Although it seems pretentious to talk about the first international trip with Lilo, my girlfriend, that was curiously Paris (the city of love, capital of fashion, inspiration for artists from different times… and also the city with the best drainage system in the world), I really wanted to share this experience with all the people.
We live in Mexico city, and at that time I was working at United Airlines so when we had an opportunity to take advantage of the travel benefits, we decided to go to Europe, although my dream of life was to visit Rome, one day before leaving we considered the option to go to Paris and apparently was a better option for us (as an airline employee we travel standby).
So after changing plans, flying 5 hours from Mexico city to San Francisco, having a burrito for breakfast, waiting 4 more hours and a second flight for more than 10 hours … our feet touched for the first time the old continent.
Paris is a city that seduces you from the very first minutes, with a majestic Concorde airplane for exhibition at the Charles de Gaulle airport, an easy-to-use metro system, a nice hotel near the center, a cold but tolerable weather.
If you go to Paris and you don’t take a selfie with the Eiffel Tower, it’s like you have not gone there, seriously, the iron lady and her 324 meters can not miss a visit to Paris. *If you make a stopover to go to another destination, I recommend at least five hours in the French capital to take the metro to take a selfie and return to take your following flight.
To be honest, at first the Eiffel Tower did not attract much my attention, because I thought (stupidly) that it was just a silly structure to divert funds under the pretext of the bicentennial of Independence or something like that (this was a mexican joke), but I discovered later that it was actually built so that the French people were more proud and could claim to be the most chic city in the
world, besides they were so pedantic as to organize a World Expo in which they presented themselves to amaze all the other countries.
The Louvre Museum is one of the largest museums in the world and also one of the most visited, because it is huge and because it has some of the most popular pieces of art in history, starting with The Mona Lisa, which appears in films such as Da Vinci Code; Freedom guiding the people, which is the cover of a Coldplay album; The Venus de Milo, which appears in an hilarious chapter of The Simpsons and in the mexican brand of matches (Clasicos) and for the geeks are exhibited several Egyptian sarcophagi and even the Rosetta Stone.
I could talk all day about the sights of the Moulin Rougue, the cathedrals of Sacre Coeur and Notre Dame, the Trocadero square, the French Pantheon (where I thought I would find the tomb of Jim Morrison, but I discovered that the Lizard King rests in another French pantheon), the Rodin museum, a monument to Moliere hidden in the streets of the 1st district, Opera Garnier, Pont Neuf; but there will be a moment in the future.
The streets are beautiful and the buildings correspond to the city imagined by Baron von Haussman who redesigned the capital so that the neighborhoods had a spiral order from the center and even the drainage system has signage such as the visible part of the streets and avenues of the light city. In any corner of the city you can find that magic that inspired many artists such as Victor Hugo, Monet, Hemingway, Dali, Woody Allen, among many others.
In a nutshell, Paris is my favorite city so far, but that’s not a reason to forget my Mexico that is so cute and cool. I really appreciate if you arrived reading here, this post is only to share a bit of milestones and experiences that I have lived, this time I went with Lilo and later I will share more anecdotes and some tips and advices for this chaotic life.
Au revoir
