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You’re nearly there – Paris, wonderful Paris! You can’t wait to arrive . You’ve gotten your flights to Paris, France , now you’re assessing some seemingly fantastic specials on hotels in Paris, France . Where you are staying in the city is always an important consideration for accommodation for 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 this part of Paris is where you want to be!

Paris: The First Arrondissement

Paris’s first arrondissement is filled with the elegance and grandeur that centuries’ worth of travelers have imagined when thinking of Paris, France’s capital city. Splendid boulevards, exclusive fashion shops , and precisely maintained parks overlooking the smoothly flowing Seine River are all to be found in this neighborhood, a district mainly of office space and tourist sites. Les Halles, Paris’s unusual take on a shopping mall, can be found here as well.

What To Know :

Why You Want To Stay Here:

Spending time here has many advantages . When you walk beneath the 19th arches of the Rue de Rivoli arcade, you will be following in the footsteps of generations of dandies and duchesses: vanished members of Paris of a bygone era . You’ll 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 Museum . And the shopping, on the elegantly understated Faubourg Saint Honore, is unrivalled!

Here’s The Bad :

While daytime in the First provides a visitor with access to some of Paris’s finest sights within a few moments’ walk, 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 low-budget pleasures may appear slightly seedy to tourists over the age of 21 (that said, the section bordering the Les Halles mall is very nice – a fine place to stop after watching 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.) What’s more, this area can get very, 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 Do:
Sites and sights abound in the First. Take a stroll 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.

Places To Eat:
Finding good French food is difficult in the First , but finding superb 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 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 better 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 Paris’s First Arrondissement :
If the exclusive shopping of the Faubourg Saint Honore is a bit out of your desired spending range, go 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 shopping centers have a particular 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 items at pretty good prices.