There’s no doubt about it, Paris is a great city, and definitely one that grew on me a lot, especially after visiting it for the second time. I’ll admit, we werent’ quite in the same area as we stayed last time, but the first thing I wondered was where all the grafitti, vandalism, rubbish and slashed tyres were. It wasn’t as if were were on the other side of the city, we were probably about 4 or 5 miles away, staying near Franklin Roosevelt Station (Champs-Élysées), compared to last time near Anvers/Gare du Nord stations. The suburb/area/district (not sure what the French call them) we stayed in this time was the nicer part of Subiaco, or Claremont compared to Northbridge or Perth City at Night. And we were lucky enough to get a reasonably priced hotel, which was really quite nice as well. For 100 euro’s a night, with a delicious coffee/baguettes/crossaint and tasty cheeses, was a darn good deal:

It seems everyone has a story about a European city, how sleazy Rome is, or how dangerous London is, watch for pickpockets in Paris and Brussels or even stay alert and don’t get in a position thats likely to get you mugged in Madrid, but I’d say a lot of it comes down to common sense, and a big chunk of luck. Of course, I feel sorry for this guy, and have heard many stories similar in the past, but I didn’t see anything that made me at all uncomfortable, at least not in Paris.

Versailles Palace (21/08/2007)

Not knowing a terrible amount about French history (nor much history at all for that matter), I wasn’t really sure what to expect of Versailles, but we’d heard that many people talk about it, that we just had to go and see it. The whole setup is a lot like the English Palaces, probably more like Hampton Court Palace than the others, but far, far more grand, and beautiful. Of course, Paris, being the most popular tourist destination in the world, meant Versailles had a most obvious downside, and that’s people, and queues. Walking up to the front gate there was a sea of people, with queues lining both sides of the massive entrance with no barriers/sign posts to direct you as to which of the two of three lines was which. After smirking at the idea of standing in a queue for two hours we went off and looked for a quicker way in and found an alternative ticket desk selling entry tickets for slightly more (€19 instead of €14) and allowing you to skip the first, longer queue. Why anyone queue for two hours just to get tickets, only to join another queue is beyond me.

Sea of People

The palace is definitely worth the ticket fee though, and some of the rooms in the palace, halls, and king and queens quarters are nothing short of spectacular:

Rating Guide

Travel: About 45-60 minutes from Paris by RER Train 2
Price: €19/ea
Time: Approx 2-3 Hours
Value: Good Value

More to come..

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Other, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.