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Paris is the paramount destination in France. It is culturally, artistically and architecturally rich, in an overwhelming way.

Paris

Domz
2004-04-06 17:47:14

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Looking down from my plane window, an odd patchwork of rhombus-shaped French farms appeared 11,000 feet below in the crisp and golden glow of morning sunrise. Compared to American farms, the fields in the agricultural areas surrounding metro Paris are long, thin parallelograms. Sleep-deprived but too excited to be sleepy, the farm towns, basking in the morning sun, look like a fairyland of quaint little villages as I peer down.

Huge farms surround Paris. I see no gargantuan, asphalt seas of parking lots. No endless patterns of sprawling residential subdivisions. It is perfectly appropriate, given this lack of auto-oriented sprawl, that the first thing I notice as the plane touches down was a passenger train speeding by near the airport.

As the plane taxies into Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, I chuckle as I think to myself about a stunning factoid I have come across recently: The city I am from—Gainesville FL—is a city of approximately 100,000 people. Cosmopolitan Paris, one of the great cities of the world, contains roughly 2.2 million people (10.5 million in the metro area). Yet the geographic size of Gainesville-the number of square miles- exceeds that of Paris! What a testament to the wasteful use of land in America...

An interesting, unfortunate trait, during our 30-minute train ride into the heart of Paris, that we are to notice throughout our European travels, is an immense amount of graffiti that is densely applied to all available walls along the train route-albeit high-quality graffiti.

We arrive at our hotel. Hotel de Lille. The pleasures of Paris are so beckoning that we set down our luggage and immediately set out.

First destination: Notre Dame, the enduring, Gothic symbol of Paris (The construction of Notre Dame began in 1163, and was not completed until 1345.) Out front (photo above right), we are greeted, at place du Parvis, by what was to become ...