didn’t want to turn my plane off “airplane mode” because of the high cost of international roaming charges. By the way, I didn’t turn my phone off airplane mode the whole time I was in Paris, which is quite an accomplishment! The free Internet at the Paris airport helped me find a room on Hotels.com — kind of risky to do it at the last second, but it worked out! Sometimes booking a room on the same day as check-in is the best way to find really good deals.
I had booked a room far in advance at one hotel since they said they had a shuttle from the airport to the hotel. But when I contacted them to arrange picking me up, they said it wasn’t available for pickups from the airport! Bait-and-switch! So I cancelled a few minutes before the deadline to cancel, and decided to find another hotel through Hotels.com after I landed. It turned out to be a good strategy since I found a comparable place (Hotel Saint Dominique) at a cheaper price.
Below is a picture of the view from the front door of the hotel, and the door to my room.
Trains
I decided to play things by ear in getting from the airport to the new hotel, with my first choice to use the train from the airport. I was a little worried about doing that because I hadn’t studied the train routes at all before I landed in Paris. After getting my bag from baggage claim, I spent about 30 minutes looking into the train options. All I knew is that if I took a train headed into town, I would figure things out, which I did.
I was able to get to my hotel from the airport for about $10, which was a lot cheaper than taking a cab or Uber. When I need to get anywhere, such as to the airport to catch a flight, I have no problem with paying extra to make sure I get there on time. But when I have time and have a chance to experience what normal folks do in a country, I kind of like giving it a try.
Here’s a video of what one of the train/subway stations looked like…
More on the hotels
Even though I think I got a good deal for my hotel room, hotels are still expensive for what you get. During my trip to Paris, I stayed in two different hotels that cost between $150-$200 a night, and both were very small. They were about the size of a bedroom, but then throw in a very small desk (almost unusable) and an Ikea-like closet cabinet, there wasn’t much room for anything else. Just having two pieces of luggage made it hard to move around the room. I read reviews online from people saying how small rooms were in Paris. I think couples would get on each others’ nerves in rooms like these! If two people are traveling together, it’s definitely worth it to find hotels with bigger rooms, which would be a normal sized room in the U.S.
The bathrooms are really small, too, but both rooms’ bathrooms were fairly modern and clean, and had one of those big overhead shower heads. Check it out below:
The first bathroom (at Hotel Saint Dominique) had a metal rack on the wall that was plugged into an electrical outlet and was kind of hot, which I thought was a heater for the bathroom since it looked like a radiator (I wish I had taken a picture of it, but I found online a similar pic below).
I thought that was strange since it wasn’t cold outside at all — the weather was just about perfect. Only later did I realize it was a towel warmer! That’s the first time I’ve ever seen one of those, and I thought I’ve been around long enough to recognize one of those — I guess not!
The bathroom I had in my second hotel didn’t have washcloths, which was frustrating (I don’t like using just soap and my hands because it doesn’t lather up very well). Maybe Europeans don’t use washcloths too much, either. That isn’t too unrealistic to think since I could smell some bad B.O. walking around, especially in the subway where there wasn’t much air circulation. I had always heard the French don’t bathe as often as Americans.
Restaurants
The number of sidewalk cafes is insane! It’s like every restaurant has them (and there are tons of restaurants). They are usually packed, and people are squeezed in with each other around little bitty tables. If you want to talk about anything private, you can forget it because 6 people around you will hear everything you say.
I also don’t know how the waiters can get to everyone when they’re all packed in like that. And then you’ve got people smoking in the midst of everyone, which has got to be frustrating if you don’t want to sit around someone who smokes — you have no control over it! And people just seem to be sitting there, talking forever with many of them puffing away. Two words kept entering my mind when I saw these scenes repeated over and over around the city: “slackers” and “weakness.” (I know that may sound harsh, but I’m just not used to seeing so much of this all over a city).
When you’re alone like I was, you don’t want to sit alone when everyone else is with someone. And there doesn’t seem to be a bar where people are eating alone without feeling as self-conscious. For one meal of mine, I sat inside at a sidewalk cafe place, and the service was slow (which seems to be the norm) probably because the culture seems to be more about “kicking back” and wasting time. It probably takes over an hour to sit down, order, wait, and eat. You either have to eat out and spend a bunch of money for small portions (I didn’t see much on people’s plates that looked all that filling), or eat at home. It kind of bothered me to see how much time people waste at these cafes, but it’s their lives. I just don’t see that happening as much in the U.S. — is that one of the reasons why the U.S. economy dwarfs France’s even after adjusting for the population difference?
Also, the menus are all in French so it’s hard to understand what you’re going to get, and you don’t want to be asking French-speaking waiters about everything on the menu. I did see, though, that most places had hamburgers, which were a minimum of $16-$17 a pop! What!?
From looking at people’s plates at the sidewalk cafes, even though their portions weren’t that big, I was surprised to see the large quantity of french fries and potatoes they served. Those are pretty fattening foods, but almost all Parisians are pretty thin, probably because of all the walking they have to do. There aren’t many buses, and going underground for the subway or train is a pain.
There are hardly any fast food places, either! I had to search for a Burger King or McDonald’s on my phone and walk over a mile to get to one. There aren’t very many of them around town. But they were a welcome site since I knew exactly what their menus were, and they were pretty clean and modern. I enjoyed it, and the food tasted the same as in the U.S. But a combo meal was about $11-$12, with a coke costing about $3…and no free refills! Huh!?
Below is another burger meal I had. It was pretty good!
Check out the spelling of “Pure” on the sign below. And thankfully I found the one place that had free refills, and they even promoted it on their sign!
I’m not ashamed to say that I ate fast food like this in Paris. Although there aren’t very many of them, it was definitely more convenient, it’s easier to eat alone in places like that, and I knew exactly what I was going to get!
Walking around the streets
I was surprised to see more Chinese tourists than I thought I’d see. I had read the Chinese are doing a lot more touring around the world because of their wealth. I could definitely hear Americans walking around, too.
I walked about 7 miles a day to get a better feel for the city. Most of the streets are pretty clean, but the sidewalks are really narrow and most streets have just one lane for one-way traffic. The architecture is all very nice, with almost every building being no higher than 6 or 7 floors. So you don’t get a lot of dark streets like in New York City since the sun and sky aren’t blocked by tall buildings.
Although the sidewalks are only 3-4 feet wide, you’ll see openings into a large courtyard area (like schools) where there’s a lot more space behind the walls instead of on the streets.
Many of the residential buildings have a one-way driveway and these beautiful, big wooden doors that open up instead of metallic parking door garages in the U.S. So you hardly notice cars pulling into buildings at all, probably because not many people own cars.
As you’ll see in the video below, I was surprised to see several residents walking their dogs without a leash! And the dogs were very well-behaved and chilled out. Even when another dog was approaching, the dog’s owner wouldn’t try to grab their dog. They’d kind of feel things out with the other dog and the owner, I guess because they’ve trained the dogs to not go crazy when they see another dog. But I would hear some dogs growling and barking at each other after they decided they couldn’t hold back from being a dog any longer LOL.
It was also cool to see little kids, sometimes between the ages of 2-3 years old, on little tricycles or scooters riding along next to a parent. They are definitely learning at an early age how to deal with being on wheels, and many of them were struggling with it. But they weren’t crying or fussing with it — they were figuring it out. Maybe that’s why the Tour de France started in France: because the kids learn at an early age to get comfortable on wheels.
One thing that was interesting in the video is that even women who are dressed in normal clothes aren’t afraid to break a sweat to get around. Overall, people walking around were all nicely dressed, mostly in jeans but with a nice shirt, blouse or sweater. Women there didn’t wear as much makeup as in the U.S. They definitely have a more natural look going on.
When I was there, it rained a couple of times, and it was surprising to see how many people didn’t care if their head or clothes got wet from the rain. Even women with makeup on. One young woman had her two daughters with her, and they didn’t have anything over their heads, and they weren’t freaking out about it like you see in other countries. They were just walking at a normal speed. So that kind of helped offset some of the “weakness” sentiment I mentioned earlier.
I also saw a group of people on unicycles which was cool.
Other things
I was surprised to see the refrigerators in both of my rooms were barely cold and couldn’t be turned down to be colder. It was also rare to get ice served with cans of coke (which were really small compared to cans in the U.S.) on planes and in restaurants. They are so accustomed to not having drinks cold over there, which was strange.
Below is a great French-looking scene from the streets. I didn’t partake in these crepes since I wasn’t hungry, but it looked damn good!
Final scenes from Paris
I didn’t go to any museums or spend a lot of time at the typical tourist sites. I really liked just walking around seeing how people live. But the one site that impressed me was the Eiffel Tower at night as seen in these night videos in the rain.