Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [90]
This national institution, better known for screening classic French and cutting-edge foreign films, is housed in stunning postmodern premises with plenty of exhibition space for its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions. It also houses screening rooms, the Bibliothèque du Film (Film Library) for researchers and an excellent specialist bookshop. Enter from place Leonard Bernstein.
MUSÉE DES ARTS FORAINS Map
01 43 40 16 22, 01 43 40 63 44; www.pavillons-de-bercy.com; Les Pavillons de Bercy, 53 av des Terroirs de France, 12e; adult/child €12.50/4; by appointment; Cour St-Émilion
The Museum of the Fairground Art, housed in several old wine warehouses in trendy Bercy Village, is a wonderful collection of old amusements from 19th-century funfairs – carousels, organs, stalls etc. Most of the items still work and are pure works of art. The place is usually only rented out for corporate events with minimum numbers but give a call or visit the website and try your luck.
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13E ARRONDISSEMENT & CHINATOWN
Drinking; Eating; Sleeping
Serious change is afoot in the 13e arrondissement, a once nondescript area south of the Latin Quarter and Jardin des Plantes (5e) that is rapidly becoming the city’s new star. Its renaissance was heralded in the 1990s b the controversial Bibliothèque Nationale de France and by the arrival of the high-speed Météor metro line, and is slated not to stop until 2015 (when the 26-year ZAC Paris Rive Gauche redevelopment project – www.parisrivegauche.com – ends).
A glamorous strip of interior-design shops now fronts riverside Quai de la Gare immediately north of the National Library and MK2 entertainment complex Click here. There’s the new river metro Click here. Then there’s the swimming pool on the Seine that floats not quite in the shade of the latest designer bridge to grace the river, the Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir (2006) – across which Right Bank night owls from Bercy hotfoot it to a trio of music venues moored in front of the library. Indeed, Parisian socialites bemoan the fact Bibliothéque is the last stop on the line, but they know this is a great place to be after dark. Once the new library and university buildings for Paris’ language and civilisation students open in 2010, there is no saying how many bars will open.
Cutting-edge architecture and design is one face of the 13e, a working-class district that will never lose its feisty spirit and down-to-earth grit. A place proud of its history, it has both a blvd Auguste Blanqui and place Nationale, a pairing propitious to the reconciliation between anarchism and patriotism.
Flit from Chinese restaurant to Vietnamese stall in the capital’s Chinatown, the area between av d’Italie and av de Choisy, and you feel you’ve imperceptibly changed continents. Or trip past the graffiti-covered façade of Les Frigos (www.les-frigos.com; rue des Frigos, 13e), an established artists’ squat with several galleries in a 1920s industrial building that used to be a train station for refrigerated wagons, and you could be in Berlin. In the Butte aux Cailles quartier, the jewel in this arrondissement’s crown, people still sing revolutionary songs from the time of the Paris Commune over chichi cuisine.
BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE Map
01 53 79 53 79, 01 53 79 40 41; www.bnf.fr;
11 quai François Mauriac, 13e; temporary exhibitions adult/18-26yr/under 18yr from €7/5/free; 10am-7pm Tue-Sat, 1-7pm Sun; Bibliothèque
The four glass towers of the €2 billion National Library of France – conceived as a ‘wonder of the modern world’ – opened in 1995. No expense was spared to carry out a plan that many said defied logic. While books and historical documents are shelved in the sunny, 23-storey and 79m-high towers (shaped like half-open books), patrons sit in artificially lit basement halls built around a ‘forest courtyard’ of 140 50-year-old