J’adore Paris • Walking around the City of Light

The key to enjoying Paris is to eat and walk, walk and eat.

With this philosophy, though we had only 24 hours to explore Paris, we managed to take in so much of the city!

On our half day, we arrived at our airbnb rental in Chinatown at the 13th arrondissement late morning. Jetlagged, we freshened up at the apartment, took a quick nap, then took the Métro to the Palais Royal station to roam around.

Our goal was to visit Musée d’Orsay, the amazing museum across the Seine from the popular Louvre. Installed in an old railway station, Musée d’Orsay houses sculptures, photography, and is most noted for its vast collection of impressionist paintings. Too bad we were not allowed to take photographs of the art, otherwise this may be a blog post full of Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh paintings!

The full photo gallery of our 24-hour adventure is here.

On our way from the Métro station to Musée d’Orsay, we saw a beautiful building, and realized… it was the Louvre! So one more thing we learned on this trip:

Any extraordinary building you see is something famous.

We learned this from stumbling upon the Louvre, the opera house, Notre-Dame, and who knows what else!

I can’t get over how Parisian this photo is. The French flag flowing, the architecture, the cobblestone road, even the little cars…

After visiting Musée d’Orsay, we wanted to catch a boat tour of the Seine. We weren’t able to find the ferry stop but we saw a lot of pretty sights.

Here, love padlocks are attached on the railings of the bridge Pont des Arts.

Parisian sunset…

We went up to Montmartre for dinner and to see the Sacré-Coeur… The area was full of hawkers and tourists; though the view was great, just didn’t feel safe busting out my DSLR much in the area. Next time I’d love to catch the basilica in day light!

After Montmartre, I insisted on seeing Eiffel Tower… at this point it was probably almost midnight and we were definitely exhausted and freezing in the chill. But we did it anyway! The view of the tower from Trocadéro was spot on, a perfect end to our day! (Thanks Jon for the recommendation!!)