Eurostar Deals to Paris – Visit the 8th Arrondissement

With the best value Eurostar deals to visit Paris on a short break you are unlikely to be staying in the 8th arrondissemnet but it’s certainly somewhere to experience whilst you’re in the city. The showcase of the 8th arrondissment in Paris is the Champs-Elysées, a prestigious big boulevard with extra wide pavements stretching from the Arc de Triomphe at the top all the way down to the Egyptian obelisk at the place de la Concorde at the bottom.

Throughout the 1970s from when I was working in the area, way before the Eurostar tunnel have even been planned, the Champs Elysées slowly turned into a garish mall street, with excessively noisy traffic, lots of American fast food outlets and the broadways a major gathering place for thieves and beggars of all types. In the 1990s the new mayor of Paris launched a cleanup campaign in the area, widening the pavements, restricting traffic and planting new trees. So now you can find fashion houses, smart hotels, restaurants and shops. Everything in the 8th arrondissement is the city’s best, grandest, and most impressive, although the idea that this street is an implant from the USA and not really Parisian at all, still pervades to some extent. The top restaurant is the Taillevent and there are celebrity nightclubs too such as the Crazy Horse Saloon and the Lido. The place de la Concorde is still worth a stroll and you can cut through to the Seine to catch the Batobus there as well – a favourite tip for getting about Paris on Eurostar trips. The great Arc de Triomphe is still in the middle of the craziest roundabout but now you can see all the way across to the Grand Arche at La Defense as ell, carefully ligned up. Arrive via Charles de Gaulle Etoile metro, Georges V or Franklin D Roosevelt, the world oldest underground station.

To conclude about the 8th as a destination for Eurostar Deals, I wouldn’t want to make it the main base for a Paris trip, you’d miss out on far too much of the genuine Parisian charm, but on the second or third day you may well want to drop in for an afternoon or early evening to experience a different side of life. Uptown as a change from downtown perhaps.