My girlfriend and I have just finished off a week in Paris. We’ve current basking in the sun in Marseille and will be spending another 2 days in Paris before heading home at the end of this week. It’s always sad to think about the end of the trip and heading home but it wouldn’t be so incredible if we were here all the time.We flew into Charles de Gaulle 1 week ago and it’s flown by. I wasn’t sure how easy the train system here was going to be to use but it’s been a dream. As soon as you figure out which side you want to go down onto the train platform(decides which direction you want to go) you’re golden. The RER (big) trains have letter names like A, B or C and the metro’s have numbers like M1, M3 or M8.The night before we left I was freaking out about which metro pass we should get. One lasts for 1, 3 or 5 days and gets you certain places, one goes from Monday to Sunday and does other things. One you need a picture for and others you don’t. Or you can just buy tickets each time you go. Or you can buy a book of 10 at a time and that’s called a Carnet (it’s really just 10 tickets that you buy at once and you get a bit of a discount). If you’re looking for more information on the passes and trains in Paris check out Paris by Train. There is a ton of information there and you can ask questions in the forum. We opted to just go with buy tickets by Carnet and it’s worked out well so far.Almost every trip we made was within the central zone of Paris, zone 1, so it worked well. If you are going to and from the airport or out further to somewhere like Versaille, you have to get a more expensive ticket. We just got our tickets from the a ticket window near the train stations and we were on our way. Try and learn a few of the words for paying for a ticket in French and it will be much easier. Some of the ticket people didn’t know any English (or didn’t want to speak it).I spent a bit of time on street view figuring out exactly where we had to go to get to our hotel before we even left Canada and it paid off in the end. We got to our hotel without a problem, a quaint little place called the Hotel de Tour Eiffel. The rooms weren’t especially big or nice for what we paid for it but the front desk crew was there 24 hours a day and they were very nice and helpful. We picked the hotel on a recommendation from a friend so I’m not sure if it’s indicative of other hotels in the Eiffel Tower area in terms of price and comfort. We were happy with the price so we didn’t look for too many other options. Being within 5 minutes of the Eiffel Tower was pretty appealing for first time visitors to Paris.
There isn’t anything quite like laying on the lawns of Champ de Mars with some wine and cheese.