Paris

The English are welcome in Paris, but at a price. What the French are much more covetous of is our language, with its hard consonants and oh-so sweet indiscretion as to whether the moon might be female, the sun a man and all that. It will allow them to entice and upstage Americans And, as this advert attests, every time you don't speak English well, a policeman dies.

Paris is a singularly narcissistic city, utterly obsessed with itself. Everything you do in Paris is designed to get you to stare AT Paris. The most fascinating feature is that you have a series of monuments to climb in order to look at other monuments that exist solely for you to climb and look at the monument you've just climbed. Why is the Sacre Couer on top of a hill? So you can look at the whole of Paris, including the Eiffel Tower and La Grande Defense. From the Eiffel Tower, you can see the Sacre Couer and La Grande Defense. And from the Defense? Yeah, those other two.



For this privilege, you pay money. Lots of money. Unless you're willing to pleb it and walk the stairs. Typing of which, at the Eiffel I watched an American man push to the front of a queue to ask what "escalier" meant, even though the sign he was reading also said "Stairs". In larger letters. With an equal sign pointing at "escalier". Another American fellow had been up and was asking security for some confiscated items back. These items? Three tins of corn.

(This sort of event would become a recurring feature of the holiday.)

Also, there's a thumb.

Once you've invested all that money into helping a city shaped like a misshapen navel gaze at itself, you can visit local eateries and fail to afford food designed exclusively to trap and entice tourists. The "special" local delicacy of any country, after all, is that in which the locals do not indulge. So you wait in line in the French equivalent of Lidl and watch the till assistants deliver the daily dose of booze prescribed for the tramps of each arrondisement. This is no exaggeration: to appease these street-kings, they kept a few cans of extra-strength behind the counter. Tramps of Montmatre truly rule their roost.



The Metro is a special, though hellish, invention designed purely to allow peddlers to offer burning corn and imitation cigarettes and fake Metro tickets to rubes, tourists and people whose tastebuds have been destroyed by burning corn and imitation cigarettes. As for more metaphorial taste, one can quite easily puchase drastic plastic sunglasses rendered utterly useless because you are, in fact, underground. In order to keep the money circulating, a side-effect of the Metro system is that it rapidly and efficiently ferries you from place to place in two minute intervals.

In short then? Paris, is a dusty city. It eats up food produce, euros and Americans and shits out fashion, self-obsession, dead-whale fragrances and tiny, pewter replicas of the Eiffel.

This process is called "culture".

Also, there's some paintings. They're probably pornographic or something. Graves? Ditto.

Next, Amsterdam.