1. When you live in Paris, it’s easy to forget that you live in, well, Paris. Before I was a tour guide, my day to day nearly never brought me in front of some of Paris’ most famous monuments (despite the fact that for years, I dreamed of living in Montmartre near the pristine white basilica of Sacré Coeur. Oh, who am I kidding – I still dream of that.)
2. But while my job certainly takes me to the Louvre and to Père Lachaise cemetery, other monuments have crept into my daily life in a much more innocuous way. Notre Dame sits just across the river from one of my favorite bookshops in Paris, Shakespeare and Company (and from one of my favorite cream puff shops, Odette – win-win).
3. Place Vendome overlooks the Tuileries gardens, where I often find myself walking between the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, where I can catch a train to the library.
4. I see the Arc de Triomphe admittedly rarely: I spend as little time on the Champs Elysées as humanly possible, and seeing as this year the annual Christmas market has been cancelled, that will be even less than usual. But I did make it down there to see when the famous avenue was close to cars, welcoming pedestrians to walk along the center road, and I also passed it one memorable evening when a former colleague of mine and I saw that the 1 train was stopped (and RATP workers had no idea when it would start again), and we decided to walk home… from Neuilly.
5. Believe it or not, the iconic Eiffel Tower is the Paris monument I see most often. The American Library sits on one side of the Champ de Mars leading up to it, and The Country Boy’s office on the other. Whenever I pop over to say hello, I get to see this beautiful lady, too.