I was in Paris on a solo trip, and I had booked an Airbnb city tour - one of those morning walking tours where a local guide takes a small group through the parts of the city that tourists usually miss. The meeting point was at Au Vieux Paris d'Arcole, a restaurant tucked on the Île de la Cité, the island in the middle of the Seine where Notre-Dame sits.
The tour started at 9am. I had checked the route the night before, calculated the Uber time, and felt confident. I should admit something here: I was never someone who arrived early. I found it inefficient - wasted time, standing around waiting when I could have had those extra minutes. There was actually a small thrill in cutting it close, arriving exactly on the dot. It felt like a challenge I was setting for myself and winning. I was proud of it. What I had not calculated was that it was a Monday morning in Paris.
I didn't think about that. I was a tourist. In my head, Paris was a beautiful city I was visiting - not a city of two million people where millions more were commuting to work and school on a weekday morning at 9am. The roads were completely locked. My driver weaved through side streets I couldn't find on a map, leaning on the horn, shouting at other drivers in French, taking corners faster than I was comfortable with. I sat in the back completely silent, gripping the door handle, too unsettled to ask him to slow down. He didn't say a word to me the entire ride - just drove, and raged, and drove.
I arrived at Île de la Cité fifteen minutes late.
The group hadn't waited. The tour doesn't pause for one person. I stood at the meeting point for a moment, a little breathless, trying to figure out where they'd gone. I messaged the guide, and she responded quickly and warmly - gave me the address of the next stop and told me to meet them there. I ran to that address, she was genuinely kind about it. The group was lovely. The tour itself was wonderful.
But I spent the first twenty minutes of that morning running through one of the most beautiful neighbourhoods in Paris, flustered and embarrassed, not seeing anything, just navigating. And I thought about that for a long time afterward.
You can research a city for weeks. You still don't know it. You are always, on the first day, a stranger.
What I do differently now
I leave thirty to forty minutes earlier than I think I need to. Especially if it is the first day in a new city.
This sounds simple, and it is. But the real change wasn't the thirty minutes - it was the reason behind it. I used to calculate travel time as a logistics problem: distance divided by estimated speed equals arrival time. Now I think of it as a humility problem. I am always, in any new city, operating with incomplete information. I don't know the traffic patterns. I don't know which metro line is delayed on which day. I don't know that the entrance to the museum is on the side street, not the main facade. I don't know any of this until I'm there. This is not a failure of research. This is just what cities are. They are alive. They don't hold still for your itinerary.
The thirty minutes is not for the commute. It is for everything I don't know yet.
And what I've found - every single time since - is that arriving early is quietly one of the best things about a trip. You get to the meeting point and you stand there and you actually look at the street. You find a café and sit with a coffee. You notice the building, the light, the way people move. You are present instead of rushing.
flâner: to wander without purpose, to simply be somewhere with no agenda.
A new city takes time to know. There is no shortcut for that. The first day you are figuring out how the metro works and where the good coffee is and which direction you instinctively get wrong. By day three you feel like a local. That progression is one of the best things about travel. But you have to let it happen at its own pace, and build your plans around the fact that day one is always day one.
Mozart said the music lives not in the notes but in the silence between them. A trip needs that silence too. Not every hour accounted for. Not every moment optimised.