Paris 01 Ancien - Quartier Champs-Élysées

Another big day of exploring lay ahead so we made an early start, had breakfast and head off towards the 17th arrondissement via the metro. The Paris metro was really great (far better than the London tube) and we were lucky that one of the main stations, Gare d’Austerlitz was only 2 minutes from our apartment.

We got off the metro and slowly made our way to the Arc de Triomphe, stopping for coffee along the way. The Arc de Triomphe was a truly incredible sight and in my opinion, far more impressive than the Eiffel Tower. We spent a good hour or two walking around and also walking to the top for an incredible view of Paris, looking straight down the Champs-Elysees.

At this point it had started raining so we decided to find a lunch spot to try French onion soup. We found a nice little bistro a short bus ride away. Heather really enjoyed the French onion soup, but I wasn’t a big fan (the cheese toast was the best part of the meal for me). Feeling unsatisfied, I grabbed a sandwich from a supermarket on the way to our next destination, Fragonard, the house of perfume.

At Fragonard we had booked a perfume making class and also a tour of the museum. The perfume making class was very cool, as we were guided through some of the basics of how a perfume is made, and then allowed to make our own with a combination of three base scents. Having made our own small perfumes, we were then taken through a tour of the perfume museum where the history of perfume was explained, right from the first iterations of perfume in Egypt, through to commercialised perfumes of today.

The rain was quite persistent at this point and we knew we were heading out to Versailles the following day, so we decided to head back to the apartment in the afternoon and relax for the evening. -VLes mer