When we went to Italy 5 years ago, I used a hotel booking site called Venere.com and it was spot on and reliable. I used it again for our 2 hotels on this trip (in Paris and Avignon) and again, success.
For Paris, we looked for something centrally located and clean, and found the Hotel Royal Opera. It was exactly as described - small, clean and very friendly and at 120 Euros, we felt it was great value for such a big city.
After checking in, we walked down towards the Tuileries and had lunch at a cafe, Parisian style! Then we took a walk in the Tuileries garden, towards the Louvre.
We had always planned on skipping the famous Louvre museum. First of all, neither of us are into art, and I had heard that, not only is the Mona Lisa unimpressive when seen in person, but that if you went to the Louvre, you were looking at spending at least a half day (if not several days!) to see everything. We didn't want to rush through Paris just to say we saw the Mona Lisa and other famous works of art. The size of the museum, from the outside, is unbelievable.
We continued walking, dipping down to the bank of the Seine,and headed East to Pont Neuf which connects the right and left banks of Paris, with the Île de la Cité, the founding location of Paris, in the middle.
On the way, a teenage boy tried a little scam on us which we saw a few more times later on in Paris. He stooped over and (dropped and) picked up a gold ring, and said "did you drop this gold ring?"... I waved him off and he had this perplexed look on his face. After we passed him, we watched him try it a few more times with other tourists. Whatever he was up to, I'm glad we still had our Asian-scam-detector-glasses on...
When we got to the island, we headed East again towards Notre Dame. We were impressed with the city so far - so clean and beautiful - everything about the city was very impressive. As we approached the famous cathedral, we noticed security and police everywhere. It turned out that the Pope was giving a sermon that evening at 10:00pm at Notre Dame, so it was closed for the day.
We continued walking, across the bridge to Saint Michel, which was a really cool area that we would have liked to explore more in the future. It had lots of little narrow streets with boutiques, and squares and cafes - very cool.
Now on the left bank (the Seine flows East to West, so looking downriver, the left bank was the South of Paris, the right bank, the North), we walked West along the Seine, passing dozens of little vendor stalls that sold touristy knick knacks, books and local artists' work. We walked as far as the Musée d'Orsay, a grand old train station refurbished as a museum. We crossed over a footbridge and back to the Tuileries garden, where we headed West towards the Champs-Élysées. Everything along this section of the city is "big" - huge expanses of gardens, wide walk ways, huge trees - it was beautiful. We passed through the Place de la Concorde, which had special meaning for me, as one of the fountains was the location of the "money shot" for the final stage of the Tour de France each year.
We were getting tired, but we made it to the Champs-Élysées. It's everything it's been billed as and one of the best areas to people watch in the world. Besides shopping (Beth was salivating, but tired enough not to go in any stores yet!), the restaurants and overall city life of the area amid gigantic trees gave us newfound energy.
While Beth took a break, I went underground and over to the famous Arc_de_Triomphe. I climbed up the narrow, winding stairways to the top of the monument for some awesome views of the surrounding area:
It was getting late, and we decided to walk back to the hotel, so we hiked down Boulevard Haussmann and back to the hotel. We had a nice dinner at an Italian restaurant near our hotel and we were fast asleep by probably 8:00pm. It had been a long flight and first day in Paris.
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