Hip-itty, Hop-itty, On-itty, Off-itty Bus

“Paris was all so… Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all – the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really quite small children, speaking fluent French!”

David Nicholls, Us

Sites/Topics covered in this post:

Go-Date: Day 124, Sunday, May 26 (Happy Mothers’ Day)

Lesson Learned:  Ellen discovered her new favorite drink, the Spritz Veneziano or Aperol Spritz, or just call it a plain old Spritz.

While sitting in a Paris café on our first evening in France we sat next to a couple about the same age as our girls (Nancy, Katie, & Mary Frances) so around 30 to 35. He was drinking red wine (of course, we are in France) and she was having a bright orange fizzy drink served in a tall/large wine glass with hard-to-find-in-a-European-café ice, and a thin slice of orange bobbing happily in the bright fluid like a 2-year-old wearing floaties at the public pool.

Ellen asked what she was drinking, and along with the reply of a “Spritz”, came an hour-long friendly discussion.

The Spritz, is an Italian wine-based cocktail, commonly served as an apéritif (which means cocktail or welcoming drink in Italian) from the Northeast part of Italy. It’s cool, light, bubbly, and great for a warm afternoon refresher. The drink originated in Padua (a region in Italy) while it was part of the Austrian Empire, and is based on the Austrian spritzer, which is a combination of equal parts white wine and soda water. Today the main ingredient for the drink is an apéritif,which is an alcoholic beverage usually dry rather than sweet. Common choices for an apéritif are vermouth; champagne; pastis; gin; rakı; fino, amontillado or other styles of dry sherry; Aperol; Campari; or any still, dry, light white wine.

The two most common apéritifs in a Spritz are Aperol and Campari (you can tell which is used by the orange or red color), but these days, there are lots of options out there for your own personal Spritz that range from sweet to bittersweet to just plain bitter. It does mean, however, that the ones you order in a café may vary due to the personal preference of the drink master.

In Venice, the Venetians have their own special Aperitivo called Select. Supposedly it has a better balanced sweet to bitter ratio, somewhere in between Aperol and Campari. The problem may be finding it outside of Italy (so I have read), but what better reason to make a trip to Italy.

Common apéritif choices include:

Aperol is on the sweeter end of the spectrum, which is probably why it is the more popular apéritif. It has a sweet citrusy flavor and a distinctive bright orange hue (thus the vibrant color sure to attract humming birds). Most people associate the spritz cocktail with Aperol, but it is just one of numerous apéritifs used to make the Spritz.

Campari is often used (but less than Aperol) is more bitter, with a deep red color and bigger kick due to a higher alcohol content. It has cherry/herbal undertones with a trace of cinnamon seasoning.

Cappelletti, is a wine-based apéritif that falls somewhere in between the bitterness of  Aperol and Campari. It has a taste of citrus, vanilla, and cola, which gives this drink a ruby red color.

Ingredients:

Directions:

Now, you are ready to chill and enjoy the end of your day just like you are in Paris.

Open Air View of Paris

A tour of Paris on one of the various hop-on, hop-off buses is one of the most pain-free ways to experience the city and give you a feel for the city and its many districts and neighborhoods. These double-decker buses give you a birds-eye view of the streets and sights in a bang-bang manner so you can judge what you want to explore and how far apart these sights are from each other. Sure, we look at maps and can tell how long it should take to get from point to point, but you’ll sure to find some things along the tour that you never even thought about.

You can see the sights from your seat as you’re driven through the streets of the city, while listening to the recorded commentary in the language of your choice.  

I didn’t count them, but in Paris there are at least 5 different companies you can choose from. We had several criteria we used to pick the best one for us, including:

Prices vary a little, but if it costs less, you may get less. We knew the main sights we wanted to see, the arrondissements we wanted to pass through, but not much else. So, we picked the Big Bus Tours, which we have used before in other countries. It’s been around for a while running buses since 1991. The cost for the bus was 35 Euros a ticket for one day, but we opted for the 48-hour ticket which costs 38 Euros, or 76 Euros for the both of us ($84.54 total).

Big Bus has two routes. The blue route covers northern sites in the city, while the red line covers the south (including both the Left and Right Banks). It doesn’t go very far over the Seine and it won’t go by sights like the Catacombs or Père Lachaise Cemetery (resting place for Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde and many, many others). I’ll attach a map, but you should select what works best for you.

Our strategy is to ride the entire route, hop off and ride the other route, and then ride the bus to the sites you want to visit first. That’s our strategy, though we never seem to make it all the way through without jumping off for lunch, or some sight that really grabs our attention. Check for the times, ours began at 9:30 and the last pick-up (for the entire loop) was at 5:45 (17:45 over here). Traffic can be bad, so a single loop may take as long as 2 hours or more. You can also buy a ticket that lets you take a boat ride on the Seine. We will do that, but we’ll pick our own boat. It’s a good introduction to the city.

Blue Route

Red Route

These are the sites visitors flock to Paris to see. The bus rolls right past all of them. We pick what we want to jump off and see and note what metro stations are close so we can zip over to them on the subway after our time on the Big Bus is over.

Enjoy the pics. We enjoyed seeing the sights.

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