Paris, France: Exploring, Traveling and Takeaways
The entire trip started because I was scrolling flights I had no business scrolling and found a one-way ticket from LAX to Paris for two hundred dollars.
(Which is roughly what I had spent on dinner the week before, and which felt less like a bargain and more like a dare).
My little sister Renee was about to turn twenty, and she is, I am happy to report, exactly as unserious about spontaneity as I am, so I sent her the link and she booked it before I had finished talking myself into it. We built the rest of the trip backward from that flight: Paris, then a small island off the coast of Spain called Menorca, then England.
I had been to Paris before and Renee had not.
She made it clear she did not want to see landmarks. She wanted to live there for a week. She had no interest in lines or bucket lists. I had already done the version of Paris where I saw everything, so our priority became what she wanted.
We stayed in a small Airbnb in the neighborhood where the Catacombs are, quiet and residential, we waved to our neighbors in the morning on the way to get groceries.
There was a market nearby and shopping became a ritual of every morning in a manner best described as maybe forty-five minutes because Renee was deciding between tomatoes.
We came back loaded up with a baguette and tomatoes still warm from sitting in the sun, with fruit and cheese and coffee, and laid all of it out on our little dining table and cooked breakfast. We ate slowly, sat for a while, took photographs, wrote in our journals and half-heartedly assembled a plan for the day that we would then almost entirely abandon.
Those two hours every morning were my favorite part of Paris and nothing remarkable happened inside a single one of them. They just were.
Then there was swimming. I still have trouble believing that you can swim in the Seine now.
Swimming had been banned since 1923 because of water pollution This year three supervised sites opened in July 2025 after a cleanup of about 1.4 billion euros so the river could host the Olympic events the summer before. One site sits near Notre-Dame, the other near the Eiffel Tower, and the third to the east of the city. They were all free to get in and we went to all three, every day.
There we were in Paris, in the seine, in August. We made friends. We floated. We got out and ate baguette sandwiches from our coffee shop and laid in the sun until we were dry again and went back in.
What I keep returning to is how somebody decided that people in this city should be able to swim in their own river in the summer, and then spent an enormous amount of public money making the water clean enough for that to be true, and then simply opened it and let people in.
We spent whole afternoons in parks doing very little.
Lying in the grass with the sun on us. Watching a picnic set up two trees over, and teenagers on a blanket next to a family with a stroller, everybody using the same lawn. There are playgrounds and there are fountains and there are places where a child can be as loud as they want, and they are in every arrondissement.
We went to the Jardin des Plantes, a magical fairy garden corner.The parks and the unfenced grass and the river and the ordinary daily pleasures of the place are simply present. Offered.
I went to Paris expecting beauty, having been before and knowing more or less what the city looks like.
What I had not anticipated was generosity, a city handing out sunlight and water and somewhere to sit and asking nothing back for any of it.
We wandered. We learned a genuinely embarrassing quantity of French, enough to order with confidence and then panic when someone answered. We shopped a little and both came home with shoes. We ate crepes. We talked for hours.
I have traveled with a lot of people and with Renee nobody had to argue for anything, because neither of us wanted to do much. Cooking, swimming, sitting in grass. That was the trip.
I had packed for a city and gotten a summer instead.
We got both. We had the city, the noise and the beauty and the walking until our feet quit, and we also had these pockets of quiet nature, fresh food and cold water and warm ground and room to breathe in the middle of it all. That is what I brought home, rather than a list of what I saw. My sister, nearly twenty and me some years past it, both of us slightly sunburned, floating in a river in the middle of Paris with absolutely nowhere else to be.
Aloreign is the creative work of Alondra: an Indigenous American and Mexican photographer, writer, and therapist based in San Diego
This is my create space for photography, writing, and everything that doesn’t fit nearly into one category. I’d love to connect.