I realized a lifelong dream over Thanksgiving. I went to France. Strictly speaking, it was Paris and we were there for a week. This concluded our honeymoon, which was split into two parts. The first was a whirlwind tour of California’s wine country and the Oregon Coast and the second… well, Paris! My first Paris trip, definitely not my last.
I’ve wanted to go ever since my uncle returned from a long stay in Normandy and told a twelve-year-old me: “nephew, let me tell you: the French know how to live.” He’s the smartest person I know, so I believed him. He wasn’t wrong.
It’s difficult to describe the experience because we did so much. My wife did her junior year abroad in Paris so she was an old pro at getting around the city and knowing what to see and what to skip so she was invaluable to our general experience. We stayed in a microscopic 5th floor walk-up apartment in the 2nd arrondissement, just a short walk from Rue Montorgueil, and made little daily journeys out to places of historic and artistic relevance. I refused to be That Guy and carry around a big fancy camera so I only took pictures with my iPhone. I think they came out OK. Maybe you’d like to see them? If you do, please check out the pictures from Saint-Denis. No one ventures out to the ‘burbs when they go to Paris and it’s one of the most important sites in France. All but two or three of the kings of France are buried there.
Of value: the three years of French study I did in high school and college. Even though that was a long time ago and I’ve had very little practice since then, I managed to make myself understood enough to get what I needed. I have never had a native speaker of French as a teacher (I had two and they were a Croatian and a Moroccan) so my language comprehension is very bad. I’d often have to ask people to repeat themselves but having made The All-Important Token Effort to Speak French right off the bat, it was usually forgiven. Most of the time, the person I was speaking to would switch to English… not because my French was that awful, but mostly because the opportunity for them to practice whatever English they knew was too good to pass up. My fluency in Spanish helped as well, it being a Romance language and all. Signage presented no problem.
It wasn’t always like that. The first time I tried to speak to someone in French was when I had to buy a phone card for the landline booths (because our phones didn’t automatically pick up the European carriers). I walked into a tabac and asked the middle-aged woman behind the counter in French if she spoke English. I was properly apologetic about it, I thought. She answered “non” very calmly but the look on her face seemed to add “and I don’t have to speak English.” I continued with my request in French and after a bit of back and forth and some hand-waving on my part I got what I needed from her: a 7.50€ phone card, 2.50€ in change and a pleasant smile.
My impressions? First off, Paris is filthy. I was expecting it and I didn’t have a problem with it. It’s a big, working city and in that aspect, it didn’t disappoint. Being a big city, it was full of graffiti, panhandlers, drug dealers and the occasional cluster of putains looking for johns. Real life, right before my eyes. Nothing Disney-fied about my Paris experience, I’m happy to say. I didn’t even go to the Eiffel Tour. It was omnipresent and therefore, venturing there was fruitless. The closest I got to there was Les Invalides. It horrified me that half the conversations in English that I eavesdropped on where about a past or upcoming day trip to Disneyland Paris. Why? Secondly, Paris is beautiful. Forget pictures! It’s grand. It’s not just the buildings, either; I’ve never seen so many stunningly beautiful people in public before. Remember… Paris is both a financial and a fashion capital. It’s a city full of working models. Lastly, Paris is multicultural. There are a lot of North Africans in the city and their presence is real and vital.
A frequently asked question since arriving is this: did I ever experience any of the famous French rudeness? Are the French rude? That’s a blunt question with a complex answer. I can’t really answer it definitively since I only spent a single week in one city in France, and most of my conversations were with people performing some form of customer service, or they consisted of me asking strangers for help with something. It was also a huge city. Could someone visiting from France hope to know what Californians are really like because they spent a week in NYC? I’d hope not. I had my experiences and they were largely positive with few exceptions, but I am not a fan of saying “the x are all y,” even when it’s a positive statement. To me, stereotyping people like that means you may not make the effort to really know the person you are interacting with because your expectations get in the way. You also run the risk of introducing your own cultural lens to the situation, and that can skew things badly. I can certainly see why many Americans would consider the perceive French as rude or distant and it’s because of how we differ in first meetings. To an American, ‘a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet,’ so there’s a tendency for us to begin first conversations with a big smile and conviviality. The French aren’t into that; in France, being overly friendly to strangers is considered disingenuous behavior so first intros tend to be… not unfriendly, but let’s say real. I don’t think that makes a person rude, just pragmatic.
If the French were truly rude, then I’d have seen people being complete assholes to one another all the time and that definitely wasn’t the case. To the contrary, the French express affection to friends in ways that Americans never would. Americans tend to have this thing about personal space, even among very close relations. We were at the grocery store picking up breakfast items and the cashier ringing us up was getting her ear talked off by a friend of hers who’d stopped by the store. The friend said her goodbyes and then kissed the cashier on the cheek a half-dozen times and said, quite sincerely, “I love you so much. Call me later.” I thought it was sweet, and then wondered if I’d ever see the same display in America after such a mundane interaction, even among life-long friends. Probably not.
So to come back to that question after a tangent and offer a concrete answer, I’d say that the French are not rude. They’re just French.