Amsterdam has been a wonderful city to experience for the last 2 weeks. Public transportation made everything easy to access, and the friendliness of the locals made the city feel all the more welcoming. Even when walking around alone late at night, I felt generally safe. Although Paris is a bigger, more crowded city with a greatly different culture, I’m hoping I can still have a similar experience with exploration.
I arrived in Paris 2 days ago. Unfortunately, our train was delayed so we got there at around 9:20 in the evening. The metro was a bit confusing, as opposed to scanning the tickets they have this weird vacuum thing. The metro doors also closed on me so I had to wait for the next one. The place didn’t seem to have escalators, so we had to bring our stuff up around 7 different flights of stairs. While this part was inconvenient, and the atmosphere was much less relaxed than Amsterdam, Paris’s public transportation seems to be a lot quicker for it. Buses and metros come every 3-5 minutes as opposed to every 15, so missing a ride isn’t nearly as much of an issue.
I’ve already noticed difficulty in communicating with only English. This isn’t much of a problem for the major places like the Metro and landmarks, but the few local places I’ve been to already pretty much only spoke French or only had French signs. I’ve had to rely on google translate and a lot of pointing. Luckily, I have been given a cheat sheet of common phrases, which will be very helpful in the future.
This is my first time traveling outside of the US, so having Paris be one of my first destinations makes it all the more exciting. I was pleasantly surprised by Amsterdam, but I still have a higher expectation of Paris. While I had to learn about what’s interesting in Amsterdam through research, stuff about Paris is already deeply ingrained into American pop culture. Naturally, I find myself to be most excited about the food and the landmarks. The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, baguettes, macarons, etc., I’m excited to see all of them, as well as whatever else isn’t captured by the American perspective. I’ve already gotten to try escargot and tartare, both of which were very tasty. I’ve had snails before, but the ones here were much more tender. I was also surprised by how light tartare was as a dish, I expected it to have a stronger taste but it was similar to eating raw fish.
Outside of anything ticketed, I’m probably going to go around Paris visiting the landmarks randomly. Since they’re very close by, I already went to see Notre-Dame, the Sainte-Chapelle, and the Panthéon. Having never seen Notre-Dame post-fire, I was shocked by the extensive damage to it. The other two were grand and had very ornate decorations. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to go inside either of them, so I’ll have to get tickets and go back later. Overall, I’ve enjoyed my time here so far, and am looking forward to more.