This was our first visit to Paris, much to the surprise of family and friends. We have been to some French colonies: Tahiti, Cameroun, Benin, New Caledonia, Vanuatu [New Hebrides] and Vietnam, but never to France. We spent the week of September 15 - 22 in the City of Light, before heading on to Morocco; the weather during the week was very kind, only one sprinkle of rain. The warm, mostly sunny weather was much appreciated given the amount of walking that we did.

Accommodation

When planning the trip, we weren’t sure whether to look at hotels, short-term apartment rental or Air BnB.  After a lot of investigation we opted to rent an apartment through Vacations in Paris, a company based in New Jersey. We would heartily recommend them - contact us for more details. Our apartment was on Rue Lauriston in 16th arrondissement - close to Place Trocadero. We had a cosy apartment on the 4th floor, with elevators, not a given in Europe! As you can see there are large windows making for a sun filled living space.  Our apartment totally met our needs whilst in Paris. It was very compact with all “mod cons”. However, we did  notice that all appliances were scaled down compared to home so that they could fit in the space available e.g. the dishwasher held about 50% of our one at home.  The bedroom and bathroom were on a mezzanine level - how did they get the bed, washer and dryer to the upper level?  Entertaining friends for dinner would have been a challenge. There was very little counter space for food preparation, laying out of food, piling up of dirty dishes and pans. Perhaps that explains the wide array of restaurants in the residential neighbourhoods of Paris.

There were two elevators for the 5 storey building, but each elevator was tiny - 3 people in the elevator was cosy. For day to day purposes, that was not an issue, but I have no idea how people transported furniture or appliances in the elevator. I also wondered how tradesmen managed to get their equipment and supplies up from the ground floor. We would have loved to see how the locals coped with such situations.

We had access to a small shared roof top area which afforded us excellent views over the Paris skyline. The Eiffel Tower was front and centre, but we could also see Le Grand Palais, Le Louvres, Sacré Coeur [Montmartre], the domes of Les Invalides as well as Notre Dame and Le Panthéon in the distance. Over the week, we made regular use of the space.