We arrived at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport from Munich after a reasonably pleasant wait, helped by Lufthansa supplying free coffee, tea and newspapers at the gate. Pauline managed to sleep for a while. The cost of things in Europe became immediately apparent when I bought two bottles of water and was charged 7.4 euros – that’s around $8 NZ for a bottle of water! Anyway we liked the terminal, it is a late ’60s concrete structure a bit like the beehive and has Jetsons-like plastic tubes with travellators running along them taking you places. We caught the Air France bus to Gare de Lyon, and caught a taxi playing Louis Armstrong rather loudly to The Hotel Minerve. The traffic and standard of driving here has been commented on many times but they certainly drive with a lot of flair – lots of scooters and motorcycles and taxis and buses all mixing it up quite aggressively but they seem to know what they are doing.
The hotel is very nice, it’s ideally situated on the left bank a couple of blocks from the river Seine, not too far from Notre Dame. The Pantheon and the Sorbonne are also close by. There’s a shop across the road that sells crepes and bread rolls with cheese and ham which we usually go to for breakfast. There are several small grocer sorts of shops that sell fresh fruit, beer and wine. And there are any number of little cafes and bistros with chairs on the pavement and reasonable prices for dinner. Here’s a photo of Pauline at the one across the road, with our hotel in the background:
Lepod's Blog 
Leave a comment