Why Paris? This is a city with a timeless familiarity, but which is constantly evolving. This is France's famously insular capital, which draws more visitors than anywhere else in the world. Here in the City of Light you'll gaze out on graceful illuminations, drink dark coffee, and find darker echoes of philosophy. Paris is a patchwork of separate intimate villages sewn together to create this singular sprawling, breathing metropolis which has a clearer cut character than any other city. Paris is a place of contrasts.
Where do you start? Paris spirals outwards like a snail, its shell split into twenty arrondissements, (city districts) each section with a distinct and different colour and character. You can begin with the famous and the familiar, scaling Paris's gracefully symbolic iron-lattice, the Eiffel Tower, before ending up in a street-art adorned bar in a suburban neighbourhood, and spying art nouveau relics. Here, you can wander into a flagship haute couture house, hop on the metro and be deep within bohemia at a boutique pop-up shop in a heartbeat. Or bustle through the glorious maze of food stalls in the Marais, following the surging crowds and your nose to fresh fluffy bread, savoury cheese and sweet macaroons before retreating to the lungs of Paris, the lush green spaces of Jardin des Plantes or the privacy of a ZZZ box.
You'll probably fall in love with Paris because it's alive, thriving: joyous proof that a city can love the trappings of the contemporary world without forgetting or fossilising it's past.