“There are sphinxes, headless statues, colossal dinosaur sculptures on an island, and a maze. What more could you want?”
Photo-Illustration: Photo-Illustration: The Strategist; Photos: Courtesy Cat Marnell Everyone knows that person who spends weeks sniffing around travel blogs, going deep into Tripadvisor rabbit holes, collecting Google docs from friends of friends, and creating A Beautiful Mind–style spreadsheets to come up with the best vacations/itineraries possible.
You buy all your transport passes in one place: at the cluster of machines by the exit for trains. I took the Heathrow Express train to Paddington Station, then hopped on the Underground. I switched to the Overground at Highbury and Islington. Everywhere you go, you tap your OysterCard — which is like a MetroCard. Beep. Beep. Tap in, tap out.
At 7 p.m., I bought marijuana from a guy named George in Finsbury Park for 20 GBP … just to be cool. Day 2 4 p.m.: Go for a “green” walk in Crystal Palace Park I slept late and woke up needing a “green” walk, so I took the Overground to Crystal Palace Park. It’s a wide-open space that once housed a famous exhibition building, which burned down in 1936. There are sphinxes, headless statues, colossal dinosaur sculptures on an island, and a maze.
I ended the night with a long, winding, half-lost walk home through ultracool Dalston and Hackney Downs . You can smell the foxes before you see them: They’re a bit skunky. 8 p.m.: See the graffiti at Leake Tunnel I cabbed to nearby Waterloo to check out the Leake Tunnel. It’s another legal graffiti “venue”; it’s open 24 hours, and it’s huge!
Day 4 4 p.m.: View the exhibit at the Saatchi Gallery There’s always a good exhibit at the Saatchi Gallery, which belongs to that dude who choked out Nigella Lawson. This trip, it was a show on the French street photographer JR. 7 p.m.: Walk through Hyde Park and find the Serpentine Gallery Next: Hyde Park. It’s a lot like Central Park, except there’s a skinny, squiggly lake called the Serpentine … snaking through it. And it’s filled with swans. I walked along the Serpentine until I reached the trendy as f Serpentine Gallery — with the Zaha Hadid pavilion attached! The late “queen of the curve” is my favorite architect of all time, and her structure is otherworldly, like an oyster shell glowing in the dark.
4:30 p.m.: Check into your hotel in Pigalle I cabbed to our hotel in the 9th Arrondissement: Hotel Josephine by Happy Culture, in the sleazy-trendy Pigalle. I’d “birthday-splurged” on the Junior Suite — what a room! For $200 a night, there was a claw-foot bathtub with a window looking out over Paris rooftops … and the most fab terrace. You climb out the window to reach it — like something out of a fairy tale.
Day 6 4 p.m.: See some contemporary art Usually I go to ultrachic Palais de Tokyo for my Parisian contemporary-art fix — and to stock up on their signature five-euro tote bags. This trip, I went to Fondation Cartier in the 14th Arrondissement instead. Damien Hirst’s “Cherry Blossoms” show was lovely; I should have bought a poster.
11 p.m.: See the best neighborhoods in Paris After dinner, I hit the best arrondissement — the 11th — for a birthday walk through my three favorite Paris neighborhoods. How to describe this area? Imagine if the Lower East Side was built onto a friggin’ mountain … and you had to hike for 25 minutes to get to Dr. Clark’s. Like, all of the bars are on an incline. It’s steep.
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