You are nearly there – Paris, France’s crown jewel and capital city! You can’t wait to start your journey. You’ve gotten your cheap airfare to Paris, France , now you’re trying to decide on some wonderful sounding offers on Paris hotels in the First arrondissement. What arrondissement you are staying in is always an important consideration for your hotel in Paris even if you are looking at hotels in Paris city centre. Here’s a guide to Paris’s First arrondissement so you can learn more about whether it is where you want to be!
Paris: The First Arrondissement
Paris’s first arrondissement is filled with the sort of elegance and grandeur that centuries’ worth of travelers have imagined when thinking of Paris . Broad boulevards, haute couture, and precisely maintained parks overlooking the dreamy Seine River are all found in this neighborhood, a district mainly of office space and tourist sites. Les Halles, Paris’s weird take on a shopping mall, can be found here as well.
What You Need To Know :
What’s Good :
Spending time in Paris’s First has many advantages . When you stroll under the nineteenth-century arches of the arcade Rue de Rivoli , you’ll be following in the footsteps of generations of dandies and duchesses: vanished remnants of an older Paris . You’ll be near some of Paris’s most exquisite tourist sites – the Tuileries garden to Chatelet -site of the Comedie Francaise, where Moliere once produced his plays – to the world-class Louvre Museum . And the shopping, on the elegantly understated Faubourg Saint Honore, is without peer !
What’s Bad About The First :
While daytime here provides access to some of Paris’s top sights within a few moments’ stroll , the business-like nature of the area means that nightlife, by contrast, is limited within the arrondissement. So unless visitors go to the Les Halles/St. Denis area there’s not much to do. Les Halles/St. Denis’s cheap pleasures may appear slightly seedy to travelers over the age of 21 (that said, the section bordering the Les Halles mall is very nice – a good place to stop after catching a movie in Les Halles’s enormous cinema, which presents many American and British films in their original languages. But avoid going towards Rue St. Denis/Blvd. Sebastopol unless you’re consciously seeking that sort of milieu.) What’s more, this area can get very, very touristy – especially around the otherwise lovely Rue de Rivoli. So watch your handbag and control your buying impulse for souvenirs until you’re a bit further off the beaten path.
What To See:
Sites and sights abound here. Take a walk down the Faubourg Saint-Honore, where nearly every top fashion house of the world has a presence. Visit the Louvre or Tuileries Gardens near the Place de Concorde, see a play at the Comedie Francaise in the Chatelet area.
Eating Places :
Finding untouristy food is difficult in this area, but finding wonderful desserts is not. Angelina, on Rue de Rivoli, has lost some of its former elegance, but the aging-grande-dame feel of the place makes the yellowed mirrors and creaky chandeliers worth seeing on their own merits. Plus, their famously rich hot chocolate and Mont Blanc desserts are some of the best in Paris. For a more recent hotspot, Cafe Marley in the Louvre offers views not only of the museum’s art, but also of Paris’s current celebrity scene. For good food, the area right around Les Halles has a number of good brasseries, but, as said earlier, the area closer to Rue St. Denis and Sebastopol has a slightly rougher character – not at all dangerous, but nevertheless unsavory.
Places To Shop:
If the high fashion of the Faubourg Saint Honore is a bit out of your desired spending range, head to the Les Halles mall. A surprisingly beautiful, art nouveau-inspired underground city (complete with street names, a swimming pool, park, and more), Les Halles proves that even Paris’s malls have a particular Parisian flair. While the area around the mall is useful for super-cheap (think 3-5 euro) clothes and shoes, the mall itself has much higher quality merchandise at pretty good prices.
