Sometimes, reading about Paris in newspapers, magazines and on Web sites devoted to tourism, I feel the clichés piling high enough to touch the Eiffel Tower — or even the still-hideous Tour Montparnasse, which for decades has given skyscrapers a bad name here.
All the clichés are still there, if that’s as far as you’re willing to look, from the supposedly haughty waiters to the baguettes and croissants and the nighttime lights on the Notre-Dame de Paris, shimmering with a faith now largely abandoned. (...)
There are parts of Paris that are “cool,” to be sure, but not the way London is, or Berlin, or even Amsterdam. Paris is a city of the well-to-do, mostly white, and their careful pleasures: museums, restaurants, opera, ballet and bicycle lanes. Bertrand Delanoë, the Paris mayor since 2001, is a Socialist Michael Bloomberg — into bobo virtues like health and the environment and very much down on cars.
Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker writer, finds “the Parisian achievement” to have created, in the 19th century, two concepts of society: “the Haussmannian idea of bourgeois order and comfort, and the avant-garde of ‘la vie de bohème.’ ” While these two societies seemed to be at war, he suggests, in fact they were “deeply dependent on each other.”
Today, however, the balance is gone, and Paris is too ordered, too antiseptic and too tightly policed to have much of a louche life beyond bourgeois adulteries. In that sense, something important has been lost. (...)
Paris is the most beautiful city in the world; to me, only Prague comes close. But Paris is also filthy. While tourists regard Paris with awe and respect, for the most part many Parisians treat it with studied indifference, a high virtue here, or with contempt.
It is the Parisians who leave dog excrement on the sidewalks, who ignore the trash containers. With smoking now supposedly banned inside restaurants, the terraces of cafes become more crowded. But the streets have become ashtrays, and the rubbish defeats the traditional sluicing of the gutters with city water by men with long green nylon brushes. Large parts of Paris remind me of how, in the never quite-so-bad old days, Times Square used to look at 8 a.m. on a Sunday.
France still gets more foreign tourists than most any other country: 83 million in 2012, and 83 percent of them from Europe, compared with only 29.3 million who visited Britain. Paris alone gets 33 million tourists a year, half of them foreigners, many in search of that mythical place where Charles Aznavour meets Catherine Deneuve meets Zidane meets Dior, all drinking Champagne and nibbling foie gras, truffles, oysters and langouste.
While tourists to Israel sometimes suffer from the Jerusalem syndrome, imagining themselves in direct contact with God, some Japanese tourists suffer from what is called the “Paris Syndrome,” distraught at the difference between what they imagine and what they find. Of course, as Walt Whitman wrote about himself, Paris contains multitudes, and most visitors go away having found just enough of what they craved to develop a lifelong yearning to return.
Image: Kosuke OkaharaWhile tourists to Israel sometimes suffer from the Jerusalem syndrome, imagining themselves in direct contact with God, some Japanese tourists suffer from what is called the “Paris Syndrome,” distraught at the difference between what they imagine and what they find. Of course, as Walt Whitman wrote about himself, Paris contains multitudes, and most visitors go away having found just enough of what they craved to develop a lifelong yearning to return.
by Steven Erlanger, NY Times | Read more:
