Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

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in Paris, nobody will help you with anything

This is absolutely untrue. My French is sub-intermediate, I've been perhaps five times, and I've never had a bad experience. Plenty of people have been super friendly and I've had great conversations with people just hanging around on the street waiting for a store to open or having a break from walking.

Perhaps the core of the problem here is that many people who visit Paris are not well traveled and have only limited empathy for the seen-it-all-before-99-times-a-day locals.

I mean, if I was busy and had a job to do, and by fate alone simply happened to be near some generic tourist attraction or other, and had whiney American/English/Russian/Chinese tourists come and ask me where the closest vegan restaurant or crossfit gym was ten times an hour like clockwork, I'd also get to the point of shrugging.

This is the same genre of people who, when you ask them where they are from, answer "America", because they're honestly unaware that it's blatantly obvious to everyone else and the interlocutor was curious about city or state.

We can put it down to cultural discontinuities. They are a blessing we should revel in them while we can, because it seems that all roads lead to generic globalized interactions in a minority of languages with increasingly unsophisticated speakers and reduced cultural appreciation.

> I've never had a bad experience.

Last month, I was there, I made the mistake of being there with a man of colour, he was thrust violently against the wall and frisked until a Blonde lady asked what they thought they were doing. They quickly said OK and left, no apology, no explanation.

Sure in my home town of London stop and search happens all the time, but the problem is with Paris it is romantacised to something far more than it is. This makes people all the more disappointed. In London that kind of behavior by police would be considered unacceptable. I would have demanded badge numbers and made a formal complaint.

Now this is just one anecdote, and in my many trips to Paris, that's not happened before, but Paris is marketed, idealised so heavily, you don't expect it.

To me that is the problem. Expectation management.

No, Paris is objectively bad for this - even French tourists from other regions will say so. Even Parisians will say so. That said, it is an error to attribute it to any racial characteristics, as French people outside of Paris (and to a lesser extent Marseille) are absolutely lovely and welcoming.

It's more a case of the stress of living in a big city, and in that respect mirrors the reputations that New York and London have in their own country (it always makes me chuckle to hear Americans complaining about how abrupt New Yorkers are, as a non-American I consider the baseline of friendliness of Americans to be so high that even the lower than average New Yorker still rates high on the friendliness scale in a global sense).

Many of the tourists that go to Paris are what I'd categorize as 'ugly'. To the point that by the end of my trip, I just bluntly told people I don't speak English.

If you realize that people in Paris have lives (not unlike New York), and don't accost everyone you see for directions to X before looking at a map, and you actually introduce yourself when talking to a local, you'll have a great time.

And while I speak French, I also spent a lot of time with my sister speaking English, and the language used didn't seem to matter. If you can drop the tourist mentality, just go, hang out in cafés, and actually experience the culture and Paris lifestyle, you'll find Parisians are perfectly nice people, possibly a little busy, and the attitude stems more from dealing with hordes of people that come from foreign places who apparently can't be bothered to learn manners...

And another thing I've noticed, we have some tourist spots here (Canada), namely the rocky mountains and national parks, and Japanese tourists will come in hordes, on buses, taking pictures of everything and not really interacting with anyone else. That's a recipe for disappointment...

No, Parisians suck. They will tell you that themselves if you ask. I say this as someone that has been living in Paris since 2003, so I think I have a pretty good handle in the city.

I thought I expressed this in my comment, but I'm not challenging the fact that you can have a good time in Paris. That's not the issue. The issue here is people who do have a bad experience, and if that happens in what manner the city itself may contribute to it.

Your comment contains a lot of assumptions about the people visiting Paris, and since I wrote the parent, the assumptions are presumably about me as well. You are mistaken.

People can have a bad experience anywhere. There is nothing specific to Paris.

If you showed up in NYC and started randomly accosting people in French you'd definitely have a bad experience. Yet Americans do the same in Paris and wonder why people are rude to them...

That, too, isn't the issue. But I can't answer a comment criticizing my impression of Paris without referring to Paris, can I? Also, please refer to my first comment, I was trying to make a more general case you might agree with.

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