Paris in May 2025: 3 Travel Tips I Learned the Hard Way

I'll also share where I had the best cheesecake and sea bass.

This is the paid follow-up to I'm Going Back to Grad School for the PhD. If you don’t have a paid subscription, don’t worry. The last post was free, and the next one will be too! This post is for the people who help me pay for grad school and adventures with paid subscriptions—and those who have appeared in my blog posts and videos over the years. Thank you!

---

I loved my time in Paris, but the city was not at all what I envisioned.

My first thought when I arrived was, “Where are all the fashionable people??”

While I certainly enjoyed my time there and would love to return, it doesn’t hold a candle to life in Madrid. This might surprise you, and I can assure you that it also surprised me!

In this week’s post, I’ll share more about why I was in Paris, some travel tips I learned the hard way, and two restaurants that I highly recommend.

First Impressions

Paris is a beautiful and interesting city, but it felt a lot more urban than I expected. Madrid can be quite busy too, but there is a cleanliness and polished look about Madrid that I saw much less of in Paris. I’m sure many people might disagree with me on this, but that’s my take.

I certainly also had some stereotypes in my head that Parisians would be fashionable and that being overweight or obese would be rare. When I was an undergrad in Jamaica, Paris was consistently lauded as the city that would put America to shame. Even their McDonald’s was classy!

That might have been true at one point, but Parisians didn’t look much different from many other city dwellers to me. In fact, it reminded me of Barcelona.

Why I Traveled to Paris.