A Unique Paris

There is your standard Paris. The Paris where you go to the visit the giant metal asparagus, take your picture at the Louvre with your digit on top on the pyramid, eat baguettes, drink red wine and go to the Moulin Rouge to watch glitter-tits dance around. Millions of tourists each year experience this Paris. Of course, we saw all of these sights. It wouldn’t be a trip to Paris if we didn’t. Even though countless people have done the same, each experience feels special because no matter how many pictures you’ve seen or travel books you’ve read, nothing can compare with the first hand sensual experience of smelling the four-hundred-year-old oil paintings in the Louvre or touching the cold steel of the Eiffel Tower.

But there’s a personal side to Paris you don’t hear about. A side, which you craft on your own by seeking out something unique. Like seeing a Frenchman smile after being approached with a badly spoken Bonjour, rather than a perfectly pronounced hello.

Waking up in a predawn Paris, to walk the deserted streets and soak in the Notre Dame without the bussling tourists, taking pictures of the church with the feel of a new day. Watching Tara cry with joy at the chime of the cathedral bells. 

Making love, with the sounds of police sirens outside the window, and Portuguese covers of David Bowie on the radio. 

Searching out a wonderful vegetarian restaurant called Au Grain De Folie and talking with the owner about organic beer. 

Finding the largest English Antique Bookstore in France, which was only 20 m2 but held thousands of precious tomes, including a 1^st Edition illustrated copy of Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (way out of our budget). 

Drinking a hot chocolate from Angelina, which is the closest thing you'll experience to tasting god.

Surprising Tara with a hot air balloon ride for her 30th birthday, the perfect metaphor for our trip, drifting over the country whichever way the wind blows. 

Riding bicycles through the streets and getting lost, only to stumble upon a cemetery with Jim Morison’s pill and joint covered grave and Oscar Wilde’s tomb, showered with red-lipstick kisses. 

Paris seems peaceful to the visiting tourist. But if you look closer you can see the pockmarks of bullet holes in the buildings along the Boulevard St. Germain from World War II. If you close your eyes and listen closely you can hear the explosions of the storming of the Bastille, and smell the blood dripping from the executioners guillotine in the Place De La Concorde. 

History seeps out of the city’s walls, and whispers through the streets, reminding us that we’re lucky to be here in peaceful times. It’s this history, which makes this city so great and so unique. Each corner has its own story waiting to be discovered.

We’ll come back to Paris one day, to uncover other old stories and create some new ones of our own. But for now, with the bags packed and beanies on, we head to Ireland.