Walking the Streets of Paris: A Virtual Experience
Imagine it is nighttime and there you are, in the middle of Pont d’Iéna, the bridge right in front of the Eiffel Tower. And there it is, the big city all around you, with all the blinking lights and the chaotic nightlife only the urbanized grandeur could offer. Alas, if only you were actually there, and not staring at your phone screen with a sense of longing. I get it, even I dream of walking the streets of Paris. But the reality is that it is too damn expensive.
What else is there to do? It is time to utilize the power of technology and experience the Paris elegance in the palm of your hand.
City Tour in the form of Walking Vlogs
There are a lot of YouTube channels out there where vloggers spend hours exploring cities around the world to give their followers a virtual tour. Most of the cities they include in their channels are the big, famous ones such as New York, Paris, and London. The vloggers don’t even do anything much in the videos. They just walk around showing various landmarks and popular destinations that locals or tourists go to.
One of the more Paris-centric vlogs on YouTube is a channel called “A walk in Paris” with 13,000 subscribers. Their videos usually amass 20k-50k views, and some reach up to 100k views.
Let us take a tour of their vlogs and have a virtual experience of walking the streets of Paris!
First stop: You already know what it is. The Eiffel Tower.
In this video, the vlogger starts from Quai d’Orsay, a quay near the River Seine. It is a river that flows around the city, close to the Tower.
We are taken on a tour along alleyways and streets showing the city’s nightlife. There are a lot of bikers on the street, and also the sidewalks are wide. People can actually walk there without fearing the cars. It can also be seen that a lot of vehicles are parked on the side of the street. Assuming they have different laws about that but if they were in the Philippines they would have had a ticket ages ago.
Halfway through the video, we finally arrive in front of the Eiffel Tower! Every evening, the tower sparkles with its golden lights for five minutes every hour from sunset until 1 AM. What a magnificent display of beauty. After taking in the tower with all its glory, our tour continues around the area seeing tourists and locals mingle alike as the Eiffel Tower shines over them.
Next stop: Louvre Pyramid
One of the most famous landmarks in Paris is the Louvre Museum. In this video, the tour starts in Avenue de L’Opera, showing us the streets of Paris in its afternoon dusk. The buildings surrounding the area show the classic Parisian architecture or Gothic architecture that is more typical to be associated with churches. But in Paris, those are some of the most common building styles.
Twenty-two minutes into the video and we finally see the large glass and metal pyramid that is the Pyramide du Louvre. It serves as the main entrance to the museum, and it usually has a long, long, very long, line of tourists.
Our last stop: Champs-Élysées
This avenue is most known for its elegant cafés and various shops. This vlog is one of the most watched videos in the channel, maybe because it exudes the Christmas spirit. Golden lights hanging by the trees, blinking colors framing the windows, and the café shops looking all pretty and cozy in the evening radiance.
The area is in a festive mood, with Christmas shoppers all around. We then enter the Galeries Lafayette Champs-Élysées, a department store, and we are welcomed by a display of fashionable mannequins. Not only that but the entrance is this sort of a sci-fi looking tunnel, and the people entering and leaving also carry that sense of fashion. There is also a huge Christmas tree in the middle, and the tour gives us a 360 view of the store. Honestly, the most surprising thing about their store is the number of mannequins. They are like.. everywhere. On the stairs, on the balcony. What a cultural difference.
Experiencing Paris
Well, that is it for today’s tour! I hope you had fun walking the streets of Paris, albeit virtually. Let us hope that soon enough, it actually becomes a reality. Au revoir!
