This past weekend I went to Paris for a beautiful and delicious 2.5 days. Here is my serious attempt at presenting my holiday in a brief and hopefully entertaining manner:
Yes, Parisians act as though they're better than you. But this really didn't bother me, because they are better than you. They look more tasteful than you do, eat better than you do, live in houses more beautiful than you
rs are, sound better than you do when they talk, and will age be
tter than you will (I did not see a single grundgy looking old person in the entire city. Maybe t
h
ey're banished when they start needing help putting on lipstick or develop a cough). In Montmartre, the gorgeous and relatively non-touristy area we stayed in, I felt like I was in a magical land where people literally walked around with baguettes, Evian was the cheapest water bottle, and little girls with tailored coats and ribbons in their hair chased one another down cobblestone streets laughing and shouting in French. Couples drank espressos and ate small cookies in cafés, watched on by a tremendously chic woman in her twenties casually leaning on her wrought iron balcony with open french windows behind her, smoking and looking damn cool. Everywhere I went I felt like I was on a movie set - do young women really bike with flowers in their bike baskets to the fruit market? Do old men really wear berets and order glasses of red wine with huge cigars in their mouths? Does that really happen? In Paris, apparently it does.
Cristine and I went to the Louvre and to l'orangerie to see some of Paris' artistic treasures (and thankfully we had Laura along to wear a huge scarf, know art history, and speak French, so we looked a little like we belonged). We did the main stuff - hit up the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and walked briskly down the Seine.
Things Paris is better at than London is:
One of my British friends told me that London doesn't have "rubbish bins" practically anywhere because they're prime places for terrorists to put bombs. So maybe I feel safer, but I come home at the end of every day with more crap in my bookbag than I would prefer.
Okay, so this may not be entirely fair to London. As cities go, I'd be willing to bet London has some of the finest food in the world - realizing that all English cuisine has to offer is bread and a host of questionably prepared meat byproducts, Londoners have given the full responsibility of food preparation to their ethnic population. This means that is you ever want Indian, Chinese, tapas, etc., you're so, so set in London. But if we're comparing, I mean, it's Paris. At the end of the day this is a competition between the birthplace of pain au chocolat and the birthplace of blood pudding. All you have to do is get a whiff of a Parisian patisserie and the competition is over.
Brits are kind of dorky. In an incredibly adorable way, but when you look at the old man in the newsboy hat and tweed jacket on the tube you just want to pinch his cheeks (or maybe that's just me). Parisians, on the other hand, are cool. They smoke, with seemingly no ill side effects, wear lots of black and huge scarves that you could never pull off, and all seem to work about 2.45 hours a day, leaving plenty of time for frequenting cafés and walking around looking generally satisfied with themselves.
Things London is better at than Paris is
- Devising an underground subway system
God bless the tube. Sure, its weekend closures and impossibly high fares are a pain, but when you enter an underground station you know your train is going to be clean, fast, and efficient. The Paris metro, with its colors and numbers and labyrinthine halls, was impossible to figure out (granted, it probably didn't help that combined Cristine and I had a working knowledge of about 10 French words). Also, it smelled like pee and you had to manually open the car doors if you wanted to get in or out. Now that's just silly.
Kind of a silly thing to say considering that the words "London" and "affordable" don't generally go together, but actually in the East End things are hella cheap. 9 pounds can easily get me a week and a half's worth of groceries...wheras it will cover one meal in Paris. Cristine and I, shocked and appalled by French prices, survived off a pastry + 1 meal a day during our stay. Fortunately the frequent hot chocolate purchases kept us going.
Maybe as an English major I'm biased, but did William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, John Donne, or even Philip Pullman come from France? Not so much. Sure, France can claim trendy authors like Muriel Barbery (and I did feel cool and cultured for seeing someone on the metro reading
l'elegance du herisson right after I've just finished reading the English translation), But it's just not the same. Also, we have the French to blame for Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett, as well as some seriously atrocious surrealist poetry. Maybe the guillotine wasn't such a bad thing to have in Paris after all...
In conclusion (at last), Paris = awesome. London = awesome. Studying abroad = the best.
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