Looking For Deals On Paris Hotels? Where to Stay in Paris – A Guide to The First Arrondissement

November 25th, 2009 | admin | Travel, Vacation

You are nearly there – Paris, the fabled City of Lights! You can’t wait to land. You’ve gotten your flights to France , now you’re trying to decide on some wonderful sounding deals on a bunch of Paris hotels. Where you are staying in the city is always an important consideration for accommodation in Paris, France 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 First Arrondissement

Paris’s first arrondissement is filled with the sort of elegance and grandeur that centuries’ worth of visitors have imagined when thinking of Paris, the City of Lights . Wide boulevards, fashionable shopping , and well maintained parks overlooking the smoothly flowing Seine River are all found in this neighborhood, a district mainly of office space and tourist sites. Les Halles, Paris’s unique take on a shopping mall, can be found here as well.

What You Need To Know :

What’s Good :

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

The Downside :

While during the day in the First Arrondissement provides a visitor with access to some of Paris’s most wonderful 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 those over the age of 21 (that said, the area bordering the Les Halles mall is actually nice – a good place to stop after catching a movie in Les Halles’s enormous cinema, which presents many US and UK movies in their original languages. But avoid going towards Rue St. Denis/Blvd. Sebastopol unless you’re consciously seeking that sort of milieu.) Furthermore, this area can get 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 abound in the First. Take a walk down the Faubourg Saint-Honore, where nearly every famous fashion house cheap acomplia 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.

Where To Eat:
Finding untouristy food is difficult in the First , but finding superb desserts is not. Angelina, on Rue de Rivoli, has lost some of its legendary 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 better food, the area right around Les Halles has a number order cialis of good brasseries, but, as said earlier, the area closer to Rue St. Denis and Sebastopol has a slightly seedier character – not at all dangerous, but nevertheless unsavory.

Places To Shop:
If the exclusive shopping of the Faubourg Saint Honore is a bit out of your price range , head to the Les Halles mall. A surprisingly beautiful, buy Actos online 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 reasonable prices.

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