A Paris Reality Check (from someone who actually lives here)
snap out of it!
I have just had the most delightful month in Paris. Despite an extra heavy workload, the city has felt especially kind and gentle. I’ve spent time with the people I Iove. Seen everyone I wanted to see. The Blue Hour went amazingly well. Almost all my vélib’s were in perfect working order (not a small thing!). I went dancing. I ate well. And the weather. Mon dieu, the weather. Rom-com weather! Paris in Hollywood weather. Influencer Paris weather.
As I told Ellie the other day, it was like the city was a handsome, charming, intelligent man. Well-dressed, capable of good conversation, thoughtful and kind. You know it’s too good to be true, but it’s just so good all common sense leaves you and you are willing to throw your life away and follow him (or her, or them!) anywhere.
That was Paris this month. If this was the Paris you encountered for the first time, you’d absolutely lose your mind. This is the Paris that makes people lose their mind. This is hardly my first Paris, and yet I have nearly lost my mind. I’ve spent the last few weeks asking myself the eternal question: why don’t I live here? Me, a person who loves New York so much that (I’m sorry to say) I sometimes think to myself, I miss New York, even when I’m in New York. (On a midnight bike ride home the other night, across the Seine, under a full moon, I thought “I love you so much Paris,” at which point a voice of reason, in a distinctly New York accent, interjected “but not enough”…yet!) And yet…
I do know better. I have experienced the Paris of February. The Paris of heat waves and no air conditioning. The Paris of eight-minute showers and the impossibility of finding a good massage (I’m revealing my priorities with this list). But, after an especially hard winter, all that faded from my mind this month.
Paris has always been a fantasy for the world, but post-Covid it’s been especially inundated with influencers, and currently there seems to be more Americans than normal (as evidenced by the amount of restaurants in the 11th prompting for gratuity). Fortunately, I spend time with people who actually live here and subsequently I hear quite a lot about the challenges Parisian life. In an effort to revenir à la réalité and offer a counter to all the filtered Paris coming through social media, I asked my friend Carita Rizzo to provide a small Paris reality check.
Carita is an entertainment writer who was born in Sweden, raised in Finland, and went to school in Edinburgh, Knoxville and Vaasa, and spent fifteen years in Los Angeles. She brings a wealth of literal lived experience to this. Please enjoy her cold water plunge below.
In the meantime, I love you so much Paris. Now, snap out of it.
|
 | A guest post by
|