I’m on year abroad in Paris and it’s awful

I’ve been living in France for two months now,and I have barely picked up more than a few words of the language of love, and spend my weekdays browsing Facebook instead of attempting to listen to my two hour long lectures on Descartes and French medieval history. Weekends are spent trying to have broken conversations with my cool 18-year-old French friends about all the cute things we do in England.

When you don’t speak French, and have some experience of post-Olympic London, Paris is pretty shit.

To prove my point I thought I’d jump on one of Paris’ premier sightseeing buses and see the city, tourist style. Four different routes around Paris, each one slightly dirtier than the next ‘til eventually you run out of things to see and end up on a tour of Paris’ answer to Victoria coach station and surrounding area.

Aside from all the pretty Haussman buildings (and resulting poverty in the suburbs) cruising the streets of Paris is pretty damn average. A supermarket here, cheap boulangerie there, and the never-ending stench of piss in the air, Paris constantly reminds you that liberté, egalité and fraternité mean shit.

The Champs-Élysées, a tourist only shopping street with a big white arch at the end, is crap. Probably because of the piss, definitely because of the Americans running in and out of Zara and Monoprix like they don’t have cheaper chain shops in their own country. (“Oh my gawwwd, I just have to go to a Monoprix before we leave!”)

I’m hardly a local, but I could write a book about how much I hate the giggling, language murdering American tourists all over Paris.

The Eiffel Tower is also pretty average after the first 30 seconds of looking at it. Yeah it’s pretty massive and a symbol of industrial strength etc., but also it’s a big fuck off metal tower and it’s actually really ugly. Even more so up close with the men jangling Eiffel Tower key rings in your face and referring to you as “pretty lady”. If someone forced me to write a travel guide for Paris, I’d ignore the Champ de Mars completely. You can get a prettier, cheaper view of the tower from pretty much everywhere else in Paris.

Notre Dame is quite cool (but I like churches). St Germain and all the rest are okay. Montparnasse is literally a canary wharf copycat tower that the French tourist board are trying to pass off as their answer to the Shard. Google it and you’ll see why that’s so upsetting. You can’t even put your “look at us, we’re a couple” locks on the Pont Des Arts anymore. The Moulin Rouge and rest of Montmartre is just one big overpriced sex shop selling faulty condoms and fake handbags. And that’s it.

But hey, maybe there are some redeeming features. My little studio flat in the Latin Quarter is pretty cool, and Christmas is coming up. Plus, my Instagram followers are through the roof.

Did I mention the piss?