Travelling
Travelling to Paris by bus is quite tiring. It took us two whole days to get there, which is because we did stop for the night and we also stopped to see Passau and Reims on the way there and Wels on the way back. I forgot to bring a book, so one of the things I made sure was that I bought a book in Paris for the way back. That turned out to be a good investment and I finished the 350 pages about an hour before we got back to Budapest.
The group
One of the downsides of travelling by bus and attending the guided tours organized by the travel agecy is that you are part of a group. Almost naturally, our group consisted of grandma aged women coming with their best friends or their grandchildren. There were very few middle aged people or people of my age, and naturally, almost none of these people spoke French or English, so they had to rely on the tour guide, who was by the way a really cool and knowledgeable Hungarian woman. So, the group was fairly slow at times - obviously, a 66-year-old woman is not going to run up the stairs of the Montmartre... At least, most of the time, people made sure to be at the right spot at the right time, so we didn't lose much time waiting for people. And since both my mother and I like our independence, we mostly explored the city together, without the group, at our own pace, seeing exactly what we wanted to see.
The room
It was tiny. If you've ever been to an Étap hotel, you know what I'm talking about. A double bed, a small table in the corner and a basin. A small shower cabin and a toilet opening right from the room. That was it. And the indispensable TV. As if we needed it... Anyway, we bought a bottle of wine in Reims and we opened it on the first night. The plan was to get a baguette or something similar in a shop close by, but they completely ran out of everything, so we celebrated our first night in Paris with a bottle of great wine and two bags of chips/crisps.
The food
I remembered that I used to like snails, so I had them twice :) We had a really nice dinner on the Champs-Élysée - boeuf bourgogne, which resembles our stew a slightly, but the spices are entirely different, and apparently, it needs two days of preparation. It was absolutely delicious. We also had dinner and wine on the Montmartre, sitting at a small table at the edge of the square and looking at the unending flow of tourists. I refused to eat anything that I could also eat at home, such as roasted chicked or spaghetti, and I made very good picks in terms of French food. Once we had lunch in the Jardin de Tuileries - and had the original French onion soup, which everybody should try if they are ever in France - and met the rudest and most incompetent waiter ever. That's also where I started feeding a crippled pigeon, which looked very ill and had one of its legs end in a blob. (Little did I expect to limp like him in a couple of days.)
People
Paris is a very multicultural city with a lot of ethnicities, a real "melting pot". I hated seeing a lot of Black immigrants selling little, useless Paris souvenirs, small Tour Eiffels, 6 pieces for 1 euro. They came up to the tourists, often the very same moment they got off their buses, offering what they had, the souvenirs, watches, bags etc. They knew what they had to know in at least 20 languages to try and sell their things; even in Hungarian and that's not a very common language. The moment the cops showed up, they disappeared, and then slowly walked back once the police was gone. It's insane how many people they have to walk up to earn a euro, how stressful it must be, how hard it must be to live like this. Imagine if they actually had families to care for. Or if they came from somewhere in search for a better future. And there were hundreds of them... Another group of people I felt strange about were the artists on the Montmartre. They had so much talent, their portraits were so great - and I'm sure that some of them went to art school - and they literally had to beg people so that they would be able to draw them and earn a couple of euros for them. So degrading.
Culture and art
Paris is a wonderful city. Sometimes I felt like I was walking in a larger version of Budapest because of the similar style of the buildings. No wonder it's one of the cultural capitals of Europe - there's a museum, a monument, a church, a park on every corner. I'm not going to list all the places we've been to, but here are a couple of highlights. While the group was in the Louvre, we went to see the Orsay Museum, which was beautiful... I've seen Monet, Manet, Klimt, Rodin, Van Gogh works, which just have something magical about them. I loved the impressionist part of the exhibition. We've also been to Monet's house in Giverny. He was a great fan of flowers and his garden is like a symphony of hundreds of flowers. A hundred meters away from his house there's THE pond with the water lylies that he'd painted several times. I can't blame him for it. It was beautiful. What I couldn't make much sense of was the modern exhibition in the Centre Pompidou, and I centainly can't see why a photo of a vulva, or a white canvas with a black line on it constitutes art. Apart from the art in the museums, there was plenty of art on the streets. I sometimes stopped to watch the performers (breakdancers, clowns etc.) and the musicians in the subway. My favorite one was a Chinese man playing his traditional Chinese instruments. At one point he started singing so loud that he literally scared the people standing next to him :)
Toilets
I must comment on the state of the toilets. Firstly, they were disgusting. From the moment we crossed the border from Germany to France, the toilets were dirty and the most unpleasant odours were lingering around. The floor wasn't cleaned either and there were always pieces of toilet paper on the ground. Paris, the capital of fashion, the capital of culture - and they can't even clean their toilets??? Secondly, there were hardly any toilets at places which should have dozens. For example, in Versailles, which is a place that is visited by thousands of tourists daily, there were 2 bathrooms around the castle, both with 3 toilets. There was a queue of about 30 meters in front of the door. Despicable.
Weather
I think we were really lucky in terms of weather. It was warm from day #1 onwards. It was sometimes too hot - the queue in front of the Tour Eiffel was bearable only because of the large fans that were placed behind the fence, but the queue in front of Versailles was horrible. My mother folded my map of Paris into a funky little hat (csákó), with which we started a movement among the people waiting to get in. People get attracted by water in such weather and so we cooled down in the fountains in Versailles, in the fountains in front of the Louvre and the ones below the Trocadéro. This last one was really the "pool of Paris". A lot of people came by just to have a bath and they actually had their bikinis or swimming trunks on. It was the children who had the most fun, sliding into the water, swimming and playing around, but I couldn't complain either while sitting at the edge of the fountain, my legs in the water, the Tour Eiffel in full view across the Seine.
