Visitor Information

At the airports are small info offices, which, for a fee, will help you make hotel reservations. But the prime source of information about Paris and the provinces is the Office de Tourisme de Paris, 127 av. des Champs-Elysées, 8e (tel. 08-36-68-31-12; fax 01-49-52-53-00; www.paris-touristoffice.com; Métro: Charles de Gaulle-Etoile or George V). It's open April to October daily from 9am to 8pm (closed May 1). From November to March, hours are daily from 11am to 6pm. The staff will make a reservation for you on the same day you want a room: 2€ for hostels and foyers ("homes"), 3.75€ for one-star hotels, 4.20€ for two-star hotels, and 7€ for three-star hotels. (Stars refer to government ratings, rather than those used in this book.) It's often very busy in summer, so you'll probably have to wait in line.

Country & City Telephone Codes

The country code for France is 33. The city code for Paris (as well as for all cities in the Ile de France region) is 1; use this code if you're calling from outside France. If you're calling Paris from within Paris or from anywhere else in France, use 01, which is now built into all phone numbers in the Ile de France, making them 10 digits long.

There is a tourist office, Bureau Gare de Lyon, at the major rail terminus, Gare de Lyon, 12e, serving rail passengers arriving by train. It is not accessible by phone but is available to walk-in clients. It is open Monday to Saturday from 8am to 8pm (Métro: Gare de Lyon).

There are other branches in the base of the Eiffel Tower (open May-Sept daily 11am-6:40pm) and in the arrivals hall of the Gare de Lyon (open year-round Mon-Sat 8am-8pm). These offices will give you free copies of the English-language Time Out and Paris User's Guide.

City Layout

Paris is surprisingly compact. Occupying 1,119 sq. km (436 sq. miles), it's home to more than 10 million people. The city is divided into 20 municipal wards called arrondissements, each with its own mayor, city hall, police station, and central post office. Some even have remnants of market squares.

The river Seine divides Paris into the Rive Droite (Right Bank) to the north and the Rive Gauche (Left Bank) to the south. These designations make sense when you stand on a bridge and face downstream; watching the water flow out toward the sea, to your right is the north bank, to your left the south. Thirty-two bridges link the banks of the Seine, some providing access to the two small islands at the heart of the city, Ile de la Cité, the city's birthplace and site of Notre-Dame, and Ile St-Louis, a moat-guarded oasis of sober 17th-century mansions. These islands can cause some confusion to walkers who think they've just crossed a bridge from one bank to the other, only to find themselves caught up in an almost medieval maze of narrow streets and old buildings.

As part of Napoleon III's massive urban redevelopment project, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann forever changed the look of Paris between 1860 and 1870 by creating the legendary boulevards: St-Michel, St-Germain, Haussmann, Malesherbes, Sébastopol, Magenta, Voltaire, and Strasbourg.

The "main street" on the Right Bank is the Champs-Elysées, beginning at the Arc de Triomphe and running to place de la Concorde. Haussmann also created avenue de l'Opéra (as well as the Opéra), and the 12 avenues that radiate starlike from the Arc de Triomphe, giving it its original name, place de l'Etoile (star); it was renamed place Charles de Gaulle following the general's death and is often referred to as place Charles de Gaulle-Etoile.

Haussmann also cleared Ile de la Cité of its medieval buildings, transforming it into a showcase for Notre-Dame. Finally, he laid out two elegant parks on the western and southeastern fringes of the city: the Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes.

Finding an Address

The key to finding any address in Paris is looking for the arrondissement number, rendered either as a number followed by "e" (1e, 2e, and so on) or more formally as part of the postal code (the last two digits indicate the arrondissement -- 75007 indicates the 7th arrondissement, 75017 the 17th). Numbers on buildings running parallel to the Seine usually follow the course of the river -- east to west. On north-south streets, numbering begins at the river.

If you're staying more than 2 or 3 days, buy an inexpensive little book that includes the plan de Paris by arrondissement, available at all major newsstands and bookshops. If you can find it, the forest-green Paris Classique l'Indispensable is a thorough, well-indexed, and accurate guide to the city and its suburbs. Most map guides provide you with a Métro map, a foldout map of the city, and indexed maps of each arrondissement, with all streets listed and keyed. We've given you a head start by including a full-color foldout map at the back of this guide.