Paris DK Eyewitness Travel Guide Alan Tillier 9781405358088 Books
Download As PDF : Paris DK Eyewitness Travel Guide Alan Tillier 9781405358088 Books
"DK Eyewitness Paris" travel guide will lead you straight to the best attractions this enchanting city has on offer. Packed with photographs, illustrations and maps of Paris the guide includes in-depth coverage of Paris' unforgettable sights from the world famous Eiffel Tower and Louvre gallery, to the artistic Montmartre and atmospheric Cimetiere du Montparnasse, unearthing the best of the city's stunning architecture, phenomenal museums, spectacular art galleries and beautiful parks in between. You'll find 3D aerial views of Paris' most interesting districts, cutaways and floorplans of all the major sites, and detailed listings of the best hotels and restaurants in Paris for all budgets. The guide includes four 'Great Days Out' in Paris and extensive practical information and insider tips from shopping and entertainment to choosing the most appetising French cuisine. Whether you are shopping Parisian-style on Avenue Montaigne, strolling through Paris's less-explored districts on one of the guide's specially devised walking tours or exploring the richly designed "Gardens of Versailles", the "DK Eyewitness Guide to Paris" is indispensable. Don't miss a thing on your holiday with the "DK Eyewitness Paris".
Paris DK Eyewitness Travel Guide Alan Tillier 9781405358088 Books
This was one of two books that I took to with me to Paris (the other was Rick Steve's) and it is truly the best guidebook I have ever traveled with. It is chock full of features that you will use everyday. Here are the one's I found most useful:1) Full size color Metro map (handy so that you don't have to buy one or use the tiny one the hotel gives you.
2)Detailed information on hours and prices of all of the places you will visit.
3)Full color sketched layouts of different sites, including landmarks that you can use on your walking tours.
4)In the back there is an amazing map section that contains most of the common streets and nearest metro stops, along with large maps that are easy to use. As a bonus, each site in the book references where on the map it can be located (every day before we set out, I would find our sites for the day on the map and highlight and circle them, locate the nearest metro and be on our way!).
The negatives are few but in fairness I will point them out:
1)The book is heavy, so if you use more than one book, you will have a tough decision to make as to which to leave behind, because for all of its glorious contents, the tradeoff is the weight. As for me, most days I chose this one, except for the days I visited the Orangerie, Orsay, and Louvre. Which brings me to #2.
2)If you are looking for a book with a great amount of detailed info on places you will be visiting or art you will be viewing, this does not do a great job of that, it will tell you only the basics. These types of details are much better covered by the Rick Steves books.
3)The dining suggestions are at grossly overpriced places, ditto for the hotels. I really am not sure who actually chooses a hotel or dining establishment based on what they read in a guidebook, but I thought I would mention this just in case. We stayed at a very nice Holiday inn in Montparnasse for a reasonable price with wonderful staff. We were walking distance from the Metro and literally surrounded by reasonably priced delicious Parisian cuisine. Because of this I found the reccomendations not reasonable for me. Perhaps they are catering to a crowd with a little more cash to burn. Me? I would prefer to stretch my Euro a bit further.
Overall, the best travel book I have used in my years of traveling. I will definately buy another Eyewitness guide for my next trip.
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Tags : Paris (DK Eyewitness Travel Guide) [Alan Tillier] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. DK Eyewitness Paris travel guide will lead you straight to the best attractions this enchanting city has on offer. Packed with photographs,Alan Tillier,Paris (DK Eyewitness Travel Guide),Dorling Kindersley,1405358084
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Paris DK Eyewitness Travel Guide Alan Tillier 9781405358088 Books Reviews
There are two kinds of travel books those you use to help you plan a trip and those you want to have in your pocket when you make it. This exceptional book falls into the latter. Although it features some information on hotels and travel, these aspects of a prospective trip to Paris will be handled much more thoroughly by other volumes. Where this book excels is in its comprehensive coverage of things that any traveler will want to know, primarily the question Where am I, and what do I want to see while in this section of Paris? Some travel books contain more information, but many of these fail to filter that which is likely to be of interest and that which is not. What is amazing about this one is the usability and pertinacity of the information presented.
The book begins with a brief history of Paris, and then provides an overview of the city as a whole. Much of the remainder of the volume consists of introductions to specific areas of Paris, letting any traveler know what the immediate highlights in any area are. The presentation of the information is as attractive as one can imagine, with beautiful graphics, beautiful photographs, and marvelous summations of the various highpoints in the city. The book ends with a useful index and a collection of high quality maps. Best of all, the book is amazingly compact and durable given the sheer mass of information it packages. Unlike its competitors, it will never be an encumbrance because of its size.
I have not looked at any of the other DK Eyewitness Travel Guides, but this one is so gorgeous that it is definitely the series that I would look at first in any trip that I was contemplating making. It is such a marvelous book that one could consult it with profit merely as a way of getting to know a city, even if one is not planning to travel there.
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.
This was one of two books that I took to with me to Paris (the other was Rick Steve's) and it is truly the best guidebook I have ever traveled with. It is chock full of features that you will use everyday. Here are the one's I found most useful
1) Full size color Metro map (handy so that you don't have to buy one or use the tiny one the hotel gives you.
2)Detailed information on hours and prices of all of the places you will visit.
3)Full color sketched layouts of different sites, including landmarks that you can use on your walking tours.
4)In the back there is an amazing map section that contains most of the common streets and nearest metro stops, along with large maps that are easy to use. As a bonus, each site in the book references where on the map it can be located (every day before we set out, I would find our sites for the day on the map and highlight and circle them, locate the nearest metro and be on our way!).
The negatives are few but in fairness I will point them out
1)The book is heavy, so if you use more than one book, you will have a tough decision to make as to which to leave behind, because for all of its glorious contents, the tradeoff is the weight. As for me, most days I chose this one, except for the days I visited the Orangerie, Orsay, and Louvre. Which brings me to #2.
2)If you are looking for a book with a great amount of detailed info on places you will be visiting or art you will be viewing, this does not do a great job of that, it will tell you only the basics. These types of details are much better covered by the Rick Steves books.
3)The dining suggestions are at grossly overpriced places, ditto for the hotels. I really am not sure who actually chooses a hotel or dining establishment based on what they read in a guidebook, but I thought I would mention this just in case. We stayed at a very nice Holiday inn in Montparnasse for a reasonable price with wonderful staff. We were walking distance from the Metro and literally surrounded by reasonably priced delicious Parisian cuisine. Because of this I found the reccomendations not reasonable for me. Perhaps they are catering to a crowd with a little more cash to burn. Me? I would prefer to stretch my Euro a bit further.
Overall, the best travel book I have used in my years of traveling. I will definately buy another Eyewitness guide for my next trip.
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