People go to Paris for different reasons: for fashion, for shopping, for museums or monuments, for romance or for fun. We took the train from Amsterdam to Paris (as it were, for the final leg of the Tour de France). It was a sunny summer Parisian weekend, good for exploring the city’s highlights.  In addition to the famous monuments and shopping districts, Paris is also a city of fantastic markets, numerous parks and green spaces, small gardens, an expansive metro system and an excellent bicycle-sharing system – the Velib, featuring some 200,000 bicycles and 1,800 bicycle docking stations throughout the city. My favourite thing about Paris is exploring its urban planning strategies and its high quality (outdoor) public life by meandering down its allies, trying out its markets or testing its growing bicycle infrastructure.  Some of these and other reasons reflect Paris’s cultural & environmental sides – highlighting the city’s own green charm and its high quality of life.