Most lists of things to do in Paris hand you the same four items: the Tower, the Louvre, a queue, a boat. You can do all of it and still come home feeling like you saw Paris through glass. The city people actually fall for is smaller and quieter — a warm bakery at eight in the morning, a museum almost to yourself on a Thursday night, a bottle of wine on the river as the lights come on.
This is that Paris: five things to do in Paris that earn their place, with the details that make the difference. And at the end, the part nobody plans for — how to turn it into a travel journal or scrapbook page once you’re home and the photos start to blur.
Table of Contents
Things to do in Paris before nine: start at the boulangerie
The most Parisian hour of your day costs about four euros. Find the neighbourhood bakery with a small queue of locals — and here’s the trick most visitors miss: French bakeries are required to close one day a week, on a rolling rota, so the one that’s open and busy is the one the street trusts. Order a pain au chocolat and a noisette (an espresso with a drop of milk), and eat it walking.
Do it near the Luxembourg Gardens just after they open, when it’s joggers and old men with newspapers and almost no one else. That half hour will outrank half the monuments on your list.
One museum, done right — and it’s probably not the Louvre
Of all the things to do in Paris, the Louvre is the one most likely to eat a full day and leave you numb in front of your fourth hallway of marble. Unless there’s a specific painting you came for, give it a miss — or go for exactly one thing (the Winged Victory of Samothrace, mid-staircase, is the one that earns the visit) and walk out without guilt.
The better afternoon is the Musée d’Orsay, across the river in a converted railway station. Go on a Thursday: it stays open until 9:45pm and empties out after six. The Impressionists everyone pictures when they think of Paris — Monet, Degas, Renoir — are up on the top floor, and there’s a café behind a giant glass clock that looks back over the city. For something quieter still, Sainte-Chapelle’s stained glass is staggering — but only on a sunny day. The whole point is the light coming through, so don’t spend it there in the rain.
See the Eiffel Tower without the scrum
Every list of things to do in Paris puts the Tower near the top, which is why Trocadéro at midday is a crush of crowds and men selling keyrings. Skip it. For the photo — the Tower framed at the end of a street — stand on Rue de l’Université, around number 5. For the whole thing rising over the river, walk out onto the Bir-Hakeim bridge. Either way, time it for dusk: on the hour after dark, the Tower sparkles for five minutes, and it’s worth building an evening around catching it once.
Give an evening to the river
Walk the Seine with no destination. Along the quais you’ll pass the bouquinistes — the green book boxes clamped to the wall, selling old paperbacks and prints the way they have for centuries. Buy something small.
Pick up wine and cheese on the way and head for the Square du Vert-Galant, the little park at the very tip of Île de la Cité, and sit on the stone steps at the water’s edge as the lights come up. On the next island over, Île Saint-Louis, Berthillon makes the ice cream Parisians actually queue for — the salted caramel is the one. Of all the things to do in Paris, this evening is the cheapest, and the one people still talk about a year later.
Free things to do in Paris: pick a neighbourhood and get lost
Montmartre is magic before nine in the morning and after the tour buses leave at night — the cobbled lanes behind Sacré-Cœur, not the painters’ square. Canal Saint-Martin is where young Paris brings a bottle to the water’s edge on a warm evening. Le Marais rewards having no plan at all. And when it rains, duck into the covered passages — Galerie Vivienne, Passage des Panoramas — 19th-century glass-roofed arcades most visitors walk straight past. None of these things to do in Paris cost more than the coffee you carry through them.
Travel scrapbook ideas: keep the trip, not just the photos
Here’s what happens after every good trip. The photos pile up in your phone, and within a year the small stuff is gone — the name of that café, the date you sat on the steps by the river, the busker who played as the Tower lit up. The monuments you’ll remember. The details that made it yours are the ones that fade, and a camera roll doesn’t hold a name or a feeling.
The fix takes two minutes a night, whatever your own things to do in Paris turned out to be: write down three lines — where you were, what you ate, the one thing that stood out. Then when you’re home, give them somewhere to live. One travel page — the few photos that mattered, those three lines beside them — beats four hundred pictures you’ll never scroll back through. Some people keep a running trip journal as they go; others build one travel scrapbook page a day once they’re home. Either way it becomes a travel memory book you’ll actually open again.
That page took about ten minutes. The photos are yours; everything else — the frames, the papers, the note cards with a space already set for the date and the place — is our Paris Adventure kit: drop-in pieces for Procreate, Canva, Photoshop or GoodNotes, so it looks like that without you being a designer. It’s the quick way to a digital travel journal or scrapbook page, no design work needed.
Get the Paris Adventure kit on Etsy →
Papers, frames, note cards and elements. Instant download, iPad or desktop.
You went all that way. Keep more of it than the camera roll.
Going somewhere else, or marking something closer to home? The same idea works for any trip or any moment worth keeping — a wedding, a graduation, the year your kid actually remembers. Browse the Artful Safari shop →