Several students are taking business classes in Paris through a summer program sponsored by the David Eccles School of Business, exploring the city, its culture and its business landscape. We’ll be sharing several of their experiences here.
Here, student Ashton Meeks writes about arrondissment #2, one of the city’s 20 distinct districts:
I am a senior (still can’t believe it) at the University of Utah where I am studying Finance. And I am about to embark on the journey of a lifetime in beautiful Paris, France. I will be studying International Finance and I will also be doing an independent study for four weeks, as I explore the different arrondissements of Paris.
Arrondissement #2
As we have been exploring the different arrondissements, I have noticed a commercial business “theme.” Each arrondissement seems to have a business that is particularly prominent. This arrondissement had dress shops everywhere. Formal dresses, casual dresses, and even just women’s clothing shops. This arrondissement is really tiny, and we walked basically from one end to the other in about 45 minutes. There really isn’t a lot of tourism in this arrondissement, which I noticed pretty quickly. We stood out because of all the photos we were taking, and because of how lost we apparently looked. A woman even came up to us to help us figure out where we were going, which we thought was really nice. Overall, this was a unique arrondissement, but I don’t think I would visit it again for any intentional purpose.
It took us forever to find a two-star hotel in this arrondissement. Granted, we weren’t super-prepared for finding a hotel. I thought I had a two-star hotel address ready to go, but when we got there, it turned out to be a three-star hotel. We were so sick of walking and taking the metro all over the place by the time we found this hotel, so I think its safe to say we were extremely excited when we found it.
We found this arc at the very end of our visit to the 2nd arrondissement. It is in the middle of a road that separates the 2nd and the 10th arrondissement. It was really beautiful but I really couldn’t tell what the purpose was.
We found this cinema, Le Grand Rex, when we were looking for the Musee du Gormand Chocolat. We didn’t end up visiting the museum because of how pricy it was, but I was happy to find this cinema in the process. So many cinemas here blend in to the rest of the businesses, but this one was very obviously a cinema. It appeared to be busy and is actually the largest cinema theatre in Europe (according to the Internet). Many of us have been talking about all of the movies that we wanted to see this summer, so we might have to go check this cinema out at some point.
Paris Bourse is the historical Paris Stock Exchange. It is a really beautiful building, with hotels all around it. While we were there, we actually noticed a mini farmers market. CEA had told us about these, but this is the first one I have seen. There was all kinds of food, fabrics, and drink stands. It was really interesting to walk through. There was also a small cafe in the courtyard and there were people all over the area. I really love the columns and different statues all over the building. It definitely looks like a government building.
While we were on our way to Paris Bourse, we stumbled across this really small skateboarding area. It was so random, and is in the middle of a huge shopping area. There were about 10 kids there and all of them looked between 8 and 12.
All photos courtesy of Ashton Meeks. You can follow his Paris blog at APeachInParis.wordpress.com