Paris

The City of Lights – named as such because some scribe was late to dinner one night. You see, Mr. Paris was standing by the River Seines, deciding what affectionate name he might give his fair ol’ town. His scribe was there fidgeting away, busting to leave because he had a hot date (it is Paris). “It will be known as...” (stupidly stereotypical French accent is appropriate here) “...The City, The City of–” All of a sudden he was cut off by the passing Seine River Boat Tour, completely decked out in flood lights, blinding the banks of Île de la Cité; causing Mr. P to exclaim: “ergh! Lights!”

In such the rush that he was in, Mr. P’s scribe wrote that down. Well, he couldn’t spell “ergh” so he left that word out at least. The rest is history.

What else have I learnt about the French then?

> You’re gonna get a ‘good morning’ out of them come breakfast. Now, I am a particularly grumpy bugger come the morning so there’s no surprises I find this odd; but, it’s gotta take some kind of sick French person to bother saying bonjour to every person in the room at breakfast time. No, I’m not talking about the staff, I’m talking about the patrons. They’re just so excited that it’s another day, another baguette.

> They’re obsessed with rollerblading. Clearly the French have never witnessed Ross Noble’s rants about rollerblading or perhaps they simply lack the skills of basic observation – but how ridiculous can they all look!?



> They’re craaazy about Police. I don’t think there is a more Police-flooded city in all of Europe. They’re literally everywhere. In cars, vans, BUSES, on foot, horseback and, you guessed it, on rollerblades. How can anyone take a police officer on roller blades seriously? They’d be chasing a crim, and all that Frenchie needs to do is run into the park. What’s Mr. Roller-speed gonna do then? There’s also the Parisian ritual of the 6 pm Police brigade. At roughly the same time every night, you’d be hard pressed to not see a great long brigade of vans and buses roaring through the city. Now either this is a drill, or Parisian crime is extremely predictable.

> The military guard all monuments, such as Notre Dame, with guns not much different in size to themselves. This is because the French are constantly fearful that Quasimodo might eat an American tourist and then Americans will be afraid to ever visit Paris again. Hmm.

> Academie de Francais is plain awesome. These dudes have such an amazing job deciding the French rules for language and the like. I’ll put in into perspective: when the ipod was released, the AF spent eight weeks deciding if ‘ipod’ was to be masculine or feminine. Eight weeks! Pretty sure it ends up being ‘l’ipod’ at either conclusion – can’t it just be cross gender? Still, brilliant work there and good use of French taxpayers money. Hey, it’d only otherwise be spent funding new rollerblading tracks.

> There is some contention over public urination. You don’t want to know about it? Sure, that’s why I left it til last. However, it seems surprising that in Bordeaux, public wees are all the rage (they love it!), yet in the capital it’s extremely frowned upon. Perspective? In Bordeaux, I saw a local man weeing very openly on the street (presumably he thought a van would hide him from the world... it didn’t), and a woman clambering into a bush in the middle of a roundabout to relieve herself. These are but a couple of the many people I saw each day using the streets as a toilet. Certainly not what you’d expect from the French. We read that in Paris, however, locals wouldn’t even pee in their friend’s bathroom when visiting for tea! I’m not entirely sure if I believe that, but there were certainly none of the Bordeaux shenanigans going on in the City of Light. As for free wees, never fear! Paris made all their public toilets free! (They’re the big spaceship looking things on the street that self clean and threaten to crush you if you don’t leave in time – inviting stuff!)

> French dog owners still need some lessons in common decency.