Paris

The currency is the euro, and contactless cards work almost everywhere, even at bakeries and street markets. The exceptions are some bars, which require a minimum of €10–15, and the metro ticket machines, which reject foreign cards without a chip. In 2026 prices, a baguette tradition costs €1.30–1.70, a jambon-beurre €5–7 and a lunch formule €15–22. Dinner at a bistro runs €30–50 per person without wine, with a glass of wine at €5–9 and a half-pint of beer at €4–8. A metro ride costs about €2.55, admission to a national museum €12–22 (at the Louvre, €32 for anyone not living in the European Economic Area) and a three-star hotel €160–260 a night. The tourist tax is charged per person per night, on top of the room rate, and ranges from about €2.60 at a one-star hotel to about €16 at a palace, with a cap of €15.93 in 2026 for unrated lodging. It's the highest in France, because of a 200% surcharge earmarked for Île-de-France public transportation. Service has been legally included in the bill since 1987, so tipping is optional: rounding up, leaving €1–2 at a café or 5% after a dinner that was worth it is already generous. National museums are free for European Union residents under 26, and several open for free on the first Sunday of the month, with long lines.

Getting downtown from each airport

Paris has three airports, Charles-de-Gaulle (Roissy), Orly and Beauvais, and choosing the wrong one can cost you up to an hour and a half more each way. Charles-de-Gaulle is 25 km northeast: the RER B runs to Châtelet, via Gare du Nord, in 30–40 minutes for about €13, and the Roissybus reaches the Opéra in 60 to 75 minutes for about €17. Orly is 14 km south and has metro line 14 running straight to the center. Beauvais is 85 km away and only pays off for the price of the flight, with a bus to Porte Maillot in 1 hour 15 minutes for about €17. By taxi, only Charles-de-Gaulle and Orly have flat fares, set by the city.

Metro: sixteen lines, and almost nowhere is far from a station

The network has 16 metro lines (1 to 14, plus 3bis and 7bis), with 321 stations, so dense that almost no point is more than 500 m from an entrance. Rounding out the system are five RER lines (A to E), Transilien trains, thirteen tram lines and the Noctilien night bus. The metro runs from about 5:30am to 1:15am, with later hours on weekends, and you pay with the Navigo Easy card. The city has more than a thousand kilometers of bike lanes, and Vélib' has about 20,000 bikes, two in every five electric, for a few euros a single ride; e-scooter rental was banned after a referendum in 2023. In the center, walking often beats the metro, and the city is about 10 km from east to west inside the Périphérique.

Paris is a safe city for violent crime by the standards of a capital whose region holds about 12.3 million people, and the real risk is theft without confrontation. Pickpockets work metro line 1, the RER B between downtown and Charles-de-Gaulle, Châtelet–Les Halles, the area around the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré-Cœur steps, and the Louvre's corridors: a backpack worn on the front of the body, a phone kept off the sidewalk table, and a wallet in the front pocket handle most of it. The scams are standardized and each one is recognizable: the gold ring “found” on the ground near the Seine, the clipboard petition for a fake deaf charity, the string bracelet tied to your wrist at the foot of Montmartre, and the three-cup game on the bridges, always staged with accomplices. All of them are defused with a “non, merci” said without breaking stride; what costs money is stopping. At night, avoid deserted RER station corridors, the area around Porte de la Chapelle, and stretches of the northern 18th arrondissement, and take a taxi or ride-hailing app after the last metro. Emergencies: 112 general, 17 police, 15 SAMU (ambulance), 18 fire department; a police report for insurance can be filed at any station, and there's a dedicated tourist police post near the 1st arrondissement.

Say “bonjour” before anything else

On entering a bakery, pharmacy, shop, or taxi, greet before you order; after 6pm, “bonsoir”. Starting with the question, even in perfect French, reads as rude and changes the tone of the service. It's the city's most important social rule and the easiest to follow.

Never call the waiter “garçon”

Use “excusez-moi” with eye contact, or “s'il vous plaît, monsieur/madame”. In France, waiting tables is a stable career, and the treatment reflects that experience; nobody comes to the table to ask if everything's okay, and the check only arrives when you ask for it: “l'addition, s'il vous plaît”.

Speak quietly in enclosed spaces

Restaurants, the metro, elevators, and building stairwells all run at low volume. Loud speakerphone calls and loud laughter in a train car draw attention immediately, and the usual response is a disapproving look, without a spoken comment.

Use “vous” until told otherwise

With strangers, shopkeepers, colleagues, and anyone older, use the formal second person. “Tu” is offered explicitly (“on peut se tutoyer”) and using it before that sounds too intimate, especially at work.

Bread: straight on the tablecloth, beside the plate

Bread goes straight on the tablecloth, next to your plate, and is for eating with the meal and mopping up the sauce at the end, not for eating with butter before the food arrives. Nor do you take a knife to salad that already comes in foldable leaves.

Metro: stand right on the escalator and let riders off before boarding

On the metro, stand on the right and keep the left clear for passing; let people off before you get on, and take your backpack off your back once inside the car. On the flip-up seats, lift the seat when the car is full.

The carnet was discontinued in November 2025

Counting on paper tickets. The magnetic carnet of ten rides no longer exists and has been replaced by the Navigo Easy card. Without it in your pocket, or without the app loaded, you're stuck at a machine that may simply not accept your foreign card.

Time-slot booking sells out weeks in advance

Showing up at the Louvre and the other big museums without a time slot. They sell tickets by time slot, and in busy months the slots sell out weeks ahead; without a booking, you're left with a two-hour line, or no ticket at all. Notre-Dame is the exception to the rule: the nave is free and lets in those who didn't book too, who just wait longer at the door.

Visiting on Monday or Tuesday without checking

Planning a visit on a Monday or Tuesday without checking. The Louvre is closed on Tuesdays, the Orsay and Versailles are closed on Mondays, and many neighborhood bistros close on Sunday night and all day Monday, which can knock out an entire day of sightseeing.

Walk three blocks to escape the trap

Eating at the highest-traffic addresses. Cafés on the Champs-Élysées, on the Trocadéro esplanade, and on the square facing Notre-Dame charge double for factory food. Walk three blocks off the tourist axis: the price drops by half, with real cooking.

The last train leaves around 1:15am

Thinking the metro runs all night. The last train leaves around 1:15am, or 2:15am on Friday and Saturday nights, and after that you're left with the Noctilien buses and taxis. Anyone staying outside the Périphérique, forty minutes by RER from the center, feels this most on the way back.

Bonjour / Bonsoir

Good morning/afternoon / good evening: mandatory when entering any establishment

S'il vous plaît / Merci beaucoup

Please / thank you very much

Excusez-moi, parlez-vous anglais ?

Excuse me, do you speak English? Always after the bonjour, never instead of it

Une baguette tradition, s'il vous plaît

A baguette de tradition, please: the standard order at the bakery

L'addition, s'il vous plaît

The check, please: it never comes on its own

Je regarde, merci

Just looking, thanks: a polite reply to a shop assistant

Le Marais (3rd and 4th)

The only central district Haussmann didn't tear through, with medieval streets and 16th- and 17th-century mansions, among them the Place des Vosges, from 1612. It holds the Jewish quarter of the rue des Rosiers, the LGBT nightlife of the rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, and the Carnavalet and Picasso museums; it's one of the few areas where almost everything opens on Sunday.

Latin Quarter (5th)

University district since the 13th century, where the Latin of the lectures gave the streets their name. It gathers the Sorbonne, the Panthéon, the rue Mouffetard market, the Jardin des Plantes, and Europe's densest concentration of art-house cinemas around the rue Champollion.

Saint-Germain-des-Prés (6th)

Around the oldest church in Paris, begun in 1014, this was the address of the existentialist cafés, Flore and Deux Magots, and it's still home to the Gallimard, Grasset, and Seuil publishing houses and dozens of galleries. Today it's expensive and quiet, with the Jardin du Luxembourg, 23 hectares, serving as the district's backyard.

Montmartre (18th)

A village annexed in 1860 on a 130 m hill, with the Sacré-Cœur at the top and the city's last urban vineyard, the Clos Montmartre. The touristy side is the southern staircases; the side where people actually live is to the north, around the rue Caulaincourt and Place des Abbesses, and at the foot lies Pigalle, today more cocktail bar than sex shop.

Canal Saint-Martin and Oberkampf (10th and 11th)

The canal was dug between 1802 and 1825 to supply the city with water and today is where people sit on the curb with a bottle and cheese on warm nights, among nine locks and iron footbridges. The rue Oberkampf, the rue Saint-Maur, and the rue de Charonne form Paris's densest strip of bars.

Belleville and Ménilmontant (19th and 20th)

A hill of successive immigration (Armenian, Tunisian Jewish, Maghrebi, Chinese, and Vietnamese) with a street market on avenue Simon-Bolivar on Tuesdays and Fridays and the city's largest concentration of legal street art on the rue Dénoyez. The Parc de Belleville has the highest lookout point in the east and Père-Lachaise sits on its southern edge; rents here are the lowest inside the Périphérique.

Batignolles (17th)

A former working-class village annexed in 1860, organized around the Square des Batignolles and an organic market on Saturdays. Next door, the Clichy-Batignolles eco-district raised the Parc Martin-Luther-King and Renzo Piano's new Palais de Justice, from 2018 and 160 m tall, over former rail yards.

13th: Butte-aux-Cailles and Chinatown

Between avenue d'Ivry and avenue de Choisy sits Europe's largest Asian neighborhood, built in the 1970s in thirty-story towers for refugees from Southeast Asia. A few blocks further, the Butte-aux-Cailles holds low houses and cobblestone streets, and by the Seine are the Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand and the Station F startup campus, opened in 2017 with 34,000 m².

The Seine's bend at the bottom of the basin

Paris sits at the bottom of a sedimentary basin, the Paris Basin, cut by a bend of the Seine that enters from the southeast and exits to the southwest, dividing the city into the Rive Droite, to the north, and the Rive Gauche, to the south, with two islands in between: the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis. It covers 105 km², or 87 km² without the Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes, which gives about 20,000 residents per km² and makes Paris one of the densest cities in the world outside Asia. The terrain is gentle: the highest natural point is the Montmartre hill, at 130 m, followed by Belleville, at 128 m, and the river runs at about 26 m of elevation.

The limestone below and the spiral

Below the surface is Lutetian limestone, quarried since the Middle Ages to build the city itself, which left about 300 km of empty galleries under the southern arrondissements and forced the creation, in 1777, of a quarry inspectorate that still exists today. The 20 arrondissements are arranged in a clockwise spiral from the Louvre, and the district number always appears in the last two digits of the postal code, which turns the address into a coordinate.

The ring-border and the gray sky

The administrative boundary is the Boulevard Périphérique, a 35 km ring completed in 1973 and limited to 50 km/h since October 2024, which works less as a road and more as a social border between the city and the banlieue. The climate is degraded oceanic: cold, gray winters without significant snow, mild summers with increasingly frequent heat waves, and about 640 mm of rain spread across the whole year, generally light and persistent.

Literature: the 19th-century novel and Proust

Paris organized much of modern European literature and still lives off that. Victor Hugo, Balzac, and Zola wrote the city street by street in the 19th century; Proust reconstructed the 8th and 16th arrondissements from memory between 1913 and 1927; Georges Perec and Patrick Modiano made the address and the archive the raw material of the novel in the 20th century. The city has about 700 independent bookstores, more than any other European capital, protected by a fixed-book-price law in force since 1981 that bans discounts above 5%; the bouquinistes along the banks of the Seine have sold used books from green boxes since the 16th century and are a UNESCO heritage site along with the riverbanks themselves.

Impressionism (1874) and the birth of cinema

In art and film, the standard was set here and is still run from here. The first Impressionist exhibition took place in April 1874 at the studio of the photographer Nadar, on boulevard des Capucines, and the Lumière brothers' first paid public film screening was on December 28, 1895, in the Salon indien of the Grand Café, on the same boulevard. Paris today has the highest density of cinemas in the world (about 400 screens across a bit more than 80 theaters, many of them repertory houses) plus the Cinémathèque Française in Bercy. In music, the chanson of Piaf, Brel, and Gainsbourg coexists with French rap, which has become the country's most-listened-to genre and was born mostly in the northern and eastern periphery; the Philharmonie de Paris, designed by Jean Nouvel and opened in 2015 in Parc de la Villette, shifted classical music to the 19th arrondissement.

Sport and religious life: PSG, at the Parc des Princes since 1974

In sport and religious life, the city is at once concentrated and divided. Paris Saint-Germain has played at the Parc des Princes since 1974 and became France's biggest club after the Qatari fund bought it in 2011; Roland-Garros occupies the west of the city for two weeks between late May and early June; the Tour de France traditionally finishes with a lap on the Champs-Élysées circuit. France has been officially secular since the separation law of 1905, meaning no religious symbols in schools or public offices; even so, Paris holds the largest Jewish and Muslim communities in Western Europe, with the Grand Mosque of Paris built in 1926 as a thank-you to the Muslim soldiers killed in the First World War, and the city owns 85 Catholic churches, nationalized in 1905 and maintained with municipal money.

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo (1862)

Describes the pre-Haussmann city street by street, sewers and the 1832 uprising included, and explains why the straight boulevards were cut just a few years after the book.

La Haine, by Mathieu Kassovitz (1995)

It films twenty-four hours between a housing project on the outskirts and downtown Paris, and shows what the Périphérique separates: the fracture that has organized French politics since the 1970s.

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, by Georges Perec (1975)

Three days sitting in the Place Saint-Sulpice noting buses, pigeons, and people: a manual for how to look at a European city without searching for a monument.