Paris – Where to stay in Paris and cheap flights

Paris smells like rain on warm stone at 07:15, when the tabac near Gare du Nord sells you espresso for €1.80 and nobody’s performing being Parisian yet. We’ve sent forty-something readers here since 2019, and the ones who email back stayed in the 10th or 20th, not the 6th.

Chapter 01: Arrival

Norwegian’s 06:35 from Oslo Gardermoen lands at Charles de Gaulle at 09:20, costs €127 return if you book three months out, €340 if you book three weeks out. We’ve watched this route for six years. The RER B into central Paris takes 35 minutes, costs €11.45, runs every 12 minutes, and delivers you to Gare du Nord looking exactly like everyone else who just flew budget: slightly tired, slightly optimistic, carrying one bag because you refused to pay €45 for hold luggage.

Charles de Gaulle is a concrete nightmare designed by someone who hated travelers. Terminal 2E has a Paul bakery that charges €8.90 for a mediocre croque monsieur. Skip it. The RER platform smells like brake dust and impatience. Buy your ticket from the machine, not the counter where they’ll try to sell you a day pass you don’t need yet. Validate the little purple ticket in the yellow machine or pay the €50 fine when the inspector boards at Aulnay-sous-Bois.

From Gare du Nord, the 10th arrondissement unfolds east and south. This is not the Paris in the Emirates airline ads. Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis runs loud with wholesale fabric shops, Tamil grocery stores, Kurdish barbers asking €12 for cuts that take nine minutes. We stayed at Hôtel Pulitzer in October 2022, €89/night for a room the size of a generous closet, window facing an air shaft, shower that worked, wifi that worked, reception guy named Samir who told us which bakery opens earliest (Boulangerie Mamiche, 06:00, croissants €1.40).

[IMAGE:rue du faubourg saint-denis morning market stalls]

Chapter 02: Why now, and why the margins

Everyone tells you to stay in Le Marais (4th) or Saint-Germain-des-Prés (6th) because everyone stayed there in 1998 and habit calcifies into wisdom. Le Marais costs €180/night for the same hotel room that costs €89 in the 10th. Saint-Germain costs €220 and comes with tourists photographing their pain au chocolat for eleven minutes before eating it. The food is worse because rent is higher, so restaurants serve concept instead of cassoulet.

Belleville (20th) and the eastern 10th and 11th got interesting when artists priced out of central Paris moved there in the 2000s, then interesting again when those artists got priced out by the people who followed them. Now it’s stabilized into actual neighborhoods where people buy toilet paper and argue about parking. Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in the 19th opens at 07:00, costs nothing, has cliffs and a temple and morning joggers who don’t perform jogging for an audience. We walked there from Belleville on a Wednesday in May 2023 at 08:20 and saw zero other tourists.

The 13th arrondissement below Place d’Italie has the largest Chinatown in Paris, which means actual Chinatown (Teochew, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Cambodian), not six restaurants calling themselves fusion. Pho Bahn Cuon 14 on Avenue de Choisy serves bowls for €9.50 that justify the 25-minute metro ride. Tang Frères supermarket sells ingredients you can’t pronounce and snacks that cost €2.30. This is the Paris that lives here, not the Paris that poses here.

Skip the Eiffel Tower queue. We mean this. It costs €28.30 to go to the top, takes 90 minutes minimum even with advance tickets, and delivers a view you’ve already seen in 4,000 photographs. The tower looks better from Trocadéro anyway, across the river, free, no queue, better angle. If you desperately need altitude, Montparnasse Tower costs €18, takes 11 minutes total, gives you a view that includes the Eiffel Tower instead of being stuck inside it. We sent our friend Kristian there in March 2024. He said it felt like cheating and he loved it.

[IMAGE:parc des buttes chaumont temple morning light]

Chapter 03: What to skip, honestly

Don’t book a Seine river dinner cruise. We watched one from Pont de l’Archevêché in June 2023 at 21:30: glass box full of people eating reheated chicken under LED strips, commentary in four languages competing with a sound system from 2004, €95/person for an experience you can simulate at home by eating leftovers in your bathroom while playing a YouTube video called “Paris at Night”. Stand on Pont Alexandre III at sunset instead, free, better view, escape route available.

Avoid the Catacombs unless you enjoy queuing 75 minutes to walk through tunnels of human bones while a tour group from Arizona blocks the narrow passages taking photos with flash despite the signs. The wait starts at Rue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy at 09:00 and doesn’t end until you’ve descended 131 steps into a historical site that smells like damp limestone and regret. Cemetery Père Lachaise costs nothing, has no queue, offers actual graves of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison without the claustrophobia.

Skip Ladurée macarons. We tried them twice (2019 and 2023) to confirm our suspicion: €3.20 each for colored sugar in a box designed to photograph well. Pierre Hermé charges €2.90 and actually tastes like the flavor printed on the label. Or skip macarons entirely and buy canelés from a random bakery in the 11th for €1.90. Bordeaux invented them, Paris perfected them, tourists ignore them for macarons.

Don’t eat in the Latin Quarter (5th) near Rue de la Huchette where restaurants have photo menus in eight languages and guys outside offering “authentic French cuisine” with laminated cards showing pasta carbonara. We walked that street in April 2022 at 19:30 and counted eleven different men offering the same frozen escargot from the same Sysco distributor. Cross the river to the 13th, ride two metro stops north to the 10th, walk literally anywhere else.

Chapter 04: One perfect day

Start at Café Oberkampf in the 11th at 07:45, when it opens and locals haven’t fully caffeinated yet. Order café crème and tartine with butter and jam, sit at the zinc counter, cost €6.20 total, duration 15 minutes. Walk south on Rue Oberkampf toward République, watching the neighborhood wake up: metal shutters rolling open, delivery trucks double-parking, the guy at the corner tabac arranging lottery tickets in the window display.

Catch the 8 from République toward Porte de Charenton, get off at Bastille, walk through Marché Bastille if it’s Thursday or Sunday (otherwise skip to next step). The market runs along Boulevard Richard Lenoir from 07:00 to 14:30, sells vegetables that still have dirt on them, cheese that smells aggressive, rotisserie chickens for €8.50, bread from actual bakeries not industrial kitchens. Buy nothing, just walk through and smell how food is supposed to smell before supermarkets wrapped it in plastic.

Walk east on Rue de la Roquette into the 11th, turn left on Rue de Charonne, find Le Bistrot du Peintre at number 116. Sit on the terrace if weather allows, order the €19 lunch menu (changes daily, usually involves duck or steak or something braised for three hours), drink the house red (€5.50 for 25cl), watch the neighborhood argue about parking and kiss on street corners and do the ordinary magic of being Parisian without thinking about it. We ate here in November 2023 at 13:15, watched a couple have a 40-minute argument about whose mother they’d visit for Christmas, felt like anthropologists.

Walk north to Cimetière du Père Lachaise, enter at Porte Principale on Boulevard de Ménilmontant, pick up the free map that nobody uses because getting lost is the point. The cemetery is 44 hectares of graves and cobblestones and cats and tourists looking for Jim Morrison’s grave (Division 6) while missing thousand better graves of people who actually mattered. Find Oscar Wilde (Division 89) covered in lipstick kisses, find Édith Piaf (Division 97) with flowers and metro tickets left by strangers, find a bench in Division 12 where nobody famous is buried and sit for 20 minutes watching light filter through chestnut trees.

Exit at Porte des Rondeaux, walk south to Parc de Belleville, climb to the top for the view everyone skips because they’re queuing at the Eiffel Tower. Paris spreads out below: Sacré-Coeur in the north, Panthéon in the south, the whole textured mass of zinc roofs and satellite dishes and lives being lived in 2.1 million apartments. Come here at 18:47 in late May when the light goes amber and long, when the city looks like the idea you had of it before you arrived and reality complicated things.

Dinner at Le Baratin in Belleville, 3 Rue Jouye-Rouve, no reservations for parties under four, arrive at 19:30 when they open or 21:00 after the first wave clears. Chef Raquel Carena cooks French-Argentine, which means steak that costs €26 and tastes like it costs €48 in the 6th, wine that costs €6.50/glass and drinks like €12 elsewhere. The room is small and loud and has been here since 1987 doing the same thing while the neighborhood changed around it three times. Our team ate here in February 2024, spent €84 for two including wine and dessert and tip, left at 23:20 full and slightly drunk and convinced Paris still works if you know where to look.

End at Rosa Bonheur sur Seine, a barge bar at Port des Invalides that opens at 18:00 and serves €7 beers on the deck facing the river. Or end at Le Syndicat in the 10th, cocktail bar specializing in French spirits (€11-14/drink), less crowded than Prescription Cocktail Club in the 6th, better drinks because they’re not performing for tourists. Or end at your hotel in the 10th, where the neighborhood is still delivering vegetables at 23:45 and the guy at the corner kebab shop knows you by now because you’ve walked past him eleven times. Paris doesn’t require a grand finale. Sometimes the best ending is ordinary.