40 min
50 min
5 · 6 · 7 · 14 · RER C
11.0 / km²
5
19
2,506
−26% vs city
Counted from OpenStreetMap and Inside Airbnb (CC BY 4.0)
Staying in Place d’Italie & Chinatown (13th)
The 13th does not look like Paris and that is the point of it. South of place d'Italie the avenues de Choisy and d'Ivry are the largest Chinatown in Europe - Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese and Laotian, in the ground floors of 1970s tower blocks - and it is where you eat for twelve euros in a city where that is otherwise difficult.
The rest is a working district: the Bibliotheque nationale and the Paris Rive Gauche development along the river, the Manufacture des Gobelins, and the Butte-aux-Cailles, a village of two-storey houses and cheap bars that survived the redevelopment and is the one genuinely pretty corner.
The cost is distance and appearance. Wikivoyage puts the walk from the Ile de la Cite at about forty minutes, which is accurate and pleasant along the Seine but not something you will do twice a day. Metro 14 from Olympiades reaches Chatelet in under ten minutes and is the reason this works at all. Book here for the food and the rate, not for the view from the window.
What works
- Metro 14 from Olympiades reaches Chatelet in under ten minutes
- The best and cheapest Asian food in Paris, by a distance
- Room rates among the lowest inside the Peripherique
- The Butte-aux-Cailles is a village of low houses and cheap bars
What does not
- Forty minutes on foot to Notre-Dame
- Tower blocks and 1970s avenues: it looks nothing like the postcard
- Nothing on a first-time sightseeing list is in the district
- Place d'Italie itself is a traffic junction with a shopping centre on it
The 13th arrondissement of Paris is primarily a residential and business district in the southeast of Paris, on the Left Bank of the Seine.The easy walk to the 13th arrondissement from the centre of Paris (Île de la Cité) takes around 40 minutes, either through back streets or along the Seine promenade.