Otherwise, buy a baguette sandwich for lunch at any boulangerie or a crepe from a streetside stand. Supermarkets sell wine and cheese for one-stop picnic shopping.
For dinner, go ethnic. Some of Paris’ tastiest and most affordable food comes from its former colonies: great couscous from North Africa, hearty noodle soups from Vietnam, specialties of Senegal.
For French fare, just pick a neighborhood — the Latin Quarter, Montmartre, St. Germain des Pres, the Marais, Bastille — and read the menus in windows. Brasseries are cheaper than bistros and offer French classics at reasonable prices with a variety of wines by the glass. Fine wines are best bought in shops — not restaurants, where markups can be enormous.
For an outdoor aperitif, do as the French do. Take a bottle with paper cups and head to the Pont des Arts, the wooden-and-iron footbridge connecting the riverbanks between the Latin Quarter and the Louvre. In the city of romance, it remains a favorite of canoodling couples and Parisians who never tire of gazing at the sunset over the Seine.
Related Travel Information
The perfect Paris picnic comes cheap: a crusty baguette ($1), a thick slab of Camembert ($2.50), a modest Bordeaux ($5). Take it to the sprawling park at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, spread a blanket and dine with a view that is priceless.
Paris has more than its share of high-end luxury, but plenty of this city's famed culture and romance can come free — or at minimal cost. There are all kinds of tricks to enjoying Paris without busting your budget.
The opera has cheap seats, museums offer reductions, churches hold free classical concerts, walking up the Eiffel Tower
First came singles bars, dating services, and click-and-date Web sites. Then young urban professional searching for a little tenderness turned to speed dating.
Now a pair of French cooking schools are blazing another, somewhat less frenetic, trail in the quest for modern romance: “cook-dating.”
“I came up with the idea when I noticed how much the students in my classes had in common,” said Frederic Chesneau, who runs a small cooking school in the Marais district of central Paris.
“There were a lot of thirty-something professionals with
The perfect Paris picnic comes cheap: a crusty baguette (85 euro cents, US$1), a thick slab of Camembert (euro 2,US $2.50), a modest Bordeaux (euro 4,US$5). Take it to the sprawling park at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, spread a blanket and dine with a view that is priceless.
Paris has more than its share of high-end luxury, but plenty of this city's famed culture and romance can come free -- or at minimal cost. There are all kinds of tricks to enjoying Paris without busting your budget.
The opera has cheap seats, museums offer reductions, churches hold free classical concerts,
James Purnell, the newly appointed minister for tourism, is the author of an outspoken article which attacked the proposed London bid for the 2012 Olympic Games as a waste of £5 billion and the "wrong priority" for Britain.
Mr Purnell's attack on the Games bid was made just ahead of the Cabinet's decision - in 2003 - on whether to support the attempt to bring the event to Britain for the first time in more than 60 years. Urged on by Tony Blair, the Cabinet gave the bid its full endorsement - despite Mr Purnell's article, written in his capacity as
The perfect Paris picnic comes cheap: a crusty baguette (euro85 cents, US$1), a thick slab of Camembert (euro2, US $2.50), a modest Bordeaux (euro4, US$5). Take it to the sprawling park at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, spread a blanket and dine with a view that is priceless.
Paris has more than its share of high-end luxury, but plenty of this city's famed culture and romance can come free - or at minimal cost. There are all kinds of tricks to enjoying Paris without busting your budget.
The opera has cheap seats, museums offer reductions, churches hold free classical concerts,