(Consider this backdated a week. I have been too tired from full days of museum-walking and street-exploring to do much blogging.)

In case Paris decides it needs a new slogan, I suggest “It lives up to the hype.” I loved Paris when I visited as a college student, and however it may have changed in the subsequent decades, its reputation as one of the world’s best cities, if not the best, is completely deserved.

Great food: check. Every grubby little place has excellent bread and delicious French onion soup. Even the tourist trap we reluctantly went to when we were famished and too near the Eiffel Tower for anything else was terrific. Boulangeries and patisseries are on just about every block, and we never ate anything at any of them that was less than delicious (French people must faint dead away when they taste what most U.S. bakers pass off as croissants).

I’m sure someone in Paris knows how to knock out a crappy meal, but we were fortunate enough not to order anything from that person’s kitchen. It really is a city of cooks who love and know food. We had precisely one disappointing meal, and that was only because it was billed as the best Chinese food in the city, which I doubt it really is. It was pretty good anyway, but we happily went back to French cuisine the next day.

Eiffel Tower: check. It’s the world’s most overviewed tourist attraction, and you know what? It’s still gorgeous. Each of us had seen it on her previous visit and put it low on the list of things to do this time around, but when we had gone all the way to the city’s museum of modern art to see a mural that turned out to be closed to view, and discovered we were half a mile from the tower, we couldn’t resist.

Also, you have to love a place where the street vendors are selling champagne to accompany your picnic. We did not buy any; for that matter, we didn’t picnic. But we walked up close.

Mona Lisa: Check. As I wrote last week, it’s hard to see it afresh, but it’s still a beautiful work of art. So are the Venus de Milo and the Nike (Winged Victory) of Samothrace, the other two items at the Louvre that are so requested that the museum just posts signs all over saying “This way.” Probably the guards got tired to giving people directions. My favorite of the three is the Nike, but none could be called a disappointment. The Louvre piece I would personally walk miles to see (actually, I think I did) is Michelangelo’s “Dying Slave.”

Beautiful city: check. Cobbled streets, graceful old buildings, spires rising here and there–it’s just lovely. Standing on a bridge at sunset watching the Seine wend through the city is even nicer than romantic movies lead one to expect. We even saw swans on the river once, though boats filled with tourists are far more common.

I have some thoughts on the shadow side of the city’s beauty in my next post.

 

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