Before I move on to other cities from our trip, I remember I had written prior to visiting Paris that Adam Gopnik’s memoir Paris to the Moon “makes me want to pause long enough to notice the light.”
Sunrise on the morning commute
Apart from the day after we arrived when jet lag didn’t wake us until 1:30pm (!), our days were full of walking different neighbourhoods; visiting art galleries, historic sites, and monuments; eating baguettes, macarons, galettes, crêpes; ordering a café crème and deciding I DID like coffee as long as there was sugar in it; taking pictures of colourful doors and narrow streets, returning to our Airbnb exhausted in the best kind of way.
A former train station, Musée d’Orsay is filled with Impressionist paintings. Our favourite museum in Paris.
As much as I could on a first trip to Paris, I tried to pause, to really look around me, to appreciate the ordinary along with the extraordinary, the juxtaposition of old and new, sacred and secular, to follow my favourite Impressionist painters in looking for the light. Here are some of those moments.
Strolling through Luxembourg Gardens with a view of the Pantheon
Couples dance to live music in Montmartre. This scene for me captured Paris at its most romantic.
The love lock bridge is gone but that doesn’t stop people from decorating the posts of Le Post des Arts.
I could care less about the Forum shopping mall but the ceiling fascinated me.
The enchanting Notre Dame
Classic V-shaped building and wide boulevards from the Haussmann era of Paris’s city planning
This boy stopped so I could get a picture of the door but I like it better with him in it.
The light on this galette (like a crêpe but made with buckwheat flour) makes it look even more divine! One of the best things I ate.
Dinosaur meets Eiffel Tower
Backside of Basilica du Sacré-Coeur. Did you know it has a pig gargoyle?
Hotel de Sully in the fashionable Marais district
The golden hour hitting the extravagant Palais Garnier (opera house)
I have a thing for red doors, and architecture that melds in interesting ways.
A decadent visit to Ladurée on Les Champs-Élysées
If this is what Sainte Chapelle looked like on a grey day, imagine if the sun was streaming through all that stained glass.
The view from L’Arc de Triomphe is magnificent in all directions.
La Madeleine meets Calvin Klein. Unfortunately this kind of juxtaposition was a common sight.
Moonlight over the Louvre. Bonne nuit, Paris.
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