Paris is a city you can return to time and time again. There are always new things to discover and experience. You can read about our last visit in chapters 3 and 4 of this blog. But no matter how much time you have, you never manage to fit in everything you’ve planned, partly because Paris probably has the world’s longest queues for its attractions.
This time, we were going to take our time and visit some of the hardest-to-reach places. The ones where you have to book tickets in advance but still end up queuing for ages. Simply because they’re so popular. Like the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral and Sainte-Chapelle. You can see the queue for the latter in the photo above.
I don’t think we’ve queued as much anywhere else in the world as we have in Paris. As luck would have it, these three places are close to one another, on or next to the Île de la Cité in the River Seine.
For V, a devoted lover of France, every visit to Paris is a celebration. The cafés, the bistros at street corners, the language, the atmosphere. And, of course, French cuisine. Paris is a relatively expensive city when it comes to dining out, so you naturally want to find the right place. But finding your way around Paris’s restaurant scene isn’t the easiest thing. If you search online, you’ll find loads of tips – far too many to make the right choice straight away. At the most popular places, you have to book a table several days or weeks in advance. We’ve taken a chance and, for the most part, haven’t been disappointed, but we haven’t yet found a restaurant we’d love to return to. The best restaurants on this visit were La Mascotte in Montmartre and Onyx at Galeries Lafayette (for links, see the right-hand column).
The first queue winds its way towards Notre Dame, rebuilt after the major fire in 2019, and now an even more popular tourist destination than before. We’ve tried to get tickets on the official website; they’re free and guarantee entry at a specific time. But even though thousands of tickets are released every day, it’s been ‘sold out’ every single time we’ve tried. So we’ll have to stand in line…
The queue moves quite quickly, though, so we’re inside after about 30 minutes, just as it starts to rain. It’s clear that the two giant rose windows opposite each other are where the crowds are thickest; otherwise, it’s easy to move about the church.
Some of the chapels, which, in good Catholic tradition, line the outer walls, have been given modern decorations, presumably because the old ones were destroyed when the roof collapsed during the fire. Others are quite bare, but in some dramatic works of art have been placed, in the form of both paintings and sculptures.
At the Louvre, the queue moves a bit faster, but it’s still a bit of a let-down. We’d booked tickets a month earlier through an online agency that had enticed us with ‘skip-the-queue’ tickets. These were considerably more expensive than the standard tickets available on the Louvre’s own website. However, we were told that these tickets were so special that we would only receive them 24 hours before entry.
Men biljetterna kom inte när de skulle. Vi mejlade och påminde, men fick aldrig något svar. Till sist hittade vi ett telefonnummer till agenturen i Storbritannien (i Frankrike fanns ingen) och fick där tala med en robot (!) som påstod att vi redan fått biljetterna. Men som la till: ”Vill ni att vi skickar dem igen?” På så sätt fick vi dem och travade iväg till Louvren. Där vi blev varse att någon ”gå-före-kön”-biljett inte existerar. Agenturen, en amerikansk vid namn Headout, hade lurat oss. Men vi hade fått riktiga, fast dyrare biljetter, så vi kom trots allt in.
