France in Three Cities — A Summer Paris, a Winter Paris, and a Borderland Called Strasbourg

France in Three Cities

A country we've now visited three times across three different seasons — Paris in summer 2022, Strasbourg from Stuttgart in June 2024, and Paris again in February 2025 — and one that keeps reshaping itself depending on which trip we look back from.

France for us is two Parises and a borderland. The summer Paris was Iron Lady-and-icons — three days of chasing every postcard image we'd grown up with, ticking off the Eiffel, queueing for the Mona Lisa, eating croissants at Café Louise, getting drenched buying macarons in Montmartre, and waving an Indian flag at Trocadero on 15 August. The winter Paris was the opposite — Canal Saint-Martin in mist, Musée d'Orsay instead of the Louvre, Père Lachaise instead of the Tour, and 19th-century covered passages with antiquarian shops still doing quiet business. And Strasbourg, an hour from the German border, was the surprise of all three: half-timbered Alsatian houses and tarte flambée served under a 142-metre Gothic cathedral that was for 227 years the tallest building in the world. Three cities. Three trips. One running discovery that France gives you something different each time you go.

📍 Tip: Every city heading below — Paris 2022, Paris 2025, Strasbourg — is clickable. Tap any to dive into the day-by-day city story.

Paris 2022 — Three Days with the Iron Lady, Macarons & Mixed Feelings

Paris is not a place that can be covered in a few days, and we tried anyway. We rolled into Bercy Seine from Prague after a 13-hour bus I'd booked by mistake (long story), took the metro to Trocadero, dragged our suitcases across cobblestones for our first eyeful of the Iron Lady, and settled into a studio at 43 Rue Spontini that felt like the apartment I'd quietly fantasised about for years — small, smart, full of light, the kind of place I've still not managed to build for myself in India. Day 1 finished on the second-last Seine river cruise of the night, the 10:40 p.m. one, watching every monument shift shape under the floodlights. Day 2 was the contradiction in a single afternoon: Café Louise croissants, the Mona Lisa as the trip's first proper disappointment (smaller than imagined, mobbed by phones, behind layers of glass and shoulders), Flyview's 360° VR ride, then Montmartre walking tour with Dalida-statue trivia, Sacré-Cœur photos, and a soaked-through walk back through Parisian rain with a bag of macarons. Day 3 was 15 August — Indian Independence Day — and our guide Hexcel ran us up the Eiffel through the long queues to the first and second floors. We waved an Indian flag with other homesick Indians at Trocadero, said goodbye to Rue Spontini, watched the city from the Montparnasse 56th floor (a quieter, cheaper view), and caught the FlixBus to Zurich with hungry stomachs and heavy hearts. The honest verdict on Paris: "a place who is holding a lot, and seen a lot in the past. The city that can act as a mirror and reflects your mood. The Iron Lady can be mesmerising, or wasteful, or worthless — depending on which perception you are looking from."

Paris 2025 — Returning to Find What We Missed the First Time

The second time you visit a city, you see it differently. The first time, you're chasing icons. The second time, you already know — and in knowing, you get to choose something else. We returned to Paris in February 2025 with one deliberate rule: nothing we'd already done. No Louvre, no Notre-Dame queue, no Montmartre by day. Instead the Canal Saint-Martin in winter — quieter, mist hanging over the water, bare plane trees making architectural patterns against grey sky — walked end to end (~4.5 km) through the République, Oberkampf and Goncourt neighbourhoods where a younger, working Paris lives. The Musée d'Orsay, housed in a Beaux-Arts railway station, won the museum argument over the Louvre — Impressionism in a building with the great clock faces of the former station embedded in the upper level, Monet's water lilies and Van Gogh's self-portraits in the old concourse. Père Lachaise Cemetery turned out to be one of the more genuinely moving experiences Paris offers — Oscar Wilde's lipstick-kissed glass-encased tomb, Jim Morrison's grave, but more than the famous names, the older sections where families over three centuries had built miniature Gothic mausoleums, statues frozen mid-grief, photographs faded but still present. And the passages couverts — 19th-century covered shopping arcades with glass roofs and mosaic floors that twenty of still survive — where we ducked out of February rain in the Galerie Vivienne and Passage des Panoramas, browsed philatelists and rare-book dealers and vintage map shops, and bought a 1920s illustrated postcard that felt Paris was keeping just for us.

Strasbourg — Half-Timbered Houses, Tarte Flambée & a Cathedral That Stopped Us Cold

Strasbourg is what happens when two countries can't agree on a city and eventually decide to share it. Historically passed between France and Germany four times in the last 150 years, it now sits in France's Alsace region, speaking French, eating choucroute, and yet surrounded by half-timbered houses and a Gothic cathedral that clearly learned its ambitions from the Rhine Valley. We arrived from Stuttgart by TGV — a journey of about 50 minutes that feels like a genuine miracle of engineering — and walked straight from the lovely German-Historicist Gare Centrale toward the cathedral spire on the horizon. The Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Strasbourg was, for 227 years, the world's tallest building: a single spire reaching 142 metres, covered in filigree sandstone carving so detailed that you can lose an hour just tracing patterns at the base. Inside, the Astronomical Clock runs through its 16th-century mechanical procession at 12:30 each day — figures representing the ages of man, the days of the week, and the Death figure striking the hour — watched in shared, slightly awed silence with 200 other people. We climbed the 330 steps of the platform for a view over the city's terracotta rooftops, the Rhine visible in the distance, the Black Forest beyond it. La Petite France — the historic tanners' island — delivered the postcard: medieval half-timbered houses with overhanging upper stories and flower-box windows leaning over narrow canal streets, where we ate two tarte flambées standing up at a winstub because the table wait was long. The Alsatian table is its own celebration: baeckeoffe (a slow-cooked casserole of three meats marinated in Alsatian white wine), kugelhopf for breakfast or dessert without distinction, and Riesling that is light and clean and frankly excellent. We walked the perimeter of the European Parliament quarter, felt appropriately multilateral, and then went back to eat more tarte flambée.

Final Reflection