Paris holds the key to your heart, or so we were told, by that movie that everyone thinks is Disney but isn't (but that, like Disney, plays very fast and loose with fairly well-documented history). Paris does hold the key to your heart, assuming your heart doesn't easily palpitate, and isn't yet clogged with cholesterol. (Seriously, don't expect a diet of wheatgrass shots and kale salad in Paris. You could probably manage it, but you'd be eating home alone literally every evening.)
Paris is a city so well versed in tourism that it's almost become a cliché, probably more so than London, which maintains a sort of gritty, rainy reputation, and New York, which is iconic but not quite iconic enough. The American Dream is far more complicated than the French one, or so we've been told, and in any case, New York isn't afforded the same dreamy and romantic quality as Paris, in large part due to all the locals warning us in harried tones not to go there, on pain of death. New York is big, and it's scary, and people jerk off on you on the subway. We'd be naive to think that these pleasantries don't exist in every other city in the world, but New York now almost prides itself on being impenetrable (as much as the USA is). It prides itself on its hard outer shell. New York doesn't hold the key to your heart, but it does wear the stilettos that will stab and trample it to a bloody mush.
(That said, New York is utterly dazzling. And you'll find entire establishments dedicated to those wheatgrass shots and kale salads that Europe just doesn't put up with.)
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| Bread and circuses? More like crowds and phalluses. |
Paris requires three staples: your time, your better clothes, and your phrasebook.
Honestly? You can get by with no French. But do you want to 'get by'?
The reality is that you always, always get more out of your social experience if you can bungle a few words of French and prove that you're really trying. You can hunt through blog after blog but the truth is the truth: if you don't make an effort to speak a few words of the language, no one else is going to make very much of an effort at all to speak yours. It's purely a system of reciprocity. Parisians are cursed with a poor reputation for being cold and rude, but this reputation was probably invented by someone who went to France, didn't bother to even crack the spine of their phrasebook, and then expected the locals to leap the extra mile and speak their second language.
It makes sense if you think of it that way. French isn't your first language, but English isn't theirs. They've probably been studying English since high school, turning in drab assignments and fumbling speaking exams, wasting their weekends with noses buried in textbooks, just for foreigners to take it entirely for granted.
Look, life isn't fair, but give a neighbour a hand where you can.
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| So artsy it hurts. Feel free to cover your eyes. |
Dressing in Paris might at first seem a burden, but...it's kind of fun. It's fun not to feel overdressed in heels and a label-less Mexican dress you bought on etsy. Don't feel pressured - it's your damn body, put whatever you want on it - but don't see Parisian fashion sense as your enemy. See it as a challenge.
I'm not going to lie to you: there's a plethora of intimidatingly beautiful women and viciously attractive men in Paris (and really just France in general) but let the city be your playground. If you never felt comfortable enough to don that tight pink see-through dress in your small Pennsylvania town or clunk around in RuPaul heels in Cupar (honestly, walking in heels in the UK is stupidly difficult, not because of the cobblestones, but because everything slopes) then take it all to Paris and strut your shit.
Let's be honest: sweatpants and white sneakers might get you some looks. Well, not "might" - they will. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the rules dictate no sweatpants. Part of travelling, and adventuring, is defying rules. Wear what you want, but bear in mind that Paris's penchant for fashion is not an elite party that you aren't invited to. So join in.
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| Beware the Star Trek lens flare. It's at large. |
Lastly, and probably most importantly, give Paris your time.
No two-day rush-arounds. Don't "spend a day in Paris". Wait, gather your money, set aside your time, and live it. The French aren't fussy eaters, and they aren't speedy eaters either: French dinners often take hours, beginning in the early evening and stretching out into the small hours of the morning (the Spanish and Italians court similar traditions). Afternoon tea can take all afternoon, and nobody expects you to grab a cup and gulp it down, or even to take your coffee to go. If you sit down in a coffee shop, you are down. There's no limit (no rule!) for how long you're allowed to sit there, as long as you order at least one thing per hour. Amy Plum explains this lovingly - the idea that you're renting your table, and while you're renting it, it belongs to you.
Time is of incredible value in Paris, and in great European cities in general. Nobody expects you to rush around (though if you do, it's okay, because European cities are so small that we're used to going everywhere on foot. This is why Europeans have two walking speeds: breakneck or grandfatherly. We're either chilling out, or booking it across the city to work).
Don't barge around the city; if you miss your train, there's another one. Don't scream your coffee order; the guy making your cappuccino is European, and if he's not at breakneck, then he's moving at his grandfatherly pace. And that's okay. Don't rush by the glorious things that there are to see; stop, breathe them in, taste the air. Look at the gaps between cobblestones, and the rivets that hold together the Tour Eiffel. Look beyond the art and at the Louvre itself. The way it's been constructed, and has stood for centuries, looked at by millions of eyes. Europe didn't battle through Rome and the Reformation and Napoleon and two world wars to be rushed around, glanced at, taken like a shot of espresso.
HYOH. But remember that time is of the essence. Not in the way you might think.
