The 8th
The only Parisians who live here full-time are rich old ladies who wear a fur coat as soon as the temperature drops below 20 degrees centigrade, along with their ancient, ex-playboy husbands, and the newly very rich who need a large underground garage to park their 4WD BMW. Other than that, it’s mostly offices, shops, theatres and fashion houses, with the Champs-Élysées running through the middle. I used to work in this part of town, and for me, the most fascinating people-watching was outside L’Avenue, the posh café on the corner of the rue François Premier and the avenue Montaigne. It is so essential to be seen there that in the middle of winter you will spot a full row of facelifts late-lunching outdoors on the terrace when everyone else is rushing back to their office to get out of the cold. If you actually want to sit in comfort and eat, wander up François Premier to L’Antenne, the café on the corner of the rue de la Trémoille. Here, office workers and media types from Europe 1 radio station gather at lunchtime for an unpretentious break from the daily grind.
The 9th
Until very recently, the area between Pigalle and the Galeries Lafayette was where people moved when they couldn’t decide which arrondissement they liked best. Nowadays it’s going the same way as the 2nd. The internet is killing both the sex shops and the guitar shops, and the neighbourhood is becoming breathlessly trendy. Drab cafés are being made over as ‘traditional bistros’, where carpaccio de boeuf has replaced jambon-beurre (ham baguette) on the menu, to cater for the new clientele of artfully unshaven men, and women who use Ray-Bans to hold their hair in place. You can still see a few old-style occupants of the neighbourhood—sex-shop owners and ageing prostitutes—in the small cafés just south of the place Pigalle. But beware, if an underdressed girl in a foreign accent comes up and says hello as soon as you enter a bar—you’re in for a very expensive drink. To see the biggest concentration of trendy newbies, head for the Hôtel Amour’s restaurant in the rue de Navarin.
The 10th
This is a bit of a no-man’s-land. Around the Gare du Nord and along the boulevard de Strasbourg, it’s as sordid as it ever was, though the Sri Lankan community to the north of the station is now settling in and cleaning it up, and incidentally providing some of the best and cheapest ethnic food in the city. At Château d’Eau métro, touts for the African hairdressers hustle women to come and get their locks braided or straightened. Fifteen years ago, the canal zone in the east of the arrondissement was the hippest area in Paris, and it still attracts plenty of night-time revellers, either crowding into the laid-back restaurants and bars or sitting along the waterside, watching the drunks stumble into the murky water. My favourite spotting spots are the Sri Lankan cafés near La Chapelle métro station, where Tamils gather for an early dinner or after-work chat, or one of the bridges over the Canal Saint-Martin when the summer-evening picnics are in full swing. And just for a taste of the really seedy side of Paris, a quick dash over the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis crossroads will take you past cheap Chinese streetwalkers and all the lowlife that these cruelly exploited new immigrants attract.
The 11th
Bastille, formerly a furniture-making area, has become a big-brand shopping ghetto, but beyond the rue de la Roquette and the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, this is still a lively, varied arrondissement, with gentrifiers living alongside Arab corner-shop owners and ordinary Parisians who will struggle if you ask them the way to Père Lachaise cemetery in English. The Oberkampf area is still one of the best venues for bar-crawling, and attracts slightly rough-edged crowds from the late teens to forty-somethings practically every night of the year. For cooler, terrace-based people-watching, it’s best to head for the Pause Café on the corner of the rue de Charonne and the rue Keller, in the area made famous (to other Parisians, at least) by the 1996 film Chacun Cherche son Chat (also released under the English title When the Cat’s Away).
The 12th
This is a far-flung arrondissement inhabited by a mix of middle-class people who wanted a cheaper alternative to the 11th, and poor edge-of-towners. The most interesting spots are the Coulée Verte (‘green flow’) gardens heading out from Bastille along the old railway track, and the hub of activity around the place d’Aligre. This is a densely packed Sunday market that makes your mouth water and your toes hurt, as you jostle to buy cheap food and get stomped on by the hurried locals. It’s Paris at its democratic, people-watching best, with rich and poor vying elbow-to-elbow to get served, and stalls selling Spanish strawberries at suspiciously low prices just metres away from the old market hall where you can buy hand-picked, organic, individually boxed French varieties that cost as much per kilo as a second-hand Renault.
The 13th
This is home to Paris’s biggest and most Chinese Chinatown, with some startlingly authentic restaurants and a real colonial feel near the Porte de Choisy. It’s also home to the Butte aux Cailles, the hilltop village of lanes and low-rise houses that is the southern Parisians’ alternative to Montmartre. I used to think that the name ‘Quails’ Hill’ was cutely rustic until I was told that caille was an old word for prostitute. These days, there are no brothels, but you might see some Chinese masseuses taping their phone numbers to lampposts. In the evenings, the Butte is a young people’s party zone, with
