Traffic in both cities was a total chaotic free-for-all of vehicles, pedestrians and bicyclists—it was common to see business people on bikes on their work (or perhaps on their way to lunch or meetings, often on electric Lime bikes) darting in and out of traffic and swerving around moving vehicles. I had one flagrant ignorant American tourist moment when a green walk light turned red on me while I was taking an iPhone video lol—a van gunned towards me when their light turned green and I am not exaggerating that I would have been hit had I not quickly hopped onto the curb lol. (To be fair, the pedestrian lights do not flash to warn pedestrians the light is about to turn red—they just turn red.)
Though the weather app called for rain most days, at worst we had a brief light drizzle a couple days. Because of that unpredictable North Atlantic weather, however, the cloud cover made for spectacular photos.
We did not know our mobile devices automatically tracked your steps until our daughter told us when we got home (I thought it had to be set up). We averaged walking more than 6 miles a day!
We had heard Parisians love late dinners and nights. After dinner on our last night, when we got on the Metro at around 10:45 p.m., the Metro was PACKED shoulder to shoulder! (It was like that as well when we headed out, which was admittedly during rush hour.)
Our hotel in London was in a pretty hopping area, right next to an Underground Station (Queensway) and around the corner from a narrow lively street full of fast food and ethnic restaurants and other shops. In contrast, our Paris hotel was in a quiet neighborhood called Passy—we later discovered that Passy is a rather posh neighborhood (there was a small Chanel store down the street) where Benjamin Franklin and Balzac both resided. At first we were concerned we were away from food and convenience stores, but we soon discovered that, like many Paris neighborhoods, there were plenty of local cafes and restaurants. In the mornings, we would see people on their way to work and children with their au pairs/nannies.
In fact, we discovered an underground market across the way—and on our last day, when exploring further, discovered that there was a modern two-level underground mall underneath some old classic buildings—one of the stores was a huge toy store! We wished we had more time to explore the neighborhood—in fact, we discovered a comics store on our last day there (but it was closed.)
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