Stopover in Paris | Travel

I've been to Paris before but only as a day visit when we were in Disneyland Paris when I was a child. Naturally, I remember much more of the Disney memories. However, the chance came to revisit the French capital as our layover to Lisbon was cheaper if we spent 22 hours in Paris - why say no to that?

This post is horribly delayed, as well as the Lisbon one, but I want to get them up anyway and they may just be less text heavy and more about the photos. I tend to overwrite anyway, so it'll probably do the posts some good.

After some initial stress, as many roads out the airport were closed, we eventually managed to get into the city and to our room where we all four promptly crashed on our respective beds. The next morning we awoke fairly early to explore the city during our limited time.

We ventured out and strolled around looking for somewhere to get breakfast but we were in no hurry and took some time to appreciate the beautiful scenery and architecture, we had been dumped into late the previous night.

We found a cute local café and Mum and I had crêpes while the boys had madame croque. Even when I'm a tourist, I appreciate finding small places that's not overrun with tourists. It seems more genuine to the culture when the locals eat there as well.

We strolled around some more afterwards, just looking and observing but then we ventured to the one of the two places where we had definitely wanted to go - Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre. This choice was curtsy of Mum, who knew this was one of the places we had not seen when we last visited Paris - not that I can honestly remember a lot from the previous Paris trips unfortunately.

We went inside Montmartre, though I respectfully remained from taking photographs. We also went in in turns as our carry-on suitcase, which we lived out of during our long "layover", wasn't allowed in. Then we walked down and got to enjoy the view from below and got to sit peacefully on the benches, while also observing men elegantly cutting down a tree and the string mechanisms that made sure the sawed of branch fell in the right direction.

Then we accidentally walked all the way down only to realise our second place we wanted to see, Place du Tertre, was located at same high level as Montmartre, just off to the right. The second time around we opted for the carriage rather than the hundreds of stairs we had already climbed once. But we eventually found it and got to see all the painters at work - a variety of people doing caricature, portraits or painting the architecture.

As a final thing, Dad wanted to stop by Moulin Rouge. At first, I wasn't even sure what it was but it became quite obvious as we found it. I appreciate the red windmill on the roof though. We also finally found a Post Office and thereby stamps, which we had been on the hunt for for hours (why don't they sell stamps where they sell postcards - it makes NO sense). 

With that, our time in Paris was coming to an end and we headed back to the airport to catch a flight to Lisbon, our original destination. It was quite nice getting to see just a tiny bit of the giant city but it was also a bit much flying two days in succession even if the flight time wasn't more than 2-3 hours. I'm glad I got to see Paris through more grown-up eyes.