This year marks ten years living in Paris. After such a long time, there’s a lot that we have gotten our heads around. Running a business, having children, discovering new sides of this ever-changing city – we’ve established ourselves pretty well here. However, even after all this time, there are still obstacles to negotiate on a daily basis.
On this week’s podcast, we discuss the frustrations we continue to experience a decade after moving to this beautiful city. Feel free to use it as a warning if you’re thinking to do the same, or perhaps as a cultural insight into the French mentality.
The podcast episode
Listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find the episode on iTunes or Spotify or via my website here. And as a fun extra the end of the episode Marie Segura, from My Private Paris, tells us about a touring the Musée d’Orsay when it’s not open to the public.
1) Language confusion
You may think you’ve mastered this beautiful language, but, any run-of-the-mill interaction in French can turn into a humbling experience for a non-native speaker. Case in point, my experience of ordering two oat milk cappuccinos (deux cappuccinos au lait d’avoine) at a local coffee shop. I’ve ordered plenty of coffees in my time here, so you might expect this exchange to be frictionless, but it shows that French can still trip up a practised speaker.
2) Easy as ABC…right?
A top tip for newcomers to France: learn the numbers and the alphabet like the back of your hand. Don’t allow the relative similarity of the letters lull you into a false sense of security. Two commonly confused letters for anglophones are g and j, which can cause no end of headaches when your surname is Gee…
3) Paper on a pedestal
France has yet to move into the digital age in many, many ways. Paper is still completely indispensable here. When you have children in Paris, you are supplied with nine (yes, nine) birth certificates to be used for access to various services, including crèches. And then, of course, when you try to convert the paper to a digital version, all hell breaks loose. Compared to other European countries, such as Sweden, it seems like France is still in the middle ages.
4) Non isn’t always no
The French mentality is that non actually means ‘convince me’. This is a distinctly unique attitude and one to which we, as a Swede and an Australian, are not accustomed. We were made acutely aware of this difference recently during a challenging dishwasher experience and definitely got penalised for not taking non as an answer.
Thanks for listening, today. We hope you enjoyed hearing about our language mishaps and we’d love to hear about yours. And, of course, it goes without saying that the positives of living in Paris more than outweigh the negatives. We are simply venting our frustrations, like all true Parisians.
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