A shopping center in a foreign country gives you a fascinating view into another nation's standards…read moreand what they consider valuable. The escalators here aren't your standard model, they're tilted moving sidewalks so that you can get your shopping cart onto 'em. And they have this groovy feature that locks your cart into place so you don't let go and kill all the people below you. There isn't enough seating in this place but the chairs they've got look like they're covered in leather. But one of the most remarkable things are the restrooms. French are pretty open about bodily functions so the restroom doors to both the men's and women's are never closed. This used to give you a straight-on view of guys using the urinals which I thought was just a little much. So on the way out I closed the door. The reaction was hilarious. A guy walks up looking concerned, stops in front of the door and looks it over. Like it's going to explode. He grabs the handle but stands there unsure if he should open it. He opens the door....... slowly peeks around and when he realizes that it's only a bathroom walks on in. The next guy out props the door open. Sometimes I wonder why these people even bother with doors. What's the point? Oh and the condom machine!! It's not inside the restrooms it's in the waiting area, near the emergency exit. You gotta love the French!!

Beaugrenelle is a pretty cool shopping center. It doesn't have designer stores like Galeries…read moreLafayette Haussman, but it has essentials like Adidas, Mango, Zara, H&M, Marks & Spencer, Uniqlo, Lacoste & Sandro. Beaugrenelle also has 10-rooms, 1,930-seats state-of the art movie theater. You can also charge your cell phone at one of the complimentary phone-charger lockers inside the center. Hours of Operation: Stores: Mon-Sat 10 am-8:30 pm. Sun 11 am-7 pm. Restaurants: Mon-Sat 10 am-midnight. Sun 11 am-midnight. Cinemas: Mon-Sun 9:30 am-midnight. EU non-residents can take advantage of the 12% tax refund by showing your passport and receipts to the tax refund desk.

The Beaugrenelle is a really nice building, fairly close to my hotel and the Tour Eiffel, which…read morebasically is a high end shopping mall, with a large number of designer brands yet still outlets such as Hagen-Dans, Nike and Adidas seem here. The staff around the mall seem nice, it is quite a nice building in both parts, with there being a bridge to connect the two malls, which are located on the opposite side of the streets. Shops here also include a small high-street of shops, which is part of the mall but with only enterences from the street, this includes an Orange store which is recently closed for a refurb, a very poor branch of Mcdonald's and a fairly nice Pandora store. Due to high security alerts, there is a lot of security on here, near enough one in every shop including Marks and Spencer, and you will be seared when you go in, while someone will look in your bag and mainly use a detector, but considering the recent events in Paris which are devastating, you can understand why and it is putting people's safety first, and I don't have a problem with that. The lifts are also pretty cool, on the left hand of the mall, playing music as you ride in the lifts, however on the right side sadly they are not, with few lifts seeming to be very small and move very slow, meaning if you actually need it with a pram or wheelchair it can be hard and frustrating and take ages just to go up a level, I know how painful this is, I've even been stuck in a lift before having only needed to get up 4 steps, and was there for an hour, which is a similar, albeit more extreme example. Beaugrenelle might be a small building, but they do have some really nice places inside, including a Monoprix which was opened today and is classed as part of the mall, despite not being directly in it, which is quite a nice supermarket/department-store which also has a cool looking Starbucks Coffee inside. There even is a cinema here, making it the perfect place to spend an hour or two, and even admire the building, as it is a really nice place, both of them are and it even contains one of 14 Marks and Spencer store's in France, which is a total dwarfed by 852 stores in the United Kingdom. They have free-wifi as well with no sign-up required other than accepting the terms and conditions, which is good and still easy to do if you have no knowledge of speaking french, Overall, this is a really nice mall and I count myself lucky infact to have it so close to my hotel, as it is so easy to pick up essentials with many large stores, including Monoprix who have a self-juicing orange machine and Marks and Spencer who have a great gluten free range and even english labeling, so I'm pleased to give this mall a solid 4 star rating!