Here are 20 lovely Paris walks for your next visit

Buckle up, we're going for a few strolls.

Today’s French word to remember: Flâneur.

Flâneur: a French term for one who saunters, observing society.

Essentially, if you enjoy wandering around aimlessly, especially in Paris, you’re a flâneur. Unless, of course, you’re a woman, in which case you’re a flâneuse.

Now, the city of Paris was practically built for strolling (and we can go pretty deep on that topic one day) but for the meantime, let’s stick with the walks themselves.

You see, this week I launched a new YouTube series featuring 20 stunning Paris strolls. One for every arrondissement.

I picked my favourite 30-ish minute stroll for every neighbourhood then we went out with a camera and filmed each of them. Then, instead of just leaving ambient background noise, we added a relevant podcast episode to each video.

In fact, we added the episodes from our Paris Countdown season, where we spent 24 hours in every arrondissement.

What we’re left with is a series of 20 YouTube episodes, each with a 30 minute slow-TV video with informative and hopefully entertaining podcast episodes as the background sound. The idea is that you can have the videos playing while cooking, while relaxing, while on the treadmill….

Look, here’s the first one! Click play, click play!

I’m really excited to share this with you, and to breathe some life into our Countdown Season again.

Watch along and we can all be Paris flâneurs from the comfort of our home. And even if you’ve done the Montmartre walk before, you might be curious to see what it looks like on a warm May afternoon. It’s a bit of a time capsule thing for the future, too. Documenting Paris as it is today.

This video series has been a pretty big undertaking, and I’m grateful to the tour company LivTours for sponsoring it. We will be releasing the whole season - 20 videos in total - over the course of June.

The first three (the 20th, 19th, and 18th arrondissements) are all out now! Look below, there’s the 19th!

Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more, and consider booking a tour with LivTours!

Also: I literally JUST pressed publish on the Montmartre video, below. Do me a favour? Can you leave a comment there? Get some activity going… ask me a question there, put a smiley face… ask something about Montmartre… anything to inject some love into the newest video as it ventures out into the world. Merci :)

This week on the podcast

Elsewhere, did you hear Monday’s podcast episode? If not, meet Morgan Walesh, an American in Paris who specializes in the hidden underbelly of the city.

She talked of her love for the catacombs, the “history of the streets”, and how she tried to talk her way into an infamous Paris apartment…

Read more about our chat and see some photos here, and then find out more about Morgan and her work on “Paris History of our Streets” via her website here, Instagram here, and Facebook here.

Rain, rain, go away!

It’s been awfully wet and rainy in Paris for the past few days. Here are my top 12 tips for fun indoor activities in Paris while it’s raining.

Today Lina and I headed inside too. We went to our podcast studio near Bastille, where we recorded Monday’s podcast episode, which will be about our new children’s book The Animal Games in Paris.

It was quite a challenge to record over the gurgling of a three-week old baby, but we managed. Hope you enjoy the episode. It’s a little insight into the thoughts that go into writing and illustrating a book that’s meant for cross-cultural, cross-country, and cross-generational reading!

And it has been really touching to see pictures of our new book coming in from all over the US, from Florida to California. Thank you - and keep sharing them! For the rest of the world, your books are almost printed here in Europe, and they’ll be with you in a couple of weeks, hold tight!

If you want a copy too, you can only get it via our online shop. This is the link for US and French addresses, here’s the link for the rest of the world. Postage is included in those prices.

Have a lovely weekend, wherever you might be!

And don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel, where there’ll be an awful lot of Paris content coming throughout June. Go on, do it. Be an armchair flâneur or flâneuse to tide you over until your next Paris trip. Cheers!

Oliver