Exploring the Little Cities Outside of Paris

Paris has zones that make the symbol of a targer, and with my metro pass, I am allowed to to through zones 1, 2, 3, and 4. Those are the centermost zones. There are also zones 5 and 6 on the outside, maybe more, but nothing cool is that far out. Zones 4 and 5 are the zones with all the cool stuff like castles and medieval cities! I can travel to all the zones for free on the weekends though, so I am going to take advantage of that! On Saturday, I went to the cute city of Pontoise! It's not too far from where I live, but it's in the northwest region outside of Paris and is very old. I went by myself because sometimes, I just like to explore by myself. I'm totally fine with that, and I always know where I'm going. I knew Pontoise was a small town so I just got out of the train station and walked everywhere. The weather was amazing for a day of walking and exploring!

I went to two small museum. Le Musee Tavet showed modern art and Musée Camille Pissarro has painting from Camille Pissarro with most of them being paintings of the city of Pontoise. One painting actually gave me and idea of where to go next. It was a painting of people in a garden called "Jardin de la Ville". I decided to find it and I did. I went to two parks that day. Jardin de la Ville and Parc du Chateau.

 

 


I found two adoreable shops to look around at! The first one was L'Arbre Blanc with cute homemade things. It was also a cafe where you can eat some of their original homemade things. I bought a bottle of L'huile D'Olive a la Vanille! Vanilla olive oil! I can't wait to try it! The second store was called Exotiqua with so many cute tea sets, baskets, and soaps! Everything was very much my style.

 

One of my favorite parts of walking around in the city instead of taking busses is that you get to find cooler things and go off the main roads. I found these cute places from walking around and going down the smaller streets. France is a very old country with a lot of history, but in the big cities, a lot of the history has been destroyed over the centuries or redone. In a city like this with not a lot of people, all of the walls, buildings, and roads will still look like they did in the 15th century.