Product Description

The Eyewitness Travel Guide helps you to get the most out of your trip with minimum difficulties. The opening section Introducing Paris locates the city geographically, sets modern Parisian its historical context and explains how Parisian life changes through the years. Paris At a Glance is an overview of the city's specialties. The main sightseeing section of the book is Paris Area by Area. It describes all the main sights with maps, photographs and detailed illustrations. Get to know Paris with The Eyewitness Travel Guide.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7287 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Customer Reviews

Nicely Arranged Guide
Purchased the guide as a replacement for a borrowed guide that got wet while we were in Paris. This one came with a wear/water resistant cover and was very nicely arranged for quickly finding the locations and areas of interest.

We LOVED this guidebook. the only disadvantage is that it's a bit heavy. but the coated pages and the fast-read pages made it fa
this is a great simple guidebook for a short trip to paris. it's very easy to absorb, but there are deeper sections if you want to know more. perhaps we had the latest edition but we did get a quick overview of the trendiest spots in paris - perfect if you're travelling with a pack of teenage girls...

the only problem is that it's a bit heavy. i'd have carried even more often if it were lighter.

This guidebook made making our way around Paris a piece of cake
We have just returned from Spring Break in Paris and the "Paris: Eyewitness Travel Guide" was our guidebook for our trip. Of course, the photo illustrations in any DK book are always impressive, and since I always like to see where I am going and what is to see there without having to Google everything, that was an obvious plus with this book. I must admit that II do not really think about this particular book as a guidebook for getting in-depth information about places; when I want that sort of information I get a guidebook at the place (only thing I bought on the trip were guidebooks and postcards). In practical terms this guidebook functioned as our menu for the trip, allowing us to see what was available and when you could visit, which was crucial because visiting hours change based on the month and the day (my biggest piece of advice based on this trip is that if you can go see the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay at night--Wednesday and Thursday respectively--you will enjoy them a lot more without the massive crowds during the day).

For me the best part of this guide book ended up being the maps. Paris is gridded out in 18 maps in the back of the book and for each region of the city there is a general map of the entire area with "Sights at a Glance" marked along with metro and train stations. Add to the mix the Paris Metro and Regional Express Railway (RER) map inside the back cover, and we found it incredibly easy to find things. We got a 5-day Metro pass and had the fortune of our hotel being right down the street from the Montparnasse Bienvenile station, which was the intersection of several metro lines (plus linked to a train station which allowed us to go to Chartres and be back by 1 in the afternoon). Except for a bus tour/river cruise the first night and a side trip to Versailles, we did not have our trip planned out. We had a list of things we wanted to see and each day would pick a starting point and work out our other options as we went along. These maps were great for making that relatively easy. Nor did we feel that we were restricted to the restaurants in our area because we were able to use our maps to head off into the night and find them.

The only exception would be the maps of the Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise and Cimetiere du Montparnassem because they were not extremely helpful in trying to find several of the graves I was trying to track down. Those of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison are easy to find because there are also several people standing around them, but finding those of Moliere, Sarah Bernhardt, and Samuel Becket were much harder. The guide does provide tiny icons representing what the graves actually look like, but the locations can be troublesome, especially when the graves are not right on a walkway. But there are detailed maps for Pere Lachaise and signs at the entrances that you can photograph with your digital camera and reference as you walk about (courtesy of your magic zoom button).

I bought the book a year before our trip, when my impromptu suggestion that we go to Paris for Spring Break was derailed by the lack of a current passport. So there is a minor concern that information is not totally current. On the one hand the Musee de l'Orange with Monet's water lily series was open, but the one place my wife wanted to go, the restaurant atop La Samaritaine, was derailed because the department store was closed. As long as you suspect that these sort of things are always going to happen (I felt sorry for the law students visiting the Louvre to discover that the Code of Hammurabi was not on display), you should be able to roll with these punches. Final word of advice regarding this particular guidebook: Make sure that you have a purse or a coat with pockets large enough to accommodate the peculiar not quite "pocket" size of this guide.