emotionalmarkup

The smell of roasting rubber from the metro is a mere tickle compared to the hammering of fresh bread, seafood and cheese. Looking up to the grey sky, you don’t feel so bad as you would on a similar day across the Channel.

You’re in Paris.

What can be whittled from this majestic stick of French gold that hasn’t been said before? The streets are wide, the food is delicious and the people are French. Walking the streets, you feel as if you were in one colossal museum - there are monuments, ancient buildings, lively artist corners and French people everywhere. Like England, the hangover of lost colonial power is apparent in France, but it’s done with so much style; you can forgive them their pride and lose yourself in a empirical reverie of wine and fragrant butter sauces.

Far from being snobbish and rude, the people are warm and only happy to help you if you give their language a go. Every day I witnessed a tourist bark orders in English to a stunned service worker. In a bakery one afternoon I saw a man demand a badine in English and, with his arms stretched out, indicate the width of the loaf he had in mind. The teenager behind the counter, probably with a good level of English, was either too offended or too amused to react. The man looked and, probably to her, sounded like a zombie with a brand new Nikon strapped to his drooling head. Just before things hit melting point, a woman standing in line translated, the zombie got his bread and retreated. Imagine if a French person did that in Australia: they would be immediately sent to a detention facility and deported the following decade.

So determined to play by the rules, I stammered out what remained of my French language skills and surprisingly, I got by relatively well. Some were flattered that I’d taken the time as an anglophone to even open a French grammar book, which is a bit of a polite exaggeration but it was a nice compliment nonetheless. The folk selling trinkets beneath the Eiffel Tower and those trying to scam money weren’t so appreciative when I told them to fuck off.

In the areas where tourists tend to congregate you are guaranteed to be approached by someone asking you for money, directly or indirectly, at least once every 15 minutes. I learnt to ignore pleas of “Do you speak English?”, but there was one trick I’d never seen before - someone would pretend to pick up something from the ground in front of you, a ring or a coin, and then present it to you as if you’d dropped it. Insisting that you take the trinket, they congratulate you and then proceed to ask you for money to compensate them for having brought such good fortune upon your package holiday.

Va te faire!