Paris new and old

Paris's new look: wildflower and rental scooters, Metro Barbès

A Parisian friend who was born on the Île de France and lives in the suburbs is not a fan of her home city.  I said it was the crottes de chien, the pollution and the “Non” culture of the Parisians that did for me after about four months around 1997.  That and not finding a job.  The dog do is awful she said, though on this trip I saw much less of it than previously and the pollution seemed better.  The e-bikes and scooters zipping across pavements though were alarming.  I narrowly escaped accident half a dozen times in three days. The push bikes in Amsterdam are speedy, but I never had the sense of being in imminent peril, partly because I was usually on a bike myself.  Nevertheless, in Amsterdam it is more the tourists  weaving on to the bike lanes that are the danger, whereas in Paris it is the scooters and ebikes infringing on the pavements or shooting across roads you are trying to cross. In 2022 there were over 450 injuries from “personal electronic mobility devices” alone and three deaths between 2021 and 2022, but rental scooters will be banned in Paris from this September. 

But what annoyed my friend most was the attitude of other people.  In a delicious irony she was embêtée, by people who feel embêté. The verb means to annoy, to bother, Je crois que je les embête / I think I am bothering them. It also means to be annoyed or to be bothered. Il est embêtant / he’s a pain, a bother, a nuisance; Il m'embête - ditto, but to me, i.e. he bothers me. So she disliked that Parisians were always annoyed with people. She gave some examples:  Tu les embêtes parce que tu es dans le metro, tu les embêtes quand tu demandes quelque chose de l’assistant dans un magasin, même si de t’aider c'est leur travail. Tu embêtes les gens tout le temps, quoi, peu importe ce que tu fais. In Paris, it didn’t matter what you did, whatever it was was going to upset people.

Even the homeless seemed careful not to embête anyone. Their tents were discreet and tidily set out down an alleyway in the Marais.

I had not been to Paris for well over twenty years and recalled the number of times I had been told:

Non, ça ne fait pas ici mademoiselle or Ah no, madame, je ne peux pas vous aider. 

If  I asked Sauriez-vous où ça pourrait se trouver?, the answer would inevitably be:

Ah, non.  Non.  Non.

Even if you don’t speak French, you will get the idea.  Parisians were not, at that time at least, very disponible. They were and still are famous for it, even among the rest of France.

At that moment, I wanted to get the bill and asked the waitress for it.  She didn’t say Ah non, of course, but the next best thing: C’est à l'intérieur, madame - i.e. it’s not our job to bring it out to you, you have to come inside to pay.