Jeff Mills Coastal Vacations Club Blog

You are nearly there – Paris! You can’t wait to get there. You’ve gotten your
href=”http://www.paris-web.com/france-flights-paris-countryside.php”> flights to France , now you are assessing some wonderful sounding bargains on a bunch of Paris hotels. What arrondissement you are staying in is always an important consideration for choosing a Paris hotel 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 the First is where you want to be!

Paris: The 1st Arrondissement

Paris’s first arrondissement is filled with the elegance and grandeur that centuries’ worth of travelers have imagined when thinking of Paris, the City of Lights . Splendid boulevards, haute couture, and precisely maintained parks overlooking the silken Seine River are all to be found in this neighborhood, a district primarily of office space and tourist sites. Les Halles, Paris’s interesting take on a shopping center , can be found here as well.

What You Need To Know About The First:

What Is Good About The First Arrondissement :

Spending time here has many benefits. When you walk beneath the 19th arches of the Rue de Rivoli arcade, you’ll be following in the steps of generations of dandies and duchesses: vanished remnants of Paris of long ago . You will be near some of Paris’s most lovely tourist sites – the Tuileries garden to Chatelet -site of the Comedie Francaise, where Moliere once produced his plays – to the world-class Musee de Louvre. And the shopping, on the elegant Faubourg Saint Honore, is without peer !

What’s Not Good :

While daytime in the First Arrondissement provides you access to some of Paris’s top sights at a few moments’ stroll , the business-like character of the area means that nightlife, by contrast, is limited within the arrondissement. So unless you 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 twenty-one (that said, the area bordering the Les Halles mall is actually nice – a good place to stop after catching a film in Les Halles’s enormous cinema, which presents many American and English movies 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 touristy – especially around the otherwise lovely Rue de Rivoli.  So watch your wallet and control your buying impulse for souvenirs until you’re a bit further off the beaten path.

What To Visit:
Sites abound in the First. Take a walk down the Faubourg Saint-Honore, where nearly every great fashion house of the world has a store . Visit the Louvre or Tuileries Gardens near the Place de Concorde, see a play at the Comedie Francaise in the Chatelet area.

Where To Eat:
Finding good French food is tough in this area, but finding great desserts is not. Angelina, on Rue de Rivoli, has lost some of its world renowned 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 among the best in Paris. For a more contemporary 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.

Where To Shop In The First :
If the haute couture 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 Parisian flair. While the area around the mall is useful for really cheap (think 3-5 euro) clothes and shoes, the mall itself has much higher quality at pretty good prices.

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