Paris

Paris is the city most people put into a rail trip first and think about least. The default itinerary writes itself — tower, big museum, cathedral, arch — and it is a dependable way to spend two days in queues and leave feeling held at arm's length. None of it is bad. It is just not how the city gets used by people who live here, and it costs about four times as much.

What follows is a Paris arranged around the other rhythm: a market before lunch, a long cheap meal, an afternoon that goes indoors if it rains, and an evening that starts late and happens on the ground beside water.

The one museum worth a whole morning

If you give a single museum a proper morning, give it to the Musée d'Orsay, and go partly for the building. The Gare d'Orsay opened in 1900 as the terminus for electric trains running down to south-west France, and lasted thirty-nine years before the platforms proved too short for longer trains. It spent the war as a parcel depot, turned up later as a film set, and became a museum in 1986. The central nave still reads as a train shed — glass roof overhead, a gilt station clock at the far end, sculpture where the platforms were.

The Impressionists are on the fifth floor, and behind them sits the second station clock, whose face you can look straight through at the Seine and the roofline of the Louvre. Two practicalities: the museum shuts on Mondays, and on Thursdays it stays open until 21:45 with a cheaper evening ticket. If you are an EU or EEA resident under 26 — which describes a lot of people travelling on a rail pass — you get in free here and at most French national museums. Bring the ID that proves it.

Coloured glass, and a cathedral people are still getting used to

Sainte-Chapelle takes about forty-five minutes, and it is worth arranging your afternoon around the weather. Louis IX had it built between 1242 and 1248 to hold the Crown of Thorns, and the accounting is the part that sticks: the relics cost him something like 135,000 livres, the building around 40,000. Go up the narrow stair to the upper chapel on a bright day and the fifteen windows — 1,113 scenes of glass — explain the arithmetic better than any label does.

Ten minutes away, Notre-Dame reopened on 8 December 2024, five years after the fire. The restoration stripped centuries of candle soot and city grime off the interior stone, so the nave is back to the sand colour it was built in rather than the grey it had turned. Entry is free; reserve a timed slot in the cathedral's app, or turn up when the doors open.

Outdoors: a cemetery, a canal, and the river itself

Père-Lachaise is 44 hectares of cobbled avenues and uneven tree-lined paths, laid out in 1804 by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart on what was then a hill outside the city. Most people arrive with a list — Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Édith Piaf — and that list is a fine excuse. What stays with you is the Mur des Fédérés, the wall where 147 fighters of the Paris Commune were shot on 28 May 1871. Entry is free, and from mid-April to the end of October staff hand out free maps from a delivery tricycle at the Porte des Amandiers, opposite the Père Lachaise métro.

The Canal Saint-Martin is where the tenth arrondissement goes to sit down. Nine locks step boats up through it, two of the four road bridges swing aside to let them by, and everything on the quay stops while they do. On Sundays the Quai de Valmy and the Quai de Jemmapes close to cars and the cobbles fill with people, bottles and food out of paper bags. Buy that beforehand — the canal has cafés, but the ritual is bringing your own.

The new thing is that you can swim in the Seine. After the clean-up built for the 2024 Olympics, public bathing returned in 2025, and in 2026 three river sites run free and unbooked from 4 July to 30 August: Bras Marie at the foot of the Pont Louis-Philippe (8am–6pm), Bercy opposite the national library (11am–9pm, the one that runs into the evening), and Grenelle facing the Île aux Cygnes. Lifeguards watch you swim a few strokes before letting you in, and an inflatable float clipped round your waist is compulsory however strong a swimmer you are. Water is tested daily and a site doesn't open if the reading is wrong, which usually means after heavy rain.

For an afternoon with a hill, the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont was a gypsum quarry until Alphand opened it as a park in 1867, leaving a 50-metre cliff with a copy of a Roman temple on top and a 20-metre waterfall in a grotto of artificial stalactites.

Eating without making it an occasion

The Marché d'Aligre in the twelfth is three markets on one square: open-air produce stalls, the covered Beauvau hall behind them, and a small brocante of second-hand books and furniture. It closes on Mondays and packs up by early afternoon, so it is a morning, not a plan B. Next to it on rue Théophile-Roussel is Le Baron Rouge, a bar with wooden barrels by the door; bring a bottle or buy one and they will fill it from the barrel. From September to April a man shucks oysters outside at the weekend and the crowd drinks on the pavement.

For dinner, Bouillon Chartier on rue du Faubourg Montmartre has been feeding people since 1896 in a mirrored Belle Époque room, brass napkin racks and all. There are no reservations, you will share a table with strangers, and the waiter adds your bill up in pen on the paper tablecloth. Starters begin around a euro and main courses around seven. Arrive at 11:30 or after 21:30 to skip the queue.

Late

The Caveau de la Huchette, down a stone staircase in the Latin Quarter, has been running live jazz in a cellar since the 1940s — Sidney Bechet, Lionel Hampton and Count Basie all played the room. Three sets a night start at 21:30, the small floor fills with swing dancers who have obviously been doing this for years, and Monday is an open jam. Entry is a little over ten euros, less for students under 25, and the doors stay open until 2am. Nobody minds if you cannot dance.