Paris Things to Do

It’s the City of the Dead all the world comes to visit, the resting place of many icons: Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Marcel Proust, Edith Piaf, Chopin, Modigliani – the list goes on. Pere Lachaise Cemetery is also very beautiful. Opened in the early 19th century it became the place for celebrity burials as a bit of a marketing ploy; many people at the time felt the cemetery was too far from the center of Paris and did not want to be buried there, so the city literally moved a few well-respected citizen’s graves to Pere Lachaise making it the place to be buried.

Spring is a happy time in Paris; everyone’s emerging from their winter hibernation and venturing back onto the streets and into the parks and cafes. You might need to take a jacket and scarf but the sun will be out and the flowers blooming. Some of the best places to soak up the spring sun are:

Living history and written history, the famous Parisian bookshop Galignani has both. With family roots going back to the first printing presses in Venice in the 16th century when Simone Galignani published a Latin grammar book, Galignani has been an important name for books since they became mass produced.

This tour is guaranteed to bring out the romantic in every Paris visitor. You will drift down the famed Seine River and along Paris’ winding canal network, while taking in the city’s most spectacular icons from a unique perspective.

Can you imagine going halfway around the world, finally catching a train to Versailles to see the massive palace and gardens that you’ve studied in art history and seen in films such as Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, and then finding the gates locked and the place shut for the day? I don’t have to imagine it because that’s what I did.

On my many trips to Paris over the years, I had never visited the Centre Pompidou. And I have to tell you, I am so glad I finally went.

104 Centquatre in Paris is an artists’ studio and exhibition space that’s reenergizing artistic life in Montmartre. Once home to visionaries such as Picasso, Dali, Monet, van Gogh, Montmartre inevitably became trendy and gentrified and too expensive for artists to inhabit.

The Shakespeare and Co. Bookshop place is one of my favorite haunts in Paris. It has a wonderful location on a small street, Rue Bucherie, beside the Seine, within eyeballing distance of Notre Dame, and close to the crepes and red wines of the Latin Quarter.

It’s always show time in Paris, where beautiful dancers, singers, and magicians create a magical escape from the everyday. Since the original “cabaret artistique” renamed Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat) opened in Montmartre in 1881, Parisian Cabaret is celebrated for bringing the most decadent, exotic acts to the stage.

Tour Montparnasse 56 Observatory gives the most spectacular view of the city of lights, offering a restaurant and a terrace on the top floor complete with a helipad for those special visits. The enclosed observatory has a bar serving drinks and snacks, souvenirs and telescopes, while the open-air terrace is reached by 65 stairs and is open to the sun and rain with magnificent evening views of the city at sunset.