“Everybody leaves Paris for the Summer; nobody is there but tourists.” Almost everybody I talked to about going to Paris in the summer.
First, a couple of caveats: we are not actually staying in the Paris of the guidebooks, we are one stop on the Metro – subway – past the ring road that defines the edge of the tourist Paris, and eight stops from the Bastille station. Every morning, we walk a couple of blocks, catch the Metro, and get off somewhere near an amazing monument or museum. Every day, no matter what time, the Metro is crowded with a mix of tourists and locals (mostly locals). I was prepared to be intimidated by Paris, having been told that it is pretty formal, that nobody wears shorts, but the July Paris, this July Paris at least, is less formal than San Francisco (I brought a blazer and slacks that I’ve never even taken out of the suitcase). At first, I thought it was just the tasteless tourists that were wearing shorts, but my mind got changed when we were having dinner in a nice restaurant near the Pompidou Center, and a local couple came in with the guy in cargo shorts (we knew they were local because they kissed the owner on both cheeks).
At first, Paris seemed impossibly huge but, walking around, it seems to me that it is not so much huge as dense. I have no idea how many museums are in Paris but we hardly scratched the surface and didn’t see several that we were near the top of my list, like the Musee National Du Moyen Age that Linda Melton recommended or the Musee des Arts et Metiers or, or, or….
It may be impossible to get a lousy meal in Paris but a truly memorable meal is not that easy and certainly not very cheap.
After French, the language we heard on the street the most was English which is certainly not a surprise, but it was a surprise that the third most heard language was Chinese. There are Chinese tourists everywhere and not just in groups, there are lots of Chinese families in Paris, I’m thinking they are the new Americans.
One surprising thing to me – although it shouldn’t have been given the number of bombings – is the strong, militarized, police presence (usually one of them is carrying an assault rifle)
Two last things, the Parisians are very serious about both cars – many of which we can’t get here – and graffiti.
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A week in Lyon is probably not enough, but a week in Paris is crazy not enough.
Everybody I know loves Paris, it is impossible not to. Walking around it – her? – it feels like we are at the center of the kind of civilization we all want, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” and, I want to add, “Civility”. It seems to me that one of the things that give Paris that feel is its lousy housing. It is hot here, slightly under or slightly over 90° every day and most people live in small apartments in old, masonry, buildings, without air conditioning – or, even, much in cross-ventilation – so people live much of their private lives in public. If, at the end of the day, you want to wind down by reading a book, it is much more comfortable outside in a park or along the cooling Seine. 
If you want to get together with a friend for a glass of wine, it is more comfortable to meet at a local bistro where we are all jammed together. 
I think this public living is a good part of what makes Paris so attractive; it promotes tolerance and community, equality and fraternity, a Civilized world. 
Ok, I want to start with a disclaimer, I’m not a gothic guy. I know that Notre-Dame is great and I feel a little guilty that I don’t like it better, but… 
…the Panthéon, a Neoclassical Church dedicated to Secular Humanism, now that’s a Church. 
And, under the Church, in a vast Crypt area – simple and unadorned – the National Intellectual Heros are buried; the people who made France, France. This is so Civilized, so French, it brings me to tears and a big smile at the same time. We came to see Émile Zola, my family’s personal intellectual saint, and there he was, honorably laid to rest in the same room as Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. 
As an aside, this year, 
The Louvre is fantastic and, to my way of thinking, it is I.M. Pie’s Pyramid that makes the museum great rather than just a huge old building stuffed with iconic art (I.M. Pie being an out-of-town architect, of course). Stuck in the middle of the Cour Napoléon, between the wings of the Louvre complex, the Pyramid provides a Grand Entrance and, more importantly, a crowd dispersal and distribution system. The Pyramid also brings the museum complex to life and it is fun to see our fellow tourists interact with it.
After hours of wandering through galleries of famous paintings memorializing once famous people, often behind crowds of smartphone photographers, we came to the Wedding at Cana by Veronese. It is, of course, famous for showing the first selfie, a once famous nobleman taking a selfie with the eternally famous Jesus.
I have been taking pictures of the Madonna and Child statues that decorated the entrances pre-Renaissance churches and cathedrals because the variety of interpretations and expressions fascinated me, but I was overwhelmed by the number of Madonna and Child paintings at the Louvre. Most were great, some familiar from long-forgotten history or art books, and many showing a very white Jesus. 
The Louvre has a huge collection of Egyptian artifacts, most looted from Egypt during Napoleon’s conquest and towards the end of the day, we wandered into that area to see for ourselves. I’m glad we did but, while the sheer amount of artifacts the French looted is disturbing, the quality of the Egyptian sculpture, much of it over 3,000 years old, is the most shocking. This is representational art, not archetypical, and the feelings evoked by seeing real people, over three thousand years old – holding hands or with an arm around a loved one’s back – is chilling. 
Paris is sort of like the Louvre, writ large. Impossibly big and dense, impossible to see even a tiny bit in less than, say, five years – it would be easy to get lost for a week just looking at the ceiling paintings in the Louvre, hell, it would take a week to just see all the column capitals – and very familiar because it has been painted and photographed ad nauseam. 
