How many travelers have written reports about their trip to Paris?

“Too many,” you say. Well hold on a second because you haven’t read Alwina Bennett’s report.

Alwina, a member of the Slow Travel Talk community, is staying for five weeks (yep, you read that right) in Paris – with nothing to do but explore. You see, this is what Slow Travel Talk members do. They enjoy lengthy and leisurely stays in one location, and really soak in the atmosphere and get a feel for what daily life there is like.

To some travelers this sounds fantastic. Others might consider it too boring. But the truth of the matter is many of us don’t enjoy five weeks of vacation time in a year, much less five weeks all in a row, and so it is really difficult for us to imagine what it would be like to “live” in another place for this amount of time.

Which is what makes Alwina’s report so great. After each day she submits another blog post, describing her activities for the day. And oh the activities – days spent exploring the cities green spaces and arcades, an 8-hour river boat ride with lunch and dancing, multiple trips to the outdoor markets, taking in a movie.

Who among us normal non-slow (fast?) travelers have time on our vacations to so deliberately immerse ourselves in the local neighborhoods?

To get a true flavor of what it’s like to take an extended trip to Paris, start at post #1 and work your way up. At the time of this writing Alwina is about two weeks into her trip. After reading about her first two weeks, and taking in all of her photos, it’s difficult to imagine there would be a better way to visit what is possibly the most visited and written about city in the world.

If only we all had the time. Ah well, at least for those of us who don’t we can lose ourselves for a bit in this marvelous trip report.

Read the report in its entirety: Autumn 2014 in the Butte Aux Cailles