RAPT = The Best Tour Bus in Paris

Vendors along the Seine
(pic taken on RATP)

News flash!! The way to see Paris is by bus! RATP, Paris' mass transit authority has a great website--enter your location and the address of your destination and the digital route finder will create an itinerary allowing you to select the parameters of your journey. These parameters include choosing the fastest route, a route that uses buses only or metros only (subways) or the route that requires the least amount of walking. The main site is in french of course: www.rapt.fr; but their site also provides information in six other languages including English, mais bien sur~ Here's the site: http://www.ratp.fr/en/ratp/c_21879/tourists/


Tickets are unusually inexpensive for such a large city and transit tickets can be used for all forms of public transportation including buses, the metros, trams, and many RER trains within the metropole. There are also great deals for transit passes 1 to 5 days for all three zones of Paris ranging in price and starting at 4.85Euros.

Hotel de Ville, Paris
pic taken from RATP bus :)

A wonderful and less known fact that I have discovered is that RATP buses are a great way to see the city!!! Hop on the 69 and you'll see more monuments and sites than you can hit with a stick! Want to see Richelieu and l'Opera--hop on the 85. Not only do many individual buses go from neighborhoods into the city centre and to major sights, there are also city buses dedicated to sight seeing. These are called Balades touristique--see this link for more about it: http://www.ratp.fr/en/ratp/c_21898/sightseeing-tours/

The Tour Eiffel is still impressive on a bus
with an impressive storm blowing in.

Riding a bus is also an awesome way to get to know your way around the city! It provides you with an excellent sense of how close and collected the arrondissements really are--more so than when walking, which can take longer to feel out and more so than on the subway, which keeps you underground. As the weather has become warmer, I have enjoyed being outside and on a bus. It also gives you a chance to take pictures in a very unobtrusive way and to see things you might not see just walking around.

It might have taken months maybe years for me to find some cool record shop or to find out that rue Drouot is where you'd go to buy rare stamps??!! Think about the movie "Charade" or the remake "The Truth about Charlie" a line of shops with rare timbres--only in Paris, smile!!! more soon, 

t.