Tips for Visiting France

October 16, 2008 by  

1. Rent an apartment in Paris. You end up close to monuments, but still in a residential enough place that you can eat where locals do – not just tourists. You can also save money by eating your breakfast at home before you leave. And if you can’t finish your dinner, you can bring home your leftovers and put them in the fridge (which is also handy for keeping your white wine cool).

2. If you do, indeed, go the apartment route, make sure to bring your own soap, shampoo and conditioner and any other toiletries you might usually leave to a hotel to provide. Towels and bedding should be provided.

3. Buy tickets in advance for any exhibition you want to see, especially the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay. The lines are so long and knowing Paris, you’ll be standing in the rain while you wait. If you only have a limited time in Paris, standing in line is no way to spend it. You can buy tickets from your travel agent before you leave home, a day or more in advance from advance ticketing offices at the attraction or you can get a Paris Museum Pass.

    You can buy the Pass online and have the Pass delivered to you before you leave home. It costs €35 (C$55-ish) for a two-day pass that lets you into over 60 museums and monuments in the Paris area. There’s no way you’ll make it to anywhere near that many. But if you’re able to hit d’Orsay (€9.50), Louvre (€9), the tower of the Arc de Triomphe (€9), and the towers of Notre Dame (€7.50) you’ll have broken even on the €35 and saved all the hassle of lines.  If you don’t plan to visit that many attractions, many offer advanced ticketing online.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer entrance to the Eiffel Tower. You’ll have to shell out an additional €12 for the elevator to the top, but in my opinion, you can enjoy it more from the park for free. You have a great city view and can see the Eiffel Tower when you’re on top of the Arc de Triomphe.

4. Beware the thieving gypsy children, especially in the metro (subway). They may trick you to open your wallet to see how much money you have, then signal to one up the street whether or not you’ll make a good ‘mark.’ The one up the street will then fleece you (if they decide you have enough on you to make it worthwhile).

We were told by our waitress in a local café that “they’re those poor darlings that you saw on TV five years ago who’d been deserted by their parents in the hospital. And now they’re in France picking our pockets.” We were also warned by the people who rented us the apartment to look out for Romanian gypsies in the metro.

5. Try the Batobus. If you don’t like walking, or you’re tired or you’re with young children or your middle-aged parents, seeing the sights of Paris from the Seine is a great alternative to the Metro, where you’re underground and don’t see much of anything (except, perhaps, thieving gypsy children). One day is €12, for €14 you get a two-day pass. You can hop on and hop off at any of the seven stops:

  • Eiffel Tower
  • Musée d’Orsay
  • St-Germain-des-Prés
  • Notre-Dame
  • Jardin des Plantes
  • Louvre
  • Champs-Elysées

6. Know how you like your coffee. Asking for “café” in France is not specific enough.

7. Learn how to use a GPS. Our rental company offered a GPS for an extra €5 per day or you can bring your own and pre-enter your “favourite” locations and be very well prepared once you arrive.

8. Pre-pay underground parking. If you’re driving and you’re using underground parking, you’ll need to pre-pay before you leave. There are no parking attendants to pay on your way out. You find a “Caisse” (it’s not a pop machine) and stick your ticket into the machine. Then you pay what the machine demands and take your ticket back. On the way out, a machine reads your ticket and lets you exit.

9. Service is included in the price of the bill. You don’t need to tip any extra unless you feel the service was above and beyond your expectations.

10. Prepare to picnic. If you’re going to picnic in France, bring some simple implements. It’s not as easy as you might expect to buy plastic cutlery in France. We looked all over and couldn’t find plastic knives and it was a long time before we could find a place to buy a single knife that was not part of a set.

I recommend packing a sharp knife, like a Swiss Army knife (in your checked baggage, of course) and a few plastic knives for spreading cheese or mustard. You may also want to pack a corkscrew (if there is not one on your Swiss Army knife). A little cutting board would have been a great help for a roadside picnic. If you have room, a fully stocked picnic basket would be fantastic … but who has that much room? Paper napkins and plastic cups were no problem to buy. We even found some plastic flutes for our Blanquette de Limoux.

11. Weight your own produce to avoid rejection in the supermarket. When you stock up for your picnic at a supermarket, you will probably need to weigh your own fruit and vegetables. Look for the scales and place your bag on top. Then find the button that has the corresponding picture and name of the fruit you chose.

For example, if you have Gala apples, there will be a picture of Galas that says “Pommes – Gala.” You just push the button and a sticker is printed out with the price. You stick it on the bag and it’s beeped through at the checkout. If you have skipped this step, you’ll be rejected at the checkout and sent back (with some confusion) to print a sticker while the people behind you wait impatiently.

12. Learn how to order your meat. Perhaps due to a lot of tourists from England, a lot of French servers assume that English-speaking people like their meat well done. If you do not enjoy chewing on a piece of shoe leather that was formerly a delicious steak, you need some specialty vocab.

  • Cooked very rare: “Bleu” which means hardly cooked at all.
  • Rare: “Saignant”
  • Medium: “à point”
    These words will work for beef, lamb and duck. Bon appétit!




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