Breaking the Myth

A common subject that came up while discussing living in Paris was how rude the French can be. It seems that the stereotype of the typical Frenchman as being an arrogant a*^%$# continues to survive and thrive in our modern globalized world. Even the French I have known and met in America seem to hold this opinion of their countrymen. A few weeks before I departed Chicago I assisted a French family visiting the States on vacation. Upon learning that I was going to be living in Paris for a year, the patriarch took me aside and said, “You know there are the French and there are the Parisians. Don’t confuse the two.” I roughly translated his warning to an American saying that there is a difference between New Yorkers and Americans. The half Polish half French owner of a flower and wine shop that I use to go to two or three times a week when I was living in Ukrainian Village warned that the “only thing wrong with Paris is the people who live there.” Of course, as a quasi seasoned traveler and progressive thinker, I casted off the warnings as stereotypical stereotyping.

Approaching the two-week mark of our stay here in Paris I feel our experiences thus far have granted me enough perspective to comment on the subject. In a few words, yes, there are a lot of a*^%##^s living in Paris. The first glimpse of Parisian contemptuousness came when trying to retrieve my ATM card back from the bank. It took three visits to the branch and, when I had reached my limit of annoyance, I snapped on the clerk. It was only then that they felt obliged to return my card to me. Then there are the thoroughly unhelpful women at the post office. When you ask them a question about how to do something, they don’t respond, they just silently perform the task in a “you’re so stupid” kind of way. The worse experience I’ve had occurred yesterday at a restaurant in the Latin Quarter. Starving, Lisa and I stopped in to a café that was only sparsely occupied. Having been informed at another restaurant that lunch was over and they were only serving drinks, I asked as careful as I could if they were still serving lunch. The prick behind the counter acted as if he didn’t understand and another patron who was within earshot repeated what I said verbatim. Then he said in English, “sit wherever you like.” We sat at an outside table near the establishment’s chef, who was seated adjacent from us tasting mushrooms and sipping wine. After about ten minutes of waiting the chef noticed that while the prick-server/bartender had cleaned every table inside and out, he had failed to even ask us what drinks we would like. She then asked him in French if he was going to attend to us. At which, he responded “they’re tourist, they can wait” in French thinking we would not understand. A look of shock came over the chef and the prick’s faces when, having understood their exchange, Lisa and I got up abruptly and said to the a*$#%$# server, “Tourist! Aye?” and walked away. We ended up getting a fantastic and less expensive lunch from a restaurant right down the street.

Of course these experiences are only half the story. The whole story is that for every a*^%## server and b*&^% post office employer we’ve come across there have been five amazingly helpful and pleasant Parisians. Perhaps the most helpful came from the French involved in bringing my iphone back to life after I attempted to jailbreak it. Not only did the busy Apple store near the Louvre restore my phone to proper working order without a hint of judgment, the phone store that helped us set up our European phones sent us to the nicest guy who unlocked our iphones in a few minutes and for a nominal fee…he even gave Lisa a free scratch-resistant film for her screen and applied it so perfectly I became envious. I really would have been screwed if it weren’t for these helpful Parisians...iphones in France cost about $900 USD!

Being a city dweller most of my life, I know how annoying tourists can be. In Chicago I took the back streets to get to work so that I encountered the least amount of slow-moving tourists as possible. In D.C., I couldn’t stand it when a tourist didn’t know the unwritten rules of riding the Metro and would block the moving left lane on the escalators or would stand in front of the train doors while getting on rather than off to the side. Patience is certainly a virtue I do not possess in abundance. And honestly if I met my Parisian-self now, I’d probably think he was a bit of an a$$#%&. But being a foreigner, a minority, these last two weeks has exposed me to the not-nice feeling of being unjustly judged, of being dismissed as a stupid tourist. Judging someone while remaining ignorant of their true character is a sickness. But let us not make the mistake of thinking that it is a sickness that only afflicts the French and is concentrated in Paris. The truth is that we all catch it from time-to-time. The truth is that there are a$*@#*&s in every town and every city throughout the world.