Paris Travel

With upwards of 12 million inhabitants, the greater metropolitan area of Paris ishome to almost 19% of France's total population (central Paris counts just under 2.2 million souls). Since before the Revolution, Paris has been what urban planners like to call a 'hypertrophic city' the enlarged 'head' of a nation-state's'body'. The urban area of the next biggest city Marseilles is just over a third the size of central Paris.As the capital city, Paris is the administrative, business and cultural centre; virtually everything of importance in the republic starts, finishes or is currently taking place here. The French have always said 'Quand Paris éternue, la France s'en rhume' (When Paris sneezes, France catches cold) but there have been conscious efforts - going back at least four decades - by governments to decentralise Paris' role, and during that time the population, and thus to a certain extent the city's authority, has actually shrunk. The pivotal year was 1968, a watershed not just in France but throughout Western Europe.Paris has a timeless quality, a condition that can often be deceiving. And while the cobbled backstreets of Montmartre, the terraced cafés of Montparnasse, the iconic structure of theEiffel
Tower and the placid waters of the Seine may all have some visitors believing that the city has been here since time immemorial, that's hardly the case.

Respect for the French language is one of the most important aspects of claiming French nationality, and the concept of la francophonie, linking the common interests everywhere French is spoken, is supported by both the government and the people. Modern French developed from the langue d'oïl, a group of dialects spoken north of the Loire River that grew out of the vernacular Latin used during the late Gallo-Roman period. The langue d'oïl - particularly the francien dialect spoken in the Île de France encircling Paris - eventually displaced the langue d'oc, the dialects spoken in the south of the country.Standard French is taught and spoken in schools, but its various accents and subdialects are an important source of identity in certain regions. In addition, some languages belonging to peoples long since subjected to French rule have been preserved. These include Flemish in the far north; Alsatian on the German border; Breton, a Celtic tongue, inBrittany; Basque, a language unrelated to any other, in the Basque Country; Catalan, the official language of nearby Andorra and the autonomous Spanish republic of Catalonia, in Roussillon; Provençal in Provence; and Corsican, closely related to Tuscan Italian, on the island of Corsica.French was the international language of culture and diplomacy until WWI, and the French are sensitive to its decline in importance and the hegemony of English, especially since the advent of the internet. It is virtually impossible to separate a French person from his or herlanguage, and it is one of the things they love most about their own culture. Your best bet is always to approach people politely in French, even if the only words you know are 'Pardon, parlez-vous anglais?' (Excuse me, do you speak English?). Don't worry; they won't bite.

When it comes to shopping, Paris naturally has it all: large boulevards lined with international chains, luxury avenues with designer fashion, famous grands magasins (department stores) and fabulous marchés aux puces (flea markets. But the real charm of Parisian shopping resides in a peripatetic stroll through the side streets, where tiny speciality stores and quirky boutiques selling everything from strawberry-scented Wellington boots to stainless-steel soap holders alternate with cafés, galleries and churches. These shops are what we've focused on in
this chapter. Key areas are around the Marais in the 3e and 4e around St-Germain des Prés in the 6e and parts of Montmartre and Pigalle in the 9e and 18.
As in many capital cities, shops are spread out across different neighbourhoods, inspiring very different styles of shopping. If what the French do best - fashion - is what you're after, then tread the haute couture (high fashion), luxury jewellery and designer perfume boardwalks in the Étoile and Champs-Élysées . For original fashion, both street and vintage , the addictive maze of boutique shopping in the Marais and St-Germain will keep you on your toes. For an overview of Paris fashion, department stores such as Le Bon Marché in 7e and Galeries Lafayetteand Printemps in the 9e provide a gentle introduction to what can be a frustratingly intimidating scene; should you not look like a millionaire, trying to raise
a smile out of frosty, poker-faced staff in some designer boutiques (or indeed attracting their attention to let you in; most require you to buzz) can be disheartening. Should it be too muchfor you, personalised shopping tours exist; www.chicshoppingparis.com and www.chicparisienne.com are two of many.
For a rundown on Paris' main shopping strips and streets specialising in particular products, Shopping in Paris for fine food, wine, tea, books, stationery, art and antiques, and other collectables is particularly rewarding.

Should you be stopped dead in your tracks on the streets of Paris by a feline figure scaling two buildings with a deathdefying leap, vaulting a statue or springing off a lamppost, no sweat: that's Parkour. Throw in a 360° backflip and triple
somersault and you have its more flamboyant acrobatic brother, Freerunning.
Born in the Parisian suburbs, the craze of getting from A to B without letting anything get in your way has since gained a cult following in cities worldwide. And anything really means anything, be it a stairwell, metro station entrance, Vélib'
bike stand or 25m gap between rooftops. One YouTube video tags it as 'dudes fiddling around with buildings' (a fair enough assumption), but this is a discipline fusing sport, art and philosophy with serious backbone. Plain dangerous,
in fact, whether you do or don't know what you're doing.Two godlike men with a cinematic screen presence and muscles to die for arebehind the French-bred discipline, which some say was the natural progression of New York's 1970s breakdance: David Belle (b 1973; http://kyzr.free.fr/davidbelle) and Sébastien Foucan (b 1974; www.foucan.com). The two played together as kids growing up
in the Parisian suburb of Lisses, 40km south of the centre, and in 1989 as fearless adolescents they put a name to their increasingly dare-devil street antics - Parkour, from the French military's 'parcours du combattant' (obstacle
courses).But in the 1990s, then a fireman, Foucan found his outlook shifting subtly away from Belle's as the philosophical lure of martial arts and yearning for greater freedom of expression kicked in. Thus, in 2001, he came up with his own,
more expressive brand of Parkour called Freerunning. While Belle and his followers (known as les traceurs) ruthlessly track the shortest, most efficient route from A to B, Foucan's team focuses on aesthetics and creativity of movement -
hence the gravity-defying stunts and acrobatics choreographed in most Freerunning movements. As much a mental as physical challenge (indeed, 'obstacles' are not always what they seem), both brands advocate the extreme sport as a way of life in which inner balance plays as crucial a role as physical prowess.Naturals when it comes to the silver screen, Belle and Foucan are both film stars. A black belt in Gong Fu, Belle struts his stunts as a do-gooder ghetto kid in Luc Besson's Banlieue 13 (2004), aptly set in a drug- and gun-riddled Parisian suburb in 2010. Among Foucan's spellbinding credits are James Bond movie Casino Royale (2006) and Madonna's 2006 'Confessions' world tour.

Yearning for a chilled venue where you don't need a gold-plated credit card or membership to the local anarchists' association to feel at ease? Don't despair: there's far more to the Parisian drinking scene than chic, design-driven lounge bars brimming with beautiful people, or tatty, dime-a-dozen tabacs (bar-tobacconists) with thin-haired regulars propping up the bar. Drinking in Paris as salt-of-the-earth Parisians do means: savouring wafer-thin slices of saucisson (sausage) over a glass of sauvignon on a terrace at sundown; quaffing an early-evening apéritif in the same literary café as Sartre and Simone once did; dancing on tables to bossa nova beats; hovering at a zinc counter with local winos; indulging in a spot of dégustation sipping martinis on a dark leather couch while listening to live jazz; sipping gyokuro in a trendy Japanese salon de thé (tearoom).
In a country where eating and drinking are as inseparable as cheese and wine, it's inevitable that the line between bars, cafés and bistros is blurred at best (no, you haven't drunk too much). Practically every place serves food of some description, but those featured in this chapter are favoured, first and foremost, as happening places to drink - be it alcohol, coffee or tea. The distinct lack of any hardcore clubbing circuit in the French capital, moreover, only serves to spice up Paris' drinking scene still further; what might appear as a simple café at 5pm can morph quite comfortably to DJ bar and pounding dance floor as the night rolls on.

Parisians have never been as intransigent as, say, Londoners in accepting changes to their cityscape, nor as unshocked by the new as New Yorkers appear to be. But then Paris never had as great a fire as London did in 1666, which offered architects a tabula rasa on which to redesign and build a modern city, or the green field that was New York in the late 18th century.It took disease, clogged streets, an antiquated sewage system, a lack of open spaces and Baron
Georges-Eugène Haussmann to drag Paris out of the Middle Ages into a modernworld, and few town planners anywhere in the world have had as great an impact on the city of their birth as he did on his. Haussmann's 19th-century transformation of Paris was a huge undertaking - Parisians endured years of 'flying dust, noise, and falling plaster and beams', as one contemporary observer
wrote; entire areas of the city (eg the labyrinthine Île de la Cité) were razed and hundreds of thousands of (mostly poor) people displaced. Even worse - or better, depending on your outlook -it brought to a head the vieux (old) Paris versus nouveau (new) Paris, a debate in which writer Victor Hugo played a key role and which continues to this day

Place de l'Opéra, site of Paris' world-famous opera house, abuts the eightcontiguous 'Grands Boulevards' (Madeleine, Capucines, Italiens, Montmartre, Poissonnière, Bonne Nouvelle, StDenis and St-Martin) that stretch from elegant place de la Madeleine in the 8e eastwards to the up-and-coming place de la République in the 3e, a distance of just under 3km. The Grands Boulevards were laid out under Louis XIV in the 17th century on the site of obsolete city walls and served as a centre of café and theatre life through much of the 18th and 19th centuries, reaching the height of fashion during the belle époque . North of the western end of the Grands Boulevards is blvd Haussmann , the heart of the commercial and banking district and known for some of Paris' most famous department stores, including Galeries Lafayette and Le Printemps.

A night out in Paris can mean anything from swilling champagne on the Champs-Elysées to opening unmarked doorways in search of a new club in the banlieues (suburbs) or dancing on tables till dawn in a mad-loud DJ bar . From jazz cellar to comic theatre, garage beat to go-go dancer, world-class art gallery to avant-garde artist squat, this is the capital of savoirvivre, with spectacular entertainment to suit every budget, every taste. The French capital holds a firm place on the touring circuit of the world's finest artists and boasts dozens of historic and/or legendary concert venues: seeing a performance here is a treat. French and international opera, ballet and theatre companies (not to mention cabaret's incorrigible cancan dancers) take to the stage in a clutch of venues of mythical proportion - the Palais Garnier, Comédie Française and the Moulin Rouge included. Away from the bright lights and media glare, a flurry of young, passionate, highly creative musicians, theatre aficionados and artists make the city's fascinating fringe art scene what it is.
The film-lover's ultimate city, Paris provides the best seat in the house to catch new flicks, avantgarde cinema and priceless classics. Its inhabitants are film fetishists par excellence, with wonderful movie theatres - 1930s Chinese pagoda to Seine-side cutting-edge shoebox - to prove it.So go out. Delve into the Parisian night.

France is one of Europe's most liberal countries when it comes to homosexuality - in part because of the long French tradition of public tolerance towards groups of people who choose not to live by conventional social codes - and Paris is the epicentre. While certainly not London, New York or even Berlin, the French capital is home to thriving gay and lesbian communities, and same-sex couples are a common sight on its streets, especially in the Marais district of the 4e. In 1999 the government enacted PACS (Pacte Civile de Solidarité) legislation, designed to give homosexual couples some of the legal protection (eg inheritance rights) it extends to married heterosexuals (though it falls well short of the laws since codified
in Spain and the UK). In May 2001, Paris elected Bertrand Delanoë, a European capital's first openly gay mayor. He was returned to office for a second term in March 2008.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries the bohemian lifestyle of Montmartre in the 18e at-tracted a number of important writers and artists. Although the activity shifted to Montparnasse after WWI, the 18e arrondissement thrives on crowds and a strong sense of community. When you've got the Butte de Montmartre (Montmartre Hill) and Sacré C%u0153ur, what do you expect? Cascading steps, cobblestone streets, small houses with wooden shutters in narrow, quiet lanes;
the charm of the quartier is immediately apparent. Rue Caulaincourt and av Junot flaunt their bourgeois credentials, while the streets around the square Willette, place des Abbesses and rueLepic become steeper and narrower, the inhabitants younger and hipper.The northern part of the 9e arrondissement has a rough-and-ready charm. The lights of the Moulin Rouge dominate blvd de Clichy, and a few blocks southeast is lively, neon-lit place Pigalle, one of Paris' main sex districts. But Pigalle is more than just a sleazy red-light district: the area around blvd de Clichy between Pigalle and Blanche metro stations may be lined with erotica shops and striptease parlours, but there are also plenty of trendy nightspots, clubs and
cabarets. South of Pigalle, the district known as Nouvelles Athènes (New Athens), with its beautiful Graeco-Roman architecture and private gardens, has long been favoured by artists.

France is among the 15 member-states of theEU (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg,Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain) that have adopted the euro (abbre-viated %u20AC and pronounced eu-roh in French)as its national currency. One euro is divided into 100 cents (centimes in French). There are seven euro notes in different colours and sizes; they come in denominations of %u20AC5, %u20AC10, %u20AC20,%u20AC50, %u20AC100, %u20AC200 and %u20AC500. The designs on the recto (generic windows or portals) and verso(imaginary bridges, map of the EU) are exactly the same in all 15 countries and symbolise
openness and cooperation.The eight coins in circulation are in de-
nominations of %u20AC1 and %u20AC2, then one, two, five,10, 20 and 50 cents. The 'head' side of the coin, on which the denomination is shown, isidentical throughout the euro zone; the 'tail'side is specific to each member-state, though euro coins can be used anywhere that accepts euros, of course. In France the %u20AC1 (silver centre with brassy ring) and %u20AC2 (brassy centre with silver ring) coins portray the tree of liberty;
the 10, 20 and 50 cent coins (all brass) have la Semeuse (the Sower), a recurring theme in the history of the French franc; and the one, two and five cent coins (all copper) portray Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic.Exchange rates are given in the Quick Reference section on the inside front cover of this book. The latest rates are available on websites such as www.oanda.com and www.xe.com.
For a broader view of the local economy andcosts in Paris.