Valentine's City Break In Paris

How can anything possibly be better than sitting in a roadside café, in the glorious sun, drinking rosé wine, eating pizza, after walking hand in hand down the Champs Elysées with my favourite person?  Well I can tell you, it can’t! I am not normally a lucky person, but we struck lucky with this weekend’s weather! I was all prepared with layers for wrapping up, but we didn’t need them at all – in fact, we were walking round in t-shirts for the middle of the day!

It was so weird setting off for the airport from my Uni flat. When I went away last year, all three times my family were there to wave me off, but this time we had no one to wish us a good trip. Jacob arrived at mine the previous evening, on actual Valentine’s day, where I had cooked a nice tea for him after work. We didn’t have too much of an early start with our flight being at 11am, and we arrived in Paris Charles de Gaulle airport at 1:30pm, Paris time. The flight is so short; most flights both me and Jacob have been on tend to be around 3 hours or further, so the time spent on the flight literally flew by. We went up, had a refreshment and then were set to land again!

You all know the feeling, when you’ve been on a plane for a few hours; it’s time to get off and the glorious hot sun hits you as you walk onto the steps down to the ground, giving you that ‘yes, I am no longer in miserable England’ feeling. Well…I wasn’t expecting to get that feeling this time considering we were literally just overseas, but do you know what…we did! The sun was shining and there was no wind whatsoever, Paris really did give us a good welcome.

Let’s talk about the hotel…WOW! Now this didn’t even have anything to do with me. Jacob surprised me with the hotel, he found and booked it himself without me even knowing. He did the most amazing job ever! We stayed at the Platine Hotel, which was themed like Hollywood movies. The breakfast area was designed like a traditional American diner with a huge wall with the view from the Rockefeller Centre in New York, with director’s chairs as the seats. The reception area had a fridge full of refreshments, and a shelf full of all spirits and alcohols you could ever want, to go with the ‘make your own cocktail’ station (this was the first of these I’ve ever seen and come on hotels – you all need to get on this level because this was so cool!). The room itself was actually amazing; whoever designed this hotel, credits to you because it was so unique and like nowhere I have ever stayed before. The headboard of the bed was a huge image of Marilyn Monroe, and same on the roof, so yes, we did wake up with Marilyn’s face as soon as we opened our eyes, but our room was so cool and I loved that the whole hotel followed such an original theme.

Our hotel room

Breakfast

We booked a river cruise for the Friday evening when we arrived. Our hotel was only a 20-minute walk along the Seine River to get to the Eiffel Tower, so we walked in the blissful sunshine and had a walk in the gardens behind the tower, where Jacob got his first French crêpe and we took lots of photos. To watch the sunset, we walked up to the Palais de Chaillot which was the perfect view. There was a singer singing Cold Play whilst playing the guitar which created an amazing atmosphere whilst we admired the views. Our evening meal was at Alfio, a tiny but lovely restaurant located just around the corner from the Eiffel Tower and it had the nicest food and wine of course! The river cruise was along the Seine River and took us from the foot of the Eiffel Tower all the way round the Notre Dame and back in the dark with the tower lights flashing down us which was just beautiful!

I had the pleasure of being the first person to take Jacob up the tallest building he has ever been up so far – that being the Eiffel Tower! We went right up to the summit which for some reason was a lot scarier for me this time! Although that could be because of the slight sway from the wind that we could feel right at the top! I actually don’t think Jacob has ever walked as far as what we walked on Saturday for our tourist-y day. We walked to the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs Elysées, and we stopped at a café, sitting along a quiet roadside with a pizza and glass of wine. After stuffing ourselves full, we trekked in the blazing sun towards the Louvre before stopping for another glass of wine (or strawberry milkshake for Jacob) in a busy square next to the Notre Dame. I was so glad we got to the Notre Dame before sunset and we even got to go inside which was such a privilege. As the sun set, we decided to walk hand in hand along the river to arrive back at the Eiffel Tower where we had a lovely meal at the Brasserie de la Tour Eiffel. Is there anywhere better to go for an evening cocktail than by the river, looking up at the Eiffel tower? I think it is quite possibly the best view I have ever had whilst I sipped on my Aperol Spritz! I couldn’t keep away from Palais de Chaillot again so when it was dark, we went to watch the lights twinkle on the hour where the singer still was playing a bit of Cold Play and Ed Sheeran.

The summit at the top of the Eiffel Tower

Arc de Triomphe

The Louvre

Guess who's drinking the wine and who's drinking the milkshake

The Notre Dame

Our lock on Paris's lock bridge

There’s nothing like an adventure on the metro when you have no idea what anyone is saying, where you’re actually going and can’t read or listen to anything because you don’t understand the language. This, for me, is the ultimate stressor. Jacob will confirm that for the whole walk to the metro I just repeated ‘I’m stressing’ whilst we were walking! Excluding buying our ticket (which was extremely stressful) the travel came quite easy, even with a change of line! It was such a beautiful day; we walked from the metro station to the Sacre Coeur, which I have always wanted to visit. It was again, such a privilege to go inside and look around, and as always the street singers and music players created such a special and quite ‘French’ atmosphere to walk around the square. Back to Palais de Chaillot we went but this time it was in the beautiful sunshine where we laid on the grass taking in the views and catching a few sun rays before setting off on our travels home.

The bottom of the stairs at the Sacre Coeur

The huge Sacre Coeur

Paris views from the Sacre Coeur

Eiffel Tower views from the Sacre Coeur

All good things come to an end and all we can now do is look back at our photos, reminisce and remember the memories we made…and get planning the next city break!

Thanks for reading! Keep smiling and have a great day! Liv xxx