I do not like Paris.
I know that already half my readers have collapsed in shock. "But it's PARIS! But you've lived there for almost a year now! How can you not like it?" Well, there's essentially two parts to that answer.
The first part is, I'm not a sheep. I'm not a 'let's go to Europe 'cause it's cool' tourist. I am a discerning tourist, a traveller. I need a reason to like a place. 'Because it's cool' and 'because everyone else says so' are not reasons. They're excuses made by people without the ability to think for themselves and who care more about their image of chicness in the eyes of other people. I am not afraid to judge. I'm not afraid to have opinions. I'm not afraid to say 'No. I don't like it.'
Paris, from the first, never grabbed me. Maybe it was the phenomenon of stranger build-up, hearing so much about a place that it can never live up to the expectations, no matter what they may or may not be. Maybe it was because I'd just come from a place that DID grab me, very, very strongly. Whatever it was, Paris never caught my attention. I'd been there twice before I moved there. Only at the end of my second trip did I catch a small glimpse of its potential. But still, there was no 'Oh my God' moment. There was no 'Hey, this has all been a little bit cool, actually,' either. I've been to places that have made me go 'Oh my God'. I've been to places that have stolen my heart and never given it back. I've been to places that have just been so pleasant and enjoyable that I'm looking forward to going back. Paris was never one of those.
It's touristy, insanely so. I hate touristy places. The transformation into a touristy place tends to destroy what made it worth visiting to begin with. The Parisians are not the most friendly of people. They can be, but I suspect that I have an advantage in being a competent French speaker and in being Australian. There are no unresolved beefs to cause tension, and I'm not an ignorant, irritating tourist who thinks that everyone speaks English if I just say it slowly and loudly enough. But even so, they can be a bit gruff sometimes.
Paris does have some great locations, I'll give it that. Places like Saint-Chapelle, the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur at Montmartre and Pere Lachaise Cemetery are incredible in their own ways and have a great history. But the Eiffel Tower is not particularly attractive, remarkable, or important in any way except that it gives a good view the one time you climb up it. The Champs-Elysees is just a street. The Seine is just a river. In short, Paris is more or less just like any other city, with some really cute history and architecture and undiscovered gems, but there's nothing to make it more special than London, or Tokyo, or many other places I've been. It's earned a reputation which has been repeated by woolly-headed tourists and never been revised.
Also, it's a horrible place to live. It's crowded, frequently dirty, the public transport system can be great or disastrous, the bureaucracy is HORRIBLE, and when you live there you have all the niggling tasks of daily life without any joys in recompense. Basically, it's a place I'd like to visit once in a while, like I visit Sydney, but not somewhere I'm keen to live again. Paris and I have made our peace, I've learned to like her, but I'm ready to move on.
Part 2 of my answer is not really about Paris at all. I calculated yesterday that I've spend half my life living in the city and half in the country - born in Melbourne, moved to the country when I was a little girl, back to Melbourne for uni and then shipped off to Paris. So in short I'm pretty equally informed on the whole city-country debate. And the thing I've noticed more and more as I get older is that I'm a country girl. Despite being born in Australia's second biggest city, the country is my home, where I feel comfortable and happy. I first noticed this when I moved to Melbourne, and the conviction has been growing ever since. Regular trips home helped ease the pain of separation, though. When I felt a hankering for some trees and green and quiet I could hop on a train on Friday night and find myself in a house in the middle of the bush with four sooky cats and an exasperated sister who couldn't wait for me to leave again (at least, that's what she always told me, but there's evidence to the contrary...).
And then I moved to Paris. A city with the population of half my country, and suddenly I couldn't hop a train home when I missed the quiet and the green. I remember the first time I realised that, sitting in class one Wednesday afternoon thinking it was a long time since I'd been home and I was missing the sound of the wind in the trees in Creswick, and maybe I should...but oh. It's a little hard to get to country Victoria from Paris. That was also when I learned the true meaning of the word 'pang' - the tight feeling in one’s chest after one realises something slightly painful.
Anyway, my time in Paris has clinched and accelerated that realisation, that cities are not for me and the country is where it's at. Unfortunately, at this point in time the country is not an option for me. I find myself calculating how long til I can get out of Paris, find somewhere smaller and quieter, praying that whatever crops up next in my life won't require me to stay where I am or move to another big city.
And now every time I travel I get this wistful feeling, watching out the windows of trains and buses, staring at the views of rural coastal Normandy from the top of Mont-Saint-Michel, thinking about how beautiful and uncomplicated and tranquil it all looks, the full-sized houses with their front yards and the tiny town centres that are completely deserted and calm and everything that I miss about my own little hometown, and a little part of me wants to cry. Even when I travel I have to travel to cities, because there aren’t youth hostels in tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, even if I had a way to reach them, so I’ve been all over the upper half of France and can tell you how to get from A to B in Lille, Strasbourg, Rennes, Tours, but I have no idea of what the vibe is, what life is truly like in the smaller rural places that make up most of the geography if not the population of the country.
So instead I have to content myself with glimpses out the window, dreams from my own imagination of how it must feel to walk those fields I see and climb those trees, the snatched moments in obscure places that I find myself in for my work and which are the only times that I ever travel to the hidden, undiscovered locations that are my true joys. Domburg, in Zeeland, Holland; Cerilly, in southern France; La Foz, in Asturias, Spain – this is how I get my fix of country, saving the colours and the peace and landscape and mentally cursing Paris the whole time for being a big, dirty, grey, impersonal, unwelcoming city.
So really, the distaste I feel for Paris at moments like these is not Paris’s fault. Paris just represents everything that I don’t want but have to put up with because I don’t have another choice. But even if you told me I had to live in a city again and gave me all the choices in the world, Paris would not be on that list. In fact, I’ll take Melbourne over Paris anyday. We’ve actually got it pretty good down there. But that’s another story.
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