You cannot help but be impressed by Paris. Every street seems to be full of well maintained 150+ year old apartment buildings and grand churches on every corner. Some of the things that I will remember are:
1. Every street seems to have more history than all of Australia put together.
2. The dog pooh. There does not seem to be any code, moral or civil, that makes owners pick up their dog’s pooh.
3. The number of smokers. Paris seems to have a very high % of smokers. I will check but I would suggest that the ratio would be at least twice that of Sydney. Also it seems to be the norm to trow your cigarette butts into the street.
4. The dirt. Paris is by no means filthy but having come from Sydney via Singapore I can say that both are significantly cleaner than Paris. Forget clean up Australia day, Ian Kiernan should do the same for Paris.
5. The cafes. There are cafes everywhere. It seems the cafe society is alive and well. The cafes as we experienced them are good quality and quite good value.
6. The coffee. If I had written this on the first or second day of our time in Paris I would have said that coffee was rubbish but I am now a covert. The cafe au lait is cheap, readily available and of high quality. In Australia I am normally a cappuccino drinker but in France a cappuccino is anything from an expresso with cream on top to an espresso with an inch of watery foam on top. My advice to all coffee drinkers is not to ask for a cappuccino in Paris because they are expensive rubbish, go with the cafe au lait and you will not be disappointed.
7. The metro. There are stations everywhere and it is very convenient. There wasn’t anywhere we wanted to go that did not have a metro station close by. The stations are a bit run down, as it the rolling stock but gee it is convenient. Our closet metro was Pereire some 100m walk away.
8. The machine guns. Everywhere we went we saw army people walking around with machine guns. Paris takes the threat of terrorism seriously.