Paris: Take-One

Paris Day One

As we started our descent into Paris the pilot let us know that it was snowing in Paris, and as the plane landed the turbines blew the snow up off the ground so that it looked like we were landing in a snowstorm! The flight was supposed to take 14 hours, but we were two hours early, landing in Paris at about 2:30 am, we gathered our gears, walked past some security people – this is considered to be customs in Paris, nobody stamped our passports, and we were free to go! However, the trains into the city don’t start until 6 am, so we sat around for a while! This meant that we had time to choose the best deal for our train ticket!

We were in Paris for 3 days to start with and just getting from the airport to the hotel on a single ticket would have been upwards of 15 euros each! So we each got a 3-day Paris Visite ticket, which gives you pretty much unlimited access to the whole of Paris. I really recommend this if you are going to be seeing all the sights because it gets you to all the main touristy things! We didn’t do Versailles this trip but I think the Paris Visite ticket can get you there as well.

We arrived at our hotel at about 7:30am and of course check in isn’t until 2pm so even though we were shattered we had to wander the streets of Paris for about 6 or so hours (not too much of a chore really). Thankfully we were able to leave our suitcases there (although not entirely securely) so we left our belongings and took the metro to Notre Dame. We were still pretty dazed, but as we climbed the stairs up out of the metro there she was, surrounded by snow and only a couple of other people in sight La Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris stood there to welcome us.

When we first planned this trip we expected it would be filled with lab visits and meet and greets with other neuroscientists in our fields of interest, as it was supposed to be our way of scouting for jobs/PhD positions. So I had resigned myself to not doing a whole lot of sight-seeing, but I had said that Notre-Dame was the one thing in Paris that I absolutely had to go and see, so it was nice that she was the first to welcome us to Paris.

We were really lucky with our timing as there were only about ten other people around and inside the church, so we almost had it to ourselves. 

After looking around the church we decided to head over to Montmartre where we had crêpes and coffee. We then wandered over to the Sacré-Cœur Basilica, where the views weren’t great due to excess cloud but it was nice to wander around the neighbourhood. 

We also saw Café Des 2 Moulins from the film Amélie, we saw the Moulin Rouge, L’Arc de Triomphe, and La Tour Eiffel. By this time 2 o’clock was fast approaching and we were almost dead on our feet and freezing cold so we headed back to the hotel and waited to be checked in. Then once we were all checked in we slept through to about 4am

Paris Day Two

We woke up early, and figured out how to get to the lab we were visiting that day, then stupidly hit the metro at rush hour, which was awful! But we made it there and my Love gave his talk to the neuroscience department, followed by questions and a tour of the lab facilities. After the lab tour they took us out to a beautiful restaurant for lunch, so nice that we went to it again for dinner on our last night in Paris.

After the lab we did a bit of wandering around the Latin Quarter before we had some dinner and headed back to the hotel. We spent most of the day with the lab team, so there wasn’t much time for tourist-ing that day!

Paris Day Three

Wasn’t really a full day in Paris, we woke up, had breakfast, checked out of the hotel, did some shopping, then caught the chunnel to London!