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It rained last night, saving the street cleaners the task of cleaning the “dog dirt” from the narrow sidewalks. The morning sky is pale blue, scattered with clouds, the streets vacant and shiny with promise. I like Paris the most early in the morning, before the roads get cluttered with cars, before the Metro morphs into a rolling sardine can, before the Champs Elysees becomes a sea of bobbing heads, before the dogs come back out to mark their territory. If you're an early riser, Paris can be yours in the morning, and yours alone. But as the day goes on, Paris becomes more and more a shared and very crowded experience.

The day begins with a croissant straight out of the oven, so fresh and warm it bursts with steam when I break it open. Washed down with a coffee strong enough to disintegrate any or all of my fillings, I'm ready to hit the pavement. Though a large city, Paris is best explored on foot, particularly the narrow streets of Montmartre, Marais and the Latin Quarter. It is through the latter and St Germain that I twist and turn my way towards the Louvre and my blind date with Da Vinci in drag. This was Hemingway's 'hood back in the “early days when we were very poor and very happy.” An expensive city, Paris today is no place to be poor. It chews people up and spits them out, and I doubt that there is a young successor to Hemingway working the racetrack to finance his writing endeavours.

The expanse of the Louvre stretches along the Seine and I look forward to getting lost in its vast halls. They say at least two months is needed to see everything in the museum, which makes it rather intimidating for a day's visit. Best to choose a period or section and tell yourself the rest of the museum is closed.

The pedestrian bridge across the Seine is crowded, everyone walking with quickened steps of anticipation. Notre Dame lurks in the background; yesterday, the Place du Parvis in front of the church was so full you couldn't see the ground. Today will be no different. But I assume the Louvre to be a place so big, you could never feel like it is crowded. Whether that's true or not I'll never know, because I don't bother to go inside. The line snakes out from the Grande Pyramide, twisting and filling the Cour Carree. I watch for a few minutes to guage the progress of the line. For fifteen minutes, it doesn't move. I have no patience for lines, which might mean I will never see anything in Paris; for I spend the rest of the morning finding lines everywhere, most notably at the Musee d'Orsay and the Pompidou Centre.

Disappointed but not distraught, I convince myself it's too nice a day to spend hours inside in shadowed halls looking at art. Paris itself is a work of art, and today the sun is a spotlight shining on this urban exhibition. I want to see it from above and walk along the Seine towards the Eiffel Tower. There are tourists everywhere, scurrying towards a museum where a line will greet them. They have patience, a Dan Brown novel clutched in one hand, a digital camera in the other - they will not be kept from seeing the sights that they have travelled half way round the world for. They are made of stronger stuff than me.

Several lines greet me at the base of the tower, twisting from each of the four entry points and crossing each other, making it near impossible to walk towards the Champs du Mars. I go in the other direction, towards the Trocadero, and veer away from the rock concert crowd gathered on the Place de Varsovie, avoiding eye contact with the hawkers standing shoulder to shoulder and selling handbags and Eiffel Tower key rings.

I decide to try the Sacre Coeur and take a crammed Metro to Anvers. The packed Rue de Steinkerque leading up to the church doesn't bode well. Sure enough, at the top of the hill, there is barely room to breathe and little chance to enjoy the view. The tourists salute each other, extending their camera or phone in front of them at arm's length. From nowhere, rain starts to fall, and umbrellas and jackets flutter in harmony. The handbags and trinkets disappear and the hawkers now have umbrellas looped over the arms, having seemingly conjured them from thin air. The line in front of Sacre Coeur is now a rainbow of umbrellas, and the unprepared, namely me, scurry downhill for the shelter of a Montmartre cafe.

The streets have lost their morning solitude and the fumes of diesel and cigarettes overpower the fresh smell of rain. The cafe I stumble into, dripping, is the Deux Moulins. It's around the corner from the Moulin Rouge and, despite the guidebooks on a few tables, I hear more French than anything else. The cafe looks vaguely familiar. It's then I see the poster of Amelie on the wall and hear the creme brulee being cracked with teaspoons. This is the cafe from the movie, where Amelie worked as a waitress, and there's more than one patron sporting her haircut.

Back outside, the streets are wet and crowded. The rain has stopped but umbrellas are still held high. It's a fight for pavement space, especially at the places where the tourists jostle, those big groups being led by a now closed umbrella, normally red and raised high. I wonder how the locals handle living with these crowds? Do they wait in line for the Louvre and the other sights or just avoid them altogether? Are there places where solitude can be found, where art can be observed and meditated over without ten heads popping into view or someone breathing on your shoulder? It doesn't seem possible; it seems the only way to see the sights is to do the time in line and to share the experience with a thousand others. But like so many places in the world, what is actually more rewarding is what is not on the tourist's itinerary.

To find those places, you have to think smaller and venture down more side streets than boulevards. Rather than spend half a day waiting to get into d'Orsay, you could visit the Musee Marmottan near the Bois de Boulogne which has the world's largest collection of Monet as well as works from the rest of the Impressionist all-star team. Forgo the lines of Pompidou and walk straight into the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, a free museum near the Trocadero with works from every major art movement of the 20th century. Paris also has many fine boutique museums where lines are rare and art can be appreciated in quiet solitude. Worth visiting are the Musee Rodin, which has a wonderful sculpture garden, the Musee Picasso and the Musee Carnavalet, a Paris history museum housed in two Renaissance mansions.

Down the side streets and in the lesser known museums, the crowds fall away and I forget the lines snaking out from the major sights. In the morning quiet of a sparse café in the Latin Quarter and in the empty Musee Marmottan, Paris becomes mine, and I realise that must be how the locals do it. They never bother with the recognisable sights; for them, what is tangible and pleasurable about Paris is the life on their streets, far away from the hordes of Champs Elysees and the crowds of the Louvre. And it is on those streets, lesser known yet bustling with local activity, that the romantic in Paris comes out again, where the lights come on in the evening and shine brightly until the dawn.

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