Paris: Montmartre

When we arrived in Paris, we went straight to our Airbnb in Montmartre. Something funny is that we booked the same Airbnb that I had booked with a friend when I came to Paris three years ago!

All the streets around our studio apartment were exactly what you would imagine when thinking of Paris - bakeries with gorgeous pastries on display, restaurants with locals at tiny tables outside, ancient buildings with terraces on every window. We loved walking past the Fromagerie (cheese shop) and so many cafes! We picked up some groceries (mostly cheese and fruit!) at local supermarkets to have for our breakfasts. 

It was extremely hot the whole time we were there so we chose to climb the 300 stairs to the top of the Sacré-Coeur in the morning when the sun wasn’t at its hottest. (Something about Montmartre - there are so many stairs! Montmatre is technically all on a hill, and there are almost 40 staircases in the area! So just getting to the Sacré-Coeur is a leg workout and then to climb 300 more stairs is exhausting! But in our opinion, it was worth it! It only cost about 5 euros to climb to the top and it was a gorgeous panoramic view of Paris. It is a very touristy thing to do but we didn’t even need to wait in line, perhaps because we went in the morning? 

Right on the other side of the Sacré-Coeur is Place due Tertre, also known as the Artist’s Square. Cafes with dozens of umbrellaed tables, gelato shops, and so many artists selling their work and offering to paint a portrait of you! This is a huge tourist area, but so fun, as there are so many shops to see! 

There are many famous restaurants that you have probably seen on instagram, like La Consulat and La Maison Rose, which would be a fun place to eat or take pictures. There are also a few windmills in Montmartre (there used to be hundreds!) which would make for a fun scavenger hunt, the most notable being the Moulin Rouge, but we didn’t head down to that area. 

We spent a lot of our time in Paris just exploring Montmartre, my favorite part by far! 

- Jess