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A Quick Tour Of Paris - Those Fancy Western Arrondissements

By Levi Reiss

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Published: 10Jul2009
Word count: 484
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The quite posh sixteenth and seventeenth arrondissements are located on the Right Bank of the Seine River in western Paris. We start our tour in the 16th that includes the Bois de Boulogne forest park. Between the two districts live almost a third of million people most of whom are well-to-do except for a working class population in the northern 17th district where not all the red lights are traffic signals.

Passy in the northern part of the sixteenth district was once a village that hosted Benjamin Franklin for many years. You can visit rue Franklin and the Cimetiere de Passy (Passy Cemetery) burial grounds for the painter Edouard Manet and the composer Claude Debussy, which was was once "the place" in Paris to be buried. The Parc des Princes is a football stadium with slightly under fifty thousand seats. It was France's national stadium until the much bigger Stade de France was built in the working class suburb of St-Denis.

Lycee Janson de Sailly is the biggest and one of the best French lycees (roughly high schools) in France. In 1944 hundreds of its students joined the French Free Forces, fought German divisions in Alsace, and entered Germany with Patton's forces in 1945. Janson's students often end up at France's most prestigious post-secondary institutions. The Musee Guimet boasts one of the largest collections of Asian art outside Asia. It also has a magnificent collection of pieces from Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. Other museums include a Counterfeiting Museum displaying original items and their counterfeits and the Musee Marmottan-Monet with a great collection of Impressionist works by Degas, Manet, Monet, Morisot, and Renoir.

The Trocadero lies across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. The original Palais de Trocadero was built in mixed Moorish and Byzantine style for a world's fair after the Franco-Prussian war. It was rebuilt for the 1937 World's Fair and contains several museums. This is where the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

The 17th arrondissement of northwestern Paris is home to Paris's largest hotel, the Hotel Concorde La Fayette built on land that once hosted an amusement park. Nearby is the huge conference center, the Palais des Congres de Paris with commercial exhibition space, TV studios, theaters, and more. The beautiful Parc Monceau is located just over the border in the eighth arrondissement.

Every Saturday morning you can visit the Marche Biologique Batignolles (Batignolles Organic Market). If you feel like splurging check out the Guy Savoy restaurant on the Rue du Troyon, a little street in the heart of the district. Be warned, you will pay $100 for a bowl of soup and you'll need to reserve a month in advance for dinner. While this district contains only one museum, devoted to Jean-Jacques Henner, a relatively unkown Alsacian painter it is said to have the most artist ateliers in the city.

Levi Reiss has authored or co-authored ten computer and Internet books, but prefers drinking fine French wine with by the right foods. He teaches computers at an Ontario French-language community college. Visit his Italian travel website www.travelitalytravel.com and his global wine website global wine website www.theworldwidewine.com with a weekly column reviewing $10 wines and new sections writing about and tasting organic and kosher wines.

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