So now that we’ve been here for a week and a half, I’m sure everyone is curious about where we are staying while we’re in Paris.  We’ve rented an apartment in a neighborhood called Le Marais.  Paris is divided into 20 arrondissements, and we are staying in the 4th, very centrally located.  We are about 15 minutes walk from Notre Dame, 20 minutes from the Latin Quarter, 20 minutes from the Louvre.  We can also walk to the Eiffel Tower, although that would probably take 45 minutes to get there.  In any case, we love being in the heart of the city.  During our last visit, we were in the 10th arrondissement which was further out, and while we liked the cultural diversity of that neighborhood (lots if immigrants made for interesting sights and foods), we had to take the metro to get to most of where we wanted to be.  It’s nice to be within walking distance of so many things this time around.

I can’t remember if we rented our apartment on Air BnB or vrbo.com or another rental website.  In any case, when we travel, we prefer to rent apartments rather than stay in hotels.  Of course, on this trip, we never would have been able to afford to stay in a hotel for such a long visit.  However, even when we do short weekend trips in the States, we frequently will rent an apartment.  Apartment rentals are great because you can have more room to spread out than in a typical hotel room, you don’t have to worry about housekeeping interrupting if you want to spend the morning reading or writing blog posts, and you can prepare meals at home instead of eating restaurant meals 3 times a day.  Also, for me, a big reason for this particular trip was to “live” in Paris and be a parisienne, if only for a month.  What better way to do so than to stay in a cozy apartment, go to the grocery store and markets, and develop some daily and weekly habits to go along with it all.  Speaking of weekly habits, our apartment has a washing machine, so one of the weekend tasks is to do laundry.  (See first blog post about traveling lightly.)  Doing laundry is not a glamorous job by any means; however, there is something pretty awesome about being on vacation long enough that you have to do laundry to get through the next week.  I know plenty of people who would hate to do laundry while on vacation.  From my perspective, though, I would much rather do laundry in Paris than in Atlanta.  I’m just saying.

So, here are some photos of our apartment, starting with the exterior.

Our apartment is above the yellow awning on the 4th floor.  You can see Chad in the open window on the left.  What’s interesting is that our apartment is in the yellow-awning building, but we get to our apartment through a door in the building to the left.  If you look closely, there is a guy entering the door behind that dude who is wearing a gray sweater and jeans and waiting to use the crosswalk.

Once you enter the building, you go past the mailboxes and through a gate.

Then you go up some old, tight, uneven spiral stairs for 3 flights and get dizzy.

Inside our apartment, we have 4-ish rooms – living room, bedroom, kitchen, and a bathroom.  To get to the bathroom, you walk through a “bonus room” (in American real estate terms) which is not really a habitable room but which has some storage space and a closet.  Here’s our living rooom:

Here’s the bedroom:

The kitchen:

And then there is this extra room with storage:

In the back left corner is the door to the bathroom:

We also have some great views from our apartment:

The apartment is not huge, but it’s larger than the last apartment we had in Paris which was a teeny-tiny studio apartment in the attic of a building on the 7th floor with no elevator and a sloping roof that you would hit your head on while preparing food in the kitchen.  In any case, Chad and I have shared enough tiny apartments that we can live anywhere together.