Paris en famille

August is said to be the time when Parisians flock out of their capital city. But with typical British perversity, that was the time Ian Macrae and his family chose to rent a vacated apartment in the City of Light

If, like me, your idea of international train travel is shaped by the book or film of From Russia With Love – minus, of course, the gun-toting Russian agent – then, also like me, you’re likely to find Eurostar a big disappointment.

Admittedly we chose to travel in August, but the pre-boarding area where your bags and passports are checked was chaos. The queue, such as it was, was controlled by one guy shouting at the top of his voice for people to move to their right. But this only resulted in the queue becoming more disorderly, in fact, less of a queue as we usually understand the term.

True, at 18 cars long, the trains have passenger capacity on their side, but they appear big and ugly, an impression not dispelled by their livery. They’re much less exotic in both feel and appearance than, for instance, the Pendolinos on Virgin’s West Coast Line.

Inside, the standard class coaches are rather cramped and luggage storage is neither really adequate nor well-organized.

Not only was the food in the buffet overpriced – no surprise there then – it’s also not very good. Sarah my wife couldn’t finish her ham and cheese (make that jambon et fromage) toasty.

Nothing is made of the fact either that you’re going through a tunnel from which you emerge into another country. No big deal, maybe. But hyping that a bit would at least give the whole thing rather more of a sense of occasion.

Finally, once on the other side of the Channel, the train does pick up speed, but the side-to-side motion this creates had both our children (aged 10 and 14) feeling decidedly queasy.

So much then for Eurostar, except that the return journey was subject to a delay of about an hour which we really didn’t need. But we were at least delivered safely and in one piece to Paris Gare du Nord.

We had decided to rent an apartment for a number of reasons, chiefly to do with hotels. Family rooms can be cramped and a bit claustrophobic and, in our experience, no one ever really gets a good night’s sleep. Booking a suite might help with all of that but would also have been expensive and cost was an issue for us.

So we trawled rental agencies online and eventually settled for a 4th floor apartment – wheelchair access was not an issue for us – in a building on Boulevard de Magenta on the borders of the 3rd and 10th arrondissements.

There was also a less tangible reason for opting for an apartment. We felt somehow that doing it that way, we’d be more part of the city instead of just visitors to it.

And in terms of location, that was certainly the case. The building turned out to be a fifteen minute walk from our point of arrival at Gare du Nord. It was about 200 metres from Place de la République and there were two Metro stations within very easy walking distance of the front door.

The building itself was about as Parisian in atmosphere as a Maigret novel. The massive double doors opened on to a dark hallway smelling of communal cooking. There was a lift barely big enough to hold the four of us which clattered, clunked and groaned its protesting way up and down the shaft.

Once inside, the apartment too gave you a big French kiss. The living space had French windows along one wall leading on to a small balcony; the parquet floor and original fittings left you feeling that all that was missing was a big old valve radio pumping out Charles Trenet and George Bressant. You could stand at the kitchen sink and look out on to the lead roofs of the rest of the building.

We discovered that our temporary landlord was involved with a professional theatre group and the place where he and his partner lived was stacked to the rafters with objets d’art of all kinds.

By now it was time to go looking for sustenance for the body before seeking out food for the mind and spirit.

It’s very easy to make the mistake of thinking that you can get a really good meal just by walking into the nearest available restaurant. Not true. The food in the place we ate at on the first night was very ordinary and we’d probably have been better served staying at home and eating at one of the French chains like Cote’s. Finding really good food can be done by luck, but we tended to rely on The Rough Guide for assistance. The best place we found all week came from there, a little creperie in a side street off Place de la République where the crêpes and galettes had real Breton authenticity.

Getting around Paris from a blind access point of view presents you with a mixture of danger and excitement which seems unique to the city. There are more light-controlled pedestrian crossings than I remember from last time. But don’t take it for granted that motorists will necessarily observe them if you’re not actually on the crossing.

And some of them have really useful features, familiar, yet different from what we have in the UK. On some, press a button and a bell will clang to let you know the pedestrian signal is green. On yet others when you press that button a voice announces your location. Of course, this information is only really useful if you know where you’re going and whether this particular rue, boulevard or avenue is on your route.

The other thing is that there’s no consistency. While some crossings have one or both of these features, plenty have neither.

But what a trip to Paris like this is really about is the sites.

The spiritual and historical heart of Paris has to be the Île de la Cité. In particular, the huge Gothic mass of Notre Dame cathedral with its massive four square frontage.

Even when thronged with tourists, inside, the cathedral manages to retain a heavy and sombre air of its own sanctity. This is helped by its sheer size and gloominess which is only slightly lifted by the stained glass.

In comparison, the more modern 19th century Sacré-Coeur looks like some insubstantial ice cream concoction. And inside, the emphasis is on the high camp and fripperies of organized religion.

The Metro is very efficient at getting you about, but we chose three other ways to see the city.

First, take the whole thing in in one panoramic hit by going up the Eiffel Tower. Two things to note here. First, there is a discounted price for disabled visitors, but the downside of that is that you’re only permitted to go as far as the second level. Second, disabled people don’t have to queue, something we discovered after having queued for about an hour: we were told when we reached the ticket window.

Next you can take a Bateaux Mouche on the Seine. The Rough Guide is very disparaging about these (although it does say the best way to avoid having to see them is to get on one). And it’s true that the commentary (in six languages) is extremely glib and not very informative. But we travelled from near the Eiffel Tower to the tip of the Île de la Cité on a beautiful sunny morning, passing many of the historic buildings on one side and coming back on the other. You really do see things from a different perspective. And there’s the variety in the numerous bridges which you pass under.

The third thing we did was to take an organized walking tour. My wife found a company, Free City Tours via the iPhone TripAdvisor app. No charge up front and you pay what you think it was worth with a tip to the guide at the end.

We took their Classic Paris tour, starting at Place de la Concorde, site of the guillotine during the revolution and still the heart of political Paris. During the two hours or so of the walk, we took in the Grand and Petit Palais, posh shops on Avenue Montaigne, a stretch of the Champs Elysées, Avenue George Cinq, and finishing near where Princess Diana’s life ended in a subway car crash.

To finish, just a few words on living in someone else’s flat for a week. The Parisian character and whacky style of its occupants knocked us all out. It was also much more comfortable and convenient than staying in a hotel. However, there was a niggling problem with the toilet flush which did little to confound British stereotypes of French sanitary arrangements.

Then there are the neighbours.

We were pretty lucky in this respect, except that the person upstairs took advantage of weekend idleness to play music quite loudly until about 4am on both Friday and Saturday nights. This didn’t do much to help any of us overcome strange-bed syndrome which had disrupted our sleeping patterns a bit.

But breakfast of delicious French pastries bought from across the road and eaten with the sun streaming in through the open French windows, somehow always seemed to drive those nighttime disruptions away and start the day on an up beat.

INFORMATION

Ian and his family found their apartment through www.lodgis.com

If you need wheelchair accessible rented accommodation, a Google search brings up plenty of options.

Eurostar from London St Pancras International to Paris Gare du Nord International: Midweek (Tuesday to Thursday) x1 adult from £124.50 (£212 for one adult and one child); Weekend (Friday to Sunday) x1 adult from £79.50 (£135 for one adult and one child)