Paris...

....is expensive, lovely, crappy, annoying and captivating.

French women don’t seem to me, to be unduly hirsute, but they are slender, rather stylish and damnably attractive. Gyms don’t seem to have made much of an inroad over there, so I guess it must be a dietary thing. French men, similarly, are fairly lean, not overly muscled individuals, with a really crappy dress sense.

English tourists by contrast were fat, loutish, boorish, annoying, shaven-headed and for the most part, bedecked in “England” T-shirts, and without any style. And they were loud ~ not “Yank tourist in Paris loud” but still plenty loud enough. Curiously, the world cup, seems to have made only a minor impact. The lunatic jingoism being experienced in England seems to have past France by altogether. Not a single “car flag” was in evidence, nor a single adult in a football shirt, (apart from on the afore mentioned English).

French culture is singly unsuited to a service industry concept. Some of the waiters and ticket guys were virtually snarling at me, and I wasn’t being hostile or unpleasant. Some guy at the Louvre, (one of the world’s great museums, with a high proportion of English speaking visitors, Brits, Yanks, some Aussies and Canadians plus various others whose second language was English) simply REFUSED to speak English! Now forgive me, but tourists feed you my friend, you can’t get all Gallic on them. This was by no means isolated. My highly dodgy high school French was essential. Outside of one or two of the nicer districts, the accommodation seems to suck.

But I still fell in hopeless love with half a dozen beauties on the Metro.