What is the best travel guide to Paris?
I'm a 16 year old girl going to Paris next easter with my school French class and I would like to buy a travel guide but I don't know which one is best. Please tell me what you think is the best travel guide and (if possible) what features of the book make them your favorite. I also appreciate any advice from you guys on how to travel in paris (what to see, what to do, how to act, what to eat, where to go, how to dress, what camera to bring, what safety precautions, etc.). Thanks :)
The best guide to the sights of Paris is probably the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Travel Guide to Paris. You can order one from their website http://us.dk.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780756615475,00.html Its just vastly better than the usual Rick Steve's/Frommer/Fodor's junk.
I know this sounds silly but being a "good" tourist is hard work and you should spend almost as much time preparing as you do actually being there. So don't just get a guide book but read thru it very carefully BEFORE you go.
Make a list of what you want to see based on your personal interests and the amount of time you have. Of course, its fine to come back to this forum with more specific questions after you have had the time to do some research of your own.
There's also a lot to Paris that is beyond the tourist sights. Its the ambience and the attitude of Paris which need to be lived and felt.
You should spend some time just strolling around the city to appreciate its architecture and to get a feel for its medieval layout, the Belle Epoch improvements of Baron Hausman, and the modernizations seen in places like the Les Halles Forum and the new Opera in the Place Bastille.
You should take a little time to just sit in a cafe in the Latin Quarter or St. Germaine and people watch. Go the Luxembourg Gardens and feed the pigeons. Watch little kids sailing toy boats in the big pond there.
Be a bit courageous about food. Go to places that don't cater to tourists and don't have English menus. Just point to things on the menu or, better still, walk into a cafe at lunchtime and ask for the daily special which you'll almost always see displayed on a chalk board. don't worry if you don't know what it is! Try it! The worst that will happen is that you'll have a hilarious story to tell about how you got served a calve's head with cream sauce or something else too weird for you to eat.
Mainly, don't stay in a tight little tourist cocoon. Strike up conversations with strangers, be open minded, put your map in your back pocket and just wander around, get lost, experiment, learn, take the time to really look at things.
Bonne chance!
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