Paris is now one place we can tick off the bucket list. It had moments that wowed us however the safety aspect of the city marred our experience.

We spent the morning driving to the English Channel where we caught a ferry across to France. From there is was a spectacular drive to Paris which only took a few short hours. When we arrived in Paris we had a driving tour of the city with the whole group.

The scale and architecture of the buildings amazed us. One place that particularly caught Kate’s eye was the opera house which gained its design inspiration from the Phantom of the Opera. Part way through the tour we stopped at the Eiffel Tower for a picnic dinner. The Eiffel Tower was quite spectacular but only for it’s sheer size. We also had the chance to taste snails and frogs legs – The frogs legs were quite nice but the snails not so much; they tasted like chewy ground with garlic.

The next day was a day to ourselves so we started the morning back at the Eiffel Tower and slowly walked back to our accommodation via all the landmarks. The line to get up the tower was very long and so we decided to not walk up it as we had little time and didnt want to waste a few hours standing in line. We walked through  the high fashion area of Paris and enjoyed the views as we wondered around the five story tall Louis Vuitton (No purchases unfortunately).

Our next stop was the Arc De Triomphe which was situated in the middle of an eight lane roundabout which mean’t that there were tunnels that took you under the road and popped you back up in the middle of the roundabout. The roundabout apparently averages one accident per 12 seconds and we could see why. With a much shorter queue than the Eiffel Tower we decided to climb the 300 or so steps to the top. The view from the top was sensational. Panoramic views that allowed us to see a huge part of the city from many different angles (Jason even managed very well with the height).

Following our climb of the Arc De Triomphe we decided to walk the 8 or so kilometers back to our hostel via The Lourve which was a huge gallery that housed works such as the Mona Lisa. We decided not to go in but to rather search the streets for some traditional Pastries and some good coffee. The pastries we found however the coffee left something to be desired. We ate Baugettes filled with ham, cheese, salami, chilli etc and topped that off with some Pan a Chocalat. As we walked back towards our hostel we passed through some of the outer districts of Paris. This was not particularly nice as we felt pretty unsafe walking back through dirty streets with plenty of eyes on our backpack.

Our final outing in Paris was a traditional French Caberet show. The show was housed in a very old school theatre which was designed by the same man who designed the Eiffel Tower. There we sat at tables and drank wine as we watched the performances. The show was the highlight of our Paris trip as it was not like anything we had seen before – There was singing, dancing, trapeze and only a little bit of tasteful toplessness.

Overall our experience of Paris was very mixed. Although there were some spectacular sites that we enjoyed seeing this was overshadowed by the fact that we felts so unsafe (people would attempt to grab your bag, grab your jacket to ask for money etc) that the city was really dirty and smelt like the inside of aeroplane toilets. We found the French people to be extremely rude, suspicious and unhappy and it is not a place that we will visit again. Many people we in the group we are travelling with had their passports and bags stolen which means they will miss some of the trip and have to get emergency passports. Men were also breaking into women’s rooms and looking through their bags as they slept. We stayed at good accommodation so found this quite surprising.

In short we were very excited to leave and make our way to the next destination.

PS: here are some more pictures of the city