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Help me Paris
Hypatia
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Or find an advice thread about Paris!
I'll be heading there for a conference and will have a few days after to see the sights.
My biggest burning question is should I money changed to euros at an ATM, a money changers, or is there a place I can do it in the states?
Other than that, there are a number of sights that seem pretty high on the tourist list like the Louvre, the Palace of Versailles, and the Sacred Heart that I'd like to see. But if there're any other recommendations for things not to miss or good places to eat, I'd like to hear them!
I'll be heading there for a conference and will have a few days after to see the sights.
My biggest burning question is should I money changed to euros at an ATM, a money changers, or is there a place I can do it in the states?
Other than that, there are a number of sights that seem pretty high on the tourist list like the Louvre, the Palace of Versailles, and the Sacred Heart that I'd like to see. But if there're any other recommendations for things not to miss or good places to eat, I'd like to hear them!
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Versailles is a bit outside of Paris proper, so make sure you have a reliable way of getting there. That said, it's an awesome place to walk around, and I highly recommend it if you get the chance.
Sacre Coeur rules, and it's at the top of a hill in Montmartre, which is a really fun area to walk around. If you have any love for Moulin Rouge, (the Luhrman film or the place itself) it's in the same general area.
Steam ID
The Catacombs are amazing, but either get there half an hour before it even opens or don't bother.
Don't plan to do anything in the city on Sunday other than museums. You can see the greatest hits of the Louvre in about 3 hours, enjoyably walking through the rest of the place and taking in some of the other things you don't recognize. If you do go to the Louvre, make sure you look up.
For your burning question, check with your bank. Many US banks have overseas banks that allow for no-fee withdrawls. If you don't want to check with your bank, just google your bank name and "paris" at the end. Bigger stores take credit cards, but it's MUCH easier to get around Paris with cash.
The Rodin gardens actually do sound more up my alley and I will add Notre Dame and the Catacombs to the list.
Saaruto: For those cooking classes, is the baguette one sufficient to be able to really make the baguettes at home? I'm just trying to decide on investing the time and money on it.
Also, is there any kind of discounted transportation pass I could buy beforehand for Paris transit or is that pretty much when I get there?
My favorite thing about travel is almost always the food, so here's my advice:
Eat French, eat sushi, eat Vietnamese. They're the three great cuisines of Paris.
French onion soup is one of the only truly Parisian dishes, give it a taste.
Eat at least one meal out of a grocery store.
If you like wine or Champagne at all, pick up a few extra bottles to bring home. Especially champagne, you can get quality stuff for literally <20% of the American price. It makes for a super fun celebration item at home.
--LeVar Burton
While the Louvre is curated historically, Musee D'Orsay is more of an art destination. Its absolutely amazing.
The Rodin museum is also fantastic.
Sacre Couer Is beautiful, but when we went, it was surrounded by cheap street performers and loud incongruous music.
Closish to Sacre Couer is something my wife and I really enjoyed, a small candy and chocolate shop called L'Etoile d'Or. Its wonderfully unique and filled with candies and chocolates you can almost get nowhere else. Especially Bernachon chocolate. Mmmmmmmm. Its not really a tourist destination but its quite fun.
• Food in Paris is mostly medicore and overpriced. Unless you want to splurge at a great restaurant just eat cheap at out-of-the-way cafés.
• Take the train to Versailles for a day. Go early, tour the palace, and hang out in the gardens. There’s a decent restaurant in the gardens.
• Aside from the stores on the Champs Élysées, some museums, and churches, almost everything is closed on Sunday.
• If you plan to hit the museums a carte musee will save you a lot of time and money.
• Go to Notre Dame during a service so you can hear the organ play. That is one big loud motherfucker of an organ.
• Usually ATMs have the best exchange fees. Find out what fees your credit cards charge for foreign transactions, because they range from cheap to usurious. Often your best bet is to just get cash from your bank before you leave town.
This
The best thing about food in Paris are all the amazing boulangeries and patisseries there are everywhere. I think my wife and I subsisted mostly on bread on our trip and it was in no way a hardship. Mmm. Delicious french bread and delicious french butter.
Ok, bakeries, pastry shops, and chocolate shops can be great. But for the most part affordable restaurant fare is at best unimpressive. I guess I find Paris a let down because I’ve only been there after trips through rural France, where meals can be transcendant.
Local knowledge was essential here so if you know someone who lives there
This is a great point. The butter just tastes better in France, straight up.
Also, grab a croissant for breakfast. Something that is implied by my first statement that you will quickly discover after grabbing a croissant for breakfast: grab a croissant for breakfast every day... If you're only familiar with croissants as they're made in the US, you're in for a treat.
There are also some Paris specialties that are well worth getting while you're there like the croque monsieur and the croque madame. The croque monsieur is little more than a hot ham and cheese, but it's a damn good hot ham and cheese. The croque madame is a variation on it that has a fried egg on top. You can get them outside of Paris, but they originated there, and they're better there.
In addition to bringing back wine, bring back some dijon mustard, because you can get amazing mustard for very, very cheap.
There are a lot of mediocre restaurants in Paris like a lot of tourist cities that have a good percentage of one time business.
But there are great ones also, even moderately priced. Check out Frommer's online for free up to date specifics.
Edit: and don't sweat the bad service, it's not you it's everyone.
Ask people (in French) if they speak English first thing. It'll get you miles more leeway.
--LeVar Burton
Cash is king. This is pretty much the rule outside of the USA, with only a few exceptions.
Go to your bank, order 500-1000 euros. Your bank will give you current market rates, at no markup, but it will take them a week to get you the euros.
If you use Bank of America, they do NOT charge commission to convert dollars to euros at European ATMs, although you may still end up paying ATM fees.
Tell your bank ahead of time that you will be overseas, so they don't shut off your account, due to suspicious activities.
Have at least two bank accounts / credit cards you can draw from. If something happens to one account, you can fall back on the other.
The Pompidou Center is another place that's surrounded by people trying to get money from tourists, and while the outsides look as impressive as you'd hope, the insides can be surprisingly quick to see given how much building there is; depends on which exhibitions are on at the time, I guess.
Also, like London, you can walk to a lot of the major sights in Paris without needing to take the Metro, and while it takes longer, you'll see a lot more of the city than you otherwise would. Check on a real (physical) map, rather than a metro map, the distances can be surprisingly small.
Plan to get "formulas" at restaurants, which are sort of like prix fixe. You get an appetizer + entree or entree + dessert (sometimes all three for an extra 2 euro) and can order most things off the menu, usually for a good discount.
I suggest both walking and taking the metro, as the metro is fast and safe. If you do take the metro, KEEP YOUR METRO TICKET. The RATP does random checks and if you're caught without your ticket, it's a 35 euro fine and the guys are not at all friendly.
I did not really like our visit to Sacre Coeur, but that may be due to us be accosted by men hawking "friendship bracelets" in order to go up. I'm a bit curious what everyone enjoyed about it. Versaille was also underwhelming as we went during early spring. The fountains were all emptied and the gardens were not particularly impressive. The palace was incredible as well as the science and engineering museum in the sub-level, but on the whole it was very crowded with tourists - even at the season we went. I can't say that I learned a ton from the handheld tour device... lots about each apartment and its tapestries and how everything was basically looted.
If you have the time to take the train out of Paris, I'd recommend Fontainebleau over Versaille. It was much less crowded and the time and there seemed to be so much more variety in the architecture because of how the castle was built over time. The small area of the park directly south of the castle was nice to wander through with crisscrossing paths that meandered through open and wooded areas. I guess I enjoyed that more than the straight as an arrow walking paths that mark many of the other palatial grounds. My wife an I had a lot of fun there.
Our favorite location to visit was a walking trip to Pere Lachaise Cemetery. It is a solemn and beautiful place with loads of history. I wish we could have spent more time there to see all the intricate stonework and read up on those who are memorialized there. I don't recall our exact walking path, but looking at a map we also visited Parc de Belleville and Parc de Buttes Chaumont on the same trip. I believe Belleville has a spectacular view over Paris while Buttes Chaumont was a lovely place to rest and people watch.
Regarding money, we informed our bank that we would be traveling overseas and then we called up our credit card company to get a card that would function with Europe's stronger security features. We did get some euros while stateside, though I do not remember how much we expected spending per day. We never had a problem with payments aside from difficulties getting our train tickets to get to the airport on the final day.
Sainte Chapelle blew me away more than anything else for some reason. Also Musée Marmottan in the 16th. But I'm weird so grain of salt.
If you go to Versailles be warned that the RER lets you off right near the palace, but the Transilien lets off at the opposite end of the city.
Hey sorry I didn't get to this. So making a baguette is actually quite simple (it is simple in theory but quite complex to execute well) and I think you could definitely do it at home after the class (you'll definitely need to practice a lot to get it perfect). The only issue is that the flour in the States is different from the stuff they use there, but there are solutions around that and they will actually help you out a lot regarding those issues.
I'm a bit of a purist I guess and I think that you should do the cliched and touristy things a bit when you first go to Paris. To me this means Versailles, the Eiffel Tower, and the Louvre. Everyone's suggestions are on point so you can't really go wrong (Musee D'Orsay, Catacombs, butter). Another gem is the view at the top of the Galeries LaFayette and Le Palais Garnier, the Opera House. PM me if you have any questions or anything!
Steam ID
It's worth doing as long as its at a real boulangerie. The two pieces of equipment you won't have at home are the floured linen rolling machine, and the steam injection oven.
Both can be approximated at home though.
Buy floured linen and roll the dough back and forth inside manually.
Put a sturdy steel pan in the bottom of the oven and put on a kettle. Pour a bit of boiling water into the pan 10 minutes before baking is done.
And of course get a pizza stone, brick lining, or big quarry tile to bake on.
--LeVar Burton
Going up the Arc d'Triumphe is ace, and there's not the queues associated with the Eiffel Tower, and the Louvre is doable in a few hours if you just want to see the Mona Lisa and the Venus De Milo and a few of the other famous ones, it is huge and tiring though. It's worth at least going to see the buildings I think, they're amazing.
Pomidou centre is another worthy sight, but the restaurant at the top is garbage so avoid it, it's pretentious without the good food.
Other than that my only real piece of advice is to bring some decent shoes you can walk in and walk everywhere rather than taking the Metro if you have time, Paris is a great city to explore rather than just hopping between the sights.
Looking at the museum's web page right now, I see that it's closed for renovation until Summer of 2013, so it depends on when this conference is, I guess.
Not for baguettes.
A real French oven uses a blast of steam (or two) near the end to help create that hard baguette crust.
The hot dry pan and boiling kettle are there to approximate this as close as possible.
--LeVar Burton
@djmitchella
I was in a rush, and this post ended up coming off super pedantic and kind of condescending.
My sincerest apologies.
--LeVar Burton
Hm, interesting; that sounds plausible, but it's the opposite of what Reinhart says; now I'm at home, I can find the exact quote:
That said, it's easy enough to try adding steam at the end as well, so I'll give it a shot next time I make baguettes. Thanks for the idea! (and no worries about the message tone, I'm always interested to learn new things to try; this is why baking is fun!)
He's quite right in a home baked sense. The steam he's talking about is basically like 100% humidity, allowing the dough to stretch without setting.
The steam used for baguettes in a Parisian bakery is closer to licking your lips on a cold winter's day with 0% humidity. Its evaporation off the crust serves to actually draw out more moisture.
That's why it needs a hot dry pan and pre-boiling water. You don't want to use so much that you create a humid environment.
It takes some experimentation. The baker I learned from was a very old pro but he was very French, so he never made bread in a home oven.
--LeVar Burton
I've been combing through some of the other websites and was wondering if anyone had any experience or suggestions on either just hoofing it alone or joining/booking some sort of tour group. For example, it seems like there are several bike tours fat tire/paris secrets types, but it's hard to tell if they're worthwhile.
My schedule specifically will be:
Friday (arrival day) by myself, I was hoping to take that baguette class but my flight gets in at 8am and the class starts at 10am, so I'm not sure I could make it. I'll probably hit any sites on the list that I won't have time to hit while my husband is with me.
Then I have conference stuff all week.
Then I'll have my husband with me for touring around Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday the next week, departing on Tuesday.
The next Friday: It sounds like Versailles might be better seen on Friday because of crowds (?), it's unclear from the websites if we should opt for just the Paris museum pass, an outside group tour, or which option to go with on the Versailles site.
I definitely understand that Versailles might be disappointing, but I would really like to see the Hall of Mirrors, even if it's a really touristy thing to do. The rest of the days are totally unplanned right now with a list of places to hit but a sort of unclear/vague idea of how much we'll actually be able to pack in. It sounds from what you guys have said though that Sunday is really a museum day.
Hope you have fun, though. I have a lot of fond memories of just strolling with my wife through the city, particularly the Marais District where we stayed. You'll leave with some wonderful memories.
Oh, and watch out for dog poop. I was avoiding a surprising number of land mines through my trip.
Your schedule looks a lot like mine -- I even was going at the end of a conference -- what I tried to do but somewhat failed at doing was this: start off the day by going to a museum, or "hot spot" with a lot of people. Get it out of the way and enjoy myself before the lines and crowd become overwhelming. Then, spend the rest of the day walking around and taking in the sights, eating, and so on.
To give you an idea, on a rainy day about 30 minutes after the rain stopped and the sun had peeked out, the line at the Eiffel Tower to go up was 2 hours long at 3pm. When I arrived at Musee d'Orsay at 3pm, the line was about 90 minutes (compared to 15 minutes at 9:30am). And the only downside to Versaille is that you have to leave Paris, but it's not that far.
I think you'll have a great time, but leave some space for exploring. My boss said his best times in Paris have been where he just explores semi-randomly, rather than going with focus, because he stumbled upon things that have stuck in his memory deeper.
Check with your bank, it is much easier to pull money out of ATMs (they are everywhere in Paris) than to carry around a large amount of cash. Pickpockets are a real thing in Paris, especially around tourist attractions.
Sights:
I love walking around the city and the gardens/monuments: Luxembourg, Tuilleries, Place des Vosges, Place Vendome, Les Invalides. If the weather is good, you should really spend a day outdoors.
If you speak French and are comfortable on a bicycle in a city setting, I HIGHLY recommend setting yourself up with a Velib account so that you can access the bike share. It's amazing and very reasonable. It might be a little confusing if you don't speak any french, though. I'm not sure if the terminals themselves have an english translation: http://en.velib.paris.fr/
Museums: A lot have been addressed here, my 2 cents that I didn't see: Musee Maillot & Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. Versailles is very interesting, just keep in mind it's a day trip.
Food: If possible, talk to locals. Then, if possible, check the internet: La Fourchette/Yelp both work for Paris, I believe. Suggestions: La Grande Epicerie (Bon Marche - grocery store with excellent prepared foods). Chez Janou (Southern French cuisine, boggling amount of pastis flavors). Berthillon (Ice Cream shop on Ile Saint Louis, relatively close to Notre Dame).
Partying: Dunno if you like bars/clubs/lounges, but if so the neighborhoods I frequented were Oberkampf, Bastille and St Germain, off the top of my head.
Overall: Pick up a Pariscope at any of the little news/magazine kiosks you'll see around town for a listing of the week's activities. You can usually find good stuff to do in there.