I hesitated for a while to answer this post because it felt very close to troll territory, was very brutal, dismissive and unnecessarily agressive, for someone calling out on a city (an entire city !) being “rude” and “not civilized”, you certainly made a very quiet and civilized place way more rude. I might delete it completely because I don’t feel very good sharing all that but I couldn’t help.
I took the 13 line to get to work for a few years and I’m a little worried when you say “shocked” or “depressed” because I know very well the kind of people that are on the 13, and appart from the fact that a lot of them are poor, racialized, live in the suburbs and don’t wear nice clothes, and the wagons are packed at business hours, I can’t see how they’re shocking or depressing, unless you mean poverty is depressing and you’d rather just not ever see it in your neighborhood, in which case I think your vision of the city is pretty well aligned which the richest areas mentality because they too don’t want to see this at their doorstep, and don’t worry, they’re making a good job of kicking these people out of their city slowly (too slowly to their taste) but surely.
This is where I was born and lived most of my life, and I do have a lot of critics about it as a city (which have been echoed in other answers to your post and I could add a lot, some of them that would even echo yours), which I certainly never keep myself from saying, but what you just wrote is just absolute nonsense, generalization, and socially very questionnable.
I guess by telling you all that I won’t score points for the Parisians team, but it’s just… I felt bad reading what you just said because it felt like “damn, all those poor people stealing wallets, why don’t they go back to their cities and leave us enjoy the Marais, Bastille and Republique between us !”. It’s a big city that’s as complex as it’s small geographically (unless you add the suburbs but if you can’t bear line 13 I imagine they’re out of the question unless they’re Versailles or Boulogne) it encompass a lot of french history, which includes poorer area full of people tourists don’t wanna see, and you know what, those people often feel shit and unwelcome in all the places you listed as cool and “the good Paris”, because that’s not the Paris where they live, that’s not the Paris they can afford, and they’re looked at as if there’s a “danger” sticker on their face when they show up there. It’s not romantic indeed, no single big City in the world is romantic once you get to see the whole picture of what they really are, where the money comes from and who benefits from it and who doesn’t. I welcome the fact the you can still see the whole picture inside Paris and not escape it completely to live in a dream world where it’s all museum, chic venues and artist shops, it keeps the people living there in check of the reality of what our western lifestyle and politic costs to the masses. Soon, all those things you despise will probably be invisible, they’re already so much less visible than they used to be.
There’s a whole discussion recently in the city about how Air Bn’B and the overall possibility to just rent flats for rich people coming from abroad for holidays is so much more profitable than actually having to rent to the same person all year that an absolutely absurd number of flats in Paris are now solely used for that by the people who own the buildings, or just not used at all during the off season.That is, when they’re just not empty all year because it’s better to not rent them but stick at super high prices than rent them all. so most of the neighborhood you described as “enjoyable” “family friendly” “Paris” and all, are, paradoxically, more and more mostly inhabited by people who don’t live in the City, or just from time to time. THAT, is shocking to me. And the more we’ll make this city the sole property of people who can afford it, the more it’ll feed the resentment of the people left in deprecated building the various mayors don’t care about at the border of the inner city.
I’m really terribly sorry that I had to comment on this and make this topic so much more political and full of the violence that I’m sure you’re all trying to escape a little when you go abroad on holiday. But I think this obsession of wanting to see and live in and even visit the Paris of “the movies” (it never existed to begin with but that’s a whole other topic) is toxic at best, and destructive in reality. What you’ll see is a big western city (they look less and less different to me, when I go to another western Capital, a lot of it feel the same) with its own variation on the idea of “a big western city”, with its quirks and a lot of flaws (A LOT) and with its charm too, even on the 13 line, even in Montreuil, even in (oh my !) Ivry, Vitry sur Scène. Sure, make sure you’re safe, like anywhere, if you don’t feel like going on an adventure in the outer city belt because you’ve got no one to show you around and translate in areas where french is the only language, don’t it’s fine there’s plenty enough to see in the little tourist-friendly areas that the inner city represents, it might be small but it’s also packed with things. Enjoy it any way you want.
Sorry I really had to answer, hit too close to home, might delete.
