Paris Travel Observations
I've again seen Paree, yet I return down on the farm.
My first trips to Paris were 24 and 22 years ago (Summer 1999 & Spring 2001). A lot has changed. A lot has not. Here are my notes:
As opposed to before, I now have money and a mobile phone supercomputer. That gave me options along with knowledge. It also meant I didn’t have to do as much preparation or thinking as I would have otherwise. That is good but also bad. I should have used a physical map more and my mobile directions less I think.
Paris today is much more like NYC than it was 20-years ago. Then it was much more foreign. Much more another world and an old world. Today the gap has remarkably narrowed.
All arrangements can and almost must be placed in advance including tickets to museums and key sites. Being late to the game, our hack for the Eiffel Tower was to book a fancy-schmantzy lunch at Madame Brasserie on the tower’s first floor allowing us to skip the line and head up the elevators immediately. The food was probably the most frou-frou glitzy of any meal we had. While good, it was probably the second least liked meal and almost all the value was in the line-skipping feature. Keep in mind that I am not opposed to frou-frou dining.
Lots of graffiti; most is of a creative nature, but much is standard protest. It is hard to know if any is truly gang related (assuming unions and socialists aren’t gangs).
The social and nightlife in Paris reminds me of Hong Kong circa 2018—before the dark times of CCP oppression.
I had forgotten or failed to previously notice all of the Brutalist architecture in the outskirts/suburbs of Paris. It looks like a movie about East Germany in places.
About the same homeless scene as NYC (so relatively little) but they seem more lost here. There were fewer panhandlers, and they seemed exceptionally distraught—hard to know if that was an act or real.
The cafes are packed and bustling even on a Monday night. No sign of recession here. Tourist spaces are jammed. Fortunately online ticketing and limited sales makes it fairly tolerable. Prices could and perhaps should actually be higher for most tourist sites.
I had (mis)remembered that in my prior visits I was able to walk right in to Saint-Chapelle and Napoleon's Tomb at Les Invalides. My comment was going to be, "No more! Tickets are required and likely must be purchased in advance. I liked it before it was cool." However, this proved to be a false memory at least for the 2001 trip. Upon arrival home I found in my ticket stubs from visiting these places. For reference here are the relevant prices in Euros for single adult attendance 2001 | 2023:
Louvre: 7 | 17
Napoleon's Tomb: 7.95 | 15
Saint-Chapelle: 3.45 | 11.5
Americans EVERYWHERE. Our hotel seemed to be exclusively Americans despite its boutique nature and deep-Paris locale.
The people about Paris look younger and more attractive than when I was here before—when I was younger and more attractive.
The major reason they are so much thinner and more fit (in central Paris anyway) is they walk & bicycle more while eating less. This is true in my estimation even after adjusting for a potential youth effect. The food here is filling at lower quantities. Thank God they never fell for the low fat nonsense.1 They obviously are taking a different position on the quantity/quality tradeoff margin.
Upon our arrival, the very friendly and helpful hotel manager explained about strikes being regular and ho hum. Sort of apologized for it. Joked they are world champions at it. His suggestion was to plan accordingly as for instance there was one rumored/scheduled for Tuesday morning. “Probably just a short demonstration. Then they disperse.”
Uber is competitive with trains even for large groups like mine. Our family of five took an Uber from the airport to the door of the hotel for €103 where a train + Metro would have been €77 (technically €2*5 of this would have been the initial, forced purchase of a rechargeable card, which could have been reused later on the metro). The €26 premium is easily worth it considering Uber’s door to door service and peace of mind about navigation. For a group of four the difference would be negligible if not in Uber’s favor as a party of five requires a larger, more expensive vehicle.
Parisian traffic is intense and all the more frenzied with motorcyclists legally able to drive between cars on the middle lines in the road. The traffic is as bad as anywhere both in the heart of the city and the suburbs heading into the city in the morning (as seen driving out to Giverney in the morning). But I though it was all marvelous trains here???
Paris traffic/driving seems chaotic at least at first, but it indeed does flow in a way unlike any I’ve seen. Basically no incidents of road rage even though there were plenty of things that exceeded what I have witnessed creating rage elsewhere in America. Honking is prevalent but is both courteously done in almost all cases—a series of short beeps—and well placed—basically telling a driver or pedestrian they should go or that they should do what they are doing at the moment like make an illegal turn. It is simply amazing to watch bikes, motorcycles, cars, and buses interact with such ease. The bicyclist also have done what I’ve heard about in places like Vietnam where they can handle crisscrossing pedestrians smoothly as long as the pedestrians move deliberately at a steady pace.
The French have a much more sanguine position on bathrooms it would seem. This I remember from prior visits where especially in the south of France economics forced shared spaces—separate stalls with common washrooms. While they’ve had unisex and shared bathroom space for decades, they distinctly have only male/female in all the places I saw. In fact my confusion at Versailles—standing in the long ladies line in a narrow hall—was quickly cleared up with helpful people pointing to the men’s room at the end of the narrow hall allowing me to bypass the line.
We had only two occasions of rudeness. I’ve always found this stereotype to be quite false. The first case came when we asked the hotel’s late-evening manager for clean towels as the maid had failed to switch ours out. He said, “This is not my job,” in a huff when asked for the second time for clean towels. He simply had to get them out of a closet and hand them to us in the lobby.
An official at PSG stadium gave us our second “not my job” in the form of “your issue is not my problem”. We had booked tickets to tour the stadium on Friday, but their system pushed them to Saturday. We noticed this weeks before leaving and confirmed by initiating without completing other reservations for Friday and Sunday—both went to Saturday. Since there was no merchant contact information to be found, we could not address it with PSG before hand. We arrived on Friday with some hope of clearing things up. When we arrived a special event was just getting started with young boys from the USA arriving for some kind of soccer camp. The best I can guess is their solution to the event was to haphazardly push ticket reservations to Saturday to avoid a scheduling conflict. Attempts to explain our dilemma were met with dismissive disregard if not contempt. Ah, well. That is what credit card charge denial is for.
Anecdotally there seems to be a healthy degree of renovations and related activity in the city—no stagnation here.
Smoking in the outdoor patio of cafes is alive and well. Some smoking still goes on in indoor markets, etc.
My son’s OU hat elicited 2 “Boomer!”s and 1 “Oklahoma”. It is a small world with Americans EVERYWHERE.
Prices in grocery stores were very similar to OKC on average. Produce is better in the street markets—no surprise. But product availability (same brands, etc.) and prices in general were very much in line. It turns out that the PPP adjustment for France to the US is basically 1 (no adjustment needed). Allowing for the likelihood that it is something different when comparing Paris to OKC, it is interesting how close the two cities are in median household income. This relates to the point I made years ago comparing OKC to Hong Kong. Higher income is great but hard to come by. More people is great and fairly easy to come by. Open the borders now!
Restaurant prices are somewhat higher, but it makes sense as an adjustment for quality. Much like my observations last year vis-à-vis NYC.
Customer service in restaurants is generally excellent once you realize the complete reversal in the norms compared to America. The assumption is you only want their attention when you are ready—not when they are. Hence, you arrive and usually only get a menu and PLENTY of time to consider it. You order and it arrives with the expectation that they should deliver everything you might need in that moment. If they were to swing by to ask how things were going, it would/should be an unnecessary interruption—if things weren’t right, they should have done it correctly in the first place. Besides, if you needed something, you would ask them. Same for the check to leave. You almost have the right to the table. You will tell them when it is time to leave. It is really quite respectful once you think about it.
The waitstaff was probably 80/20 male and 5-10 years older on average compared to the US. It is a very different profession.
The degree of pride the French take in their food is remarkable. It is not a transaction nor simply satisfaction of a basic need. It is a craft and an art. Hence, at every level of experience from prepared foods in the grocery store to fast-casual restaurants to the cafes to the finer dining it is a notch higher than what we see in the US. Again, they have chosen a different quality to quantity arrangement.
A visitor would be forgiven to not know it was the finals of the French Open during our time there. Only twice did I see a TV playing the event. And in the first case no one was watching. In the second, which was the final sets of the championship match, it was only our group, a couple of men who didn’t stay to see the ending, and one other couple. Likewise there was absolutely no sign the Olympics will be in Paris next summer. They seem to be substantiating the substitution effect.
It is hard to know what to make of the lack of air conditioning. Our hotel came advertised as fully equipped, but the bedroom for my wife and me within our family suite had such an inadequate unit it might as well have not had A/C at all. The kids’ basically equally sized room was very well functioning in cooling. Their vent was about twice as big. Almost all shops and restaurants do not have any cooling to speak of. The major department stores and malls do have pretty good A/C. How many people experience the Louvre by moving from floor vent to floor vent? Would precise geotracking falsely reveal the art in front of these units as the “most popular”? As I see it there is a cultural hold up (you don’t want for what you haven’t had the ability to want), a structural hold up (almost all cafes are open air but of course they do shut those windows and doorways in the winter), and an economic hold up (Paris isn’t as wealthy as Plano, TX). Then again, Paris isn’t as hot as Plano. It is as hot as Portland, OR. Portland has a lot of A/C as does Boston, another similar climate in the summer.
I find the European siren to be superior to the American. It is less obstructive while still be alerting. Also, the Parisian police exhibit a high degree of curtesy turning their sirens from low to high volume only when necessary. They promptly turn them back down immediately when possible—I witnessed this on our short block—only on high for about 100 feet.
Louvre security was surprisingly quite lax. Musse D’Orsey was only nominally stronger. Weapons or tools of vandalism could very easily be snuck in.
The prevalence of American music is always surprising. It probably helps people from the US feel at home; although, I am sure that is not the intended purpose. The same phenomenon is at work here where American music from the past 60 years and especially the middle 20 of those is played as if it were the latest hits. Between American music and American TV & movies, the French, et al. have a huge advantage for learning English including pronunciations, idioms, and accents.
Stereotypes are dangerous for the bad arguments they can foster, but there is something to this: Americans tend to worry that government decisions will take away jobs whereas the French seem as much concerned that it will take away their leisure. Both are equally concerned about loss of pension/entitlement income.
Wine is as inexpensive as it is available, and it is EVERYWHERE. What a wonderful country!
The value of travel especially internationally is how much smaller it makes the world seem while at the same time helping one to appreciate how vast and beautiful it is.
Enjoy some pictures!
P.S. (added 6/22/2023) The French also famously use butter and other natural food fats as opposed to seed oils. I would put strong odds on this being a dietary choice/serendipity working in their favor.