PARIS TRIP SUMMER 2019

At the end of summer 2019 I visited Paris with one of my best friends for four days, we stayed in an amazing hotel, visited beautiful places, explored museums and of course ate amazing food and I wanted to document this for my memories and to give recommendations for anyone looking to visit Paris! I visited Paris end of summer 2018 for the first time with my family and had the best time ever, I completely fell in love with the city, its culture, beauty and shops. We only stayed for 3 days which was just enough time for me to decide it was my favourite city and I longed to go back all year, I’d love to see it coated with snow and all the Christmas lights. The trip with my friend Eve was the most impulsive decision I had ever

made, she phoned me on the Saturday asking if I wanted to book a flight and go with her on the Sunday, of course I had to say yes and I don’t regret it one bit. I flew out from Birmingham at 2pm and landed at 4pm into Paris CDG, this was the first time I had flown by myself so it was a stressful experience but I made it in one piece. Then it was the task of finding the way to my hotel as cheap as possible, with everything and everyone being french, when I had failed and dropped french in year 9. I finally managed to find a bus with the help

of google translate and when I got off I was welcomed by my friend and the panic was all over. It was about 6pm by the time I reached the hotel and we checked into ‘CizizenM Paris Gare de Lyon Hotel’ which was right next to Gare de Lyon station. The hotel was extremely modern as we were welcomed with neon signs, bright coloured interior, very modern and modern art pieces, followed by electronic self check in systems. When we made it into our room we saw it was a fully open plan bathroom and bedroom with only the shower and toilet in a separate space, it was small but spacious. The whole room was controlled by an iPad, everything fully automated, including the blinds, it was a very futuristic hotel room. The iPad had controls for the lighting brightness and colour, music, TV channels and it even had a ‘mood’ option where you could set the whole room to a certain mood, such as romantic, energising, movie night etc and

it would alter all of the room to set that mood. After we had explored our room we thought we should probably explore the hotel and our surrounding area. Of course we started with the sky bar in our hotel which had a

gorgeous view of the sunset on the Seine, however it was very expensive for drinks so we chose to look around nearby. We were starving by this time so we looked at the restaurants down the road looking over onto the station as it was a beautiful building. We opted for a pasta and pizza restaurant which now I think about it this was very Italian for our first night in France.. but it looked amazing, I had lasagne and Eve had bolognese with lots of bread and cheese as they are my two favourite things. We were very tired from travelling so we chose to stay in and watch films after our food. For our first full day in Paris we woke up at bright and early 10am to try and find breakfast. We crossed the bridge over the Seine and took a walk along the water to look at all of the beautiful Parisian buildings and of course had a photo shoot in front of them. We then had breakfast opposite Notre Dame, although it was under

construction it was still amazing to look at. We ate at A.Lacroix Pâtissier where I had a crumble tart and fresh lemonade which was amazing, I had never had the crumble before but I noticed them in quite a few bakeries. We then continued on our walk to the front of Notre Dame, which from that angle it looked undamaged and still stood in all it beauty, of course we took some photos there as well. We continued out walk down the Seine and aimed for the Louvre Museum. When we reached the museum square, we took some more photos and then made our way to the queue to get into the museum, I had never been inside so this was very exciting. We queued for about half hour but we were let in for free for being under 26 and living in the EU. When we finally made our way in we queued up straight away to enter the part of the museum which holds the Mona Lisa as this is just something you have to do if you to go the Louvre.

We queued for about half and hour to get our 30 seconds in front and the painting, quite anti climatic but at least I can say I’ve seen the painting. We then continued on to look around the museum. Once we had explored the paintings and statues we were starving so where else would we go other than McDonald’s, because I try to eat at all the different

countries McDonald’s and the French did not let me down. We then walked through the Tuileries Garden, which was breath taking with all of the greenery and fountains and crepes of course. We carried on walking down to the Champs-Élysées to start our shopping, but I’m going to leave this blog post here because its getting quite long and we did so many more amazing things.