Paris - The most romantic place to visit in most peoples top five list of must see cities in the world. Well it certainly had a lot of impressive buildings and attractions to see and we definitely enjoyed our stay but more because we made our own fun than anything else. The Paris that you may not have heard about includes sketchy people loitering around metro stations for no apparent reason, beggers on the steps of every site, Nigerians blocking pathways in order to tie strings on your finger and then demand money and scammers trying to get people to sign petitions with some fine print outlining that you are signing money away. Luckily we've been at the travel game for quite long enough to know who and what to avoid but this didn't stop us almost getting into a bit of a situation with the Nigerians getting very confrontational.

We've been to quite a few big cities so the "less attractive" side of Paris was nothing new but we would certainly not go around bandying the term "most romantic city" about the place. We were unfortunate with the weather which probably didn't help things but the city can't be blamed for that. Having said that, it was a remarkable city to walk around with an overload of huge, impressive buildings.

We decided to try out the city bike sharing system which was an experience on its own. We had quite forgotten how to ride in traffic and the bike lanes kept disappearing or the roads just turned into one way roads without us knowing. In the end Jansen found any excuse to walk from place to place which was probably for the better.

Definitely worth the visit but, as expected, didn't quite live up to its reputation.