#00 Paris à la Carte

About the Paris à la Carte Tour

If the following thoughts speak to you, the Paris à la Carte tour is made for you!

Clichés Are Tenacious

Getting an overall picture of a major city is often a difficult task when visiting it as a foreigner. Most of the time, we focus on one aspect, one neighborhood or one moment, and tend to generalize from that experience.

We could enter the overwhelming Louvre and decide that Paris is a big old museum. Or stick to the surroundings of the Eiffel Tower and figure that Paris and Parisian look well-dressed… but quite homogeneously! Yet another risk woud be to picture the typical Parisian as a Caucasian person, smoking and drinking wine.

There are Many Paris

My take is that Paris is diverse, Paris is a city of contrasts, Paris has many faces and they all equally deserve to be discovered!

On the one hand, many outer arrondissements in the current layout were not part of Paris until 1859 and their forced integration under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann. These vilages or towns had their own architecture, communities, artistic or political views. And this is why these districts mostly kept their own identity since. You’ll often hear that the likes of Belleville or Montmartre hold the essence of the real Paris!

On the other hand, for the last decade or so, Paris has opened up internationally. The city has also invested in its future, taking its destiny in hands in terms of public transport, habitat, sustainability, social innovation and inclusiveness. Batignolles, la Petite Ceinture or the Greater Paris are great examples of the dynamism of the city.

Cherry on top — for those who needed proof that miracles do exist — locals started to speak English!

The Paris à la Carte Tour

The idea of this tour is to create a customized itinerary in terms of duration, neighborhoods and aspects of the city, to really soak it all in.

Let’s try to get a feel on what makes the city a ground for cultural experimentation, just through exploration!

Of course, one golden rule remains, the raison d’être of Paris B-sides: wander off the beaten track!