"Paris" a Paris Travel Page by mke1963

Paris is known the world over for its beauty, its art, its food, its architecture, for being empty in August, for its aloof attitude and paradoxically for its sense of fun. Paris, more than anywhere else in the world (except perhaps New York or Basildon?) is a city for living in: it's truly a people city.

Paris is why the word 'cosmopolitan' was invented, although I am sure many citieswould disagree.

It's a city where art, grace and goodliving is so important that its citizens can live with anything if it has a bit of flair, a bit of style and especially if it was invented in France. Why else would Parisians put up with the RER station at Gare du Nord if it wasn't for the fact that the orange tiles "look just so 1970s, cherie".

It's a city where you can walk into a bar and be treated like a long lost brother, or walk into the bar next door and be ignored - and unserved - for four hours.

Each arrondissement in Paris has its own style and its own life, a city within a city in an ever-decreasing spiral of loyalty: to France, to the hexagone, to L'Ile de France, to Paris, to the 7eme, to this little corner. Each part has its own die-hard supporters (except the 16th..everyone hates the 16th don't they? Bigger than some French cities, boring and like the after effects of a neutron bomb most of the time), and every part of Paris has its delights and surprises.

Yet there is, like all good cities, a tension that creates a definite edge; an edge not seen in London or Amsterdam for some many years. Successive waves of migrants gives Paris much colour, much joy and much labour; but it also gives rise to much hate and antipathy. The marginalisation of newcomers *seems* closer to the surface in Paris than in many other global cities.

Paris is a city in two parallel universes: the city of art, beauty and grace, coffee at the zinc with the paper and poodles being walked among the sandstone pillars on the Rue Rivoli; and the city of stale sweat and urine in the Metro, elderly African women heaving huge bags up and down streets, monstrous vertical ghettos in the suburbs, the rush of cars and broken funiture in the street. One turn of a corner and you can go from elegance and the good life, to deserted, windswept streets echoing to your footsteps: from colour to black and white.

Paris, more than most cities, is a city of angst, with the French increasingly questioning themselves and their role: it is no surprise that 98.7% of Parisians are officially-qualified philosophers, a percentage beaten only by London taxi-drivers. Whether it is memories of Algeria, Vietnam, the legacy of colonies, art, food, wine, agricultural subsidies and especially the French language, Parisians are at loggerheads mainly with their own psyche on what is the answer. Or often, what is the question.

If Parisians didn't exist, Foucault would have to have invented them.