View from Notre-Dame de Paris:
Metro entrances seriously protected from fare dodgers with mega-turnstiles. A true bastion.
Now this is done right.
The stations themselves can look something like this. Apparently, renovation. Nobody seems to mind.
Although, as someone used to the beauty of the Moscow metro, I was slightly surprised. That’s all.
Réaumur — Sébastopol station. What it has to do with Sevastopol — Google will answer. We move on.
Galeries Lafayette
Heaven not only for shopaholics (which I’m not), but also for foodies (which I’m also not, but this camp is closer to me — I like a good bite). In the neighboring building — a scattering of gourmet boutiques and small restaurants. If you order pasta with truffles — you risk staying here forever.
Attacking Chewbacca figurine — €95.
Comfortable wooden lounges near the Pantheon (built by Napoleon).
Louvre
There’s a similar pyramid in Baku.
Parisian mansards.
By the way, mansards first appeared right here, in Paris. They were named after François Mansart, who started designing such structures.
Hyatt Regency Hotel. Style — like “Kosmos” in Moscow at VDNH, right? Considering that there’s also a monument to Charles de Gaulle near the Moscow hotel, the resemblance is probably not accidental.
I googled for more details, but the entire search result was clogged with Booking and TripAdvisor links, and I was too lazy to dig further.
In the Tuileries Garden near the Louvre there’s a statue of Cain after murdering his brother Abel. For obvious reasons, this sculpture is now often referred to as the facepalm statue…)
Museum
Don’t remember the name
Paris Opera
Academy of Fine Arts
Luxembourg Garden. Full of people sitting, eating, snacking, drinking. Alcohol is allowed, and not just in this park, but in others too.
We and our guide sat on the lawn right in the center — near the Hôtel des Invalides — and had a lovely picnic with delicious French food and wine (the alcohol went to the guide, and we, teetotalers, drank something like compote). Around us, other “picnickers” were also eating and drinking — no problems, no police. Wonderful.
Paris, you’re a very tasty city! Ah yes… also a beautiful one…)
Disneyland Paris
It’s not actually in Paris, but in the town of Marne-la-Vallée, 32 km east of the French capital. Just saying…)
Pleasant impressions. It’s not even a park. It’s essentially a separate city with its own hotels and several amusement parks. If you’re planning to do an express tour of Disneyland, allocate at least a whole day 🙂 And it’s best to go on a weekday.
One attraction that stood out was a cool 3D ride based on Star Wars. You put on VR glasses, sit in a “spaceship”, and the moving seats combined with surreal space visuals give you the feeling of flying to distant corners of the Universe… Awesome. Be careful — after the 5–7 minute ride, you might feel a bit nauseous. Understandable — diving into hyperspace, flying at crazy speeds across planets, dodging enemy ships firing at you… and considering your ship is barely functional and piloted by the clumsy robot C-3PO, the adrenaline is guaranteed. All while not physically moving. Yeah, wild.
Inside the Hollywood Tower Hotel building is one of the most adrenaline-pumping attractions. It’s called something like “falling elevator” or along those lines. You can’t tell from the photo, but the building is actually quite tall. As I understand it, the building is mostly a technical (ride) and decorative structure — not a real hotel. According to the story, lightning strikes the building, systems fail, and then…
Seine
Montmartre
Beautiful.
Moulin Rouge
So, mission “see Paris and… continue living” — Done! It’s not only a beautiful city, but also a very, very tasty one! )
