| More on Martin | Born in Thurrock, lived in Cambridge, now in Paris. One of Martin's favourite haunts (given the travelling choice) is The Reggae Bar, Cenang Beach, Langkawi Island, Malaysia. "Terrible food, Heineken in cans, feet in the Andaman Sea, and unbelievable sunsets." Martin was once mugged in Morocco but firmly believes..."that (not counting war-torn danger areas) you are just as likely to get mugged in London as you are in Lima..." |
ALOOF? MOI? | "If you’ve read ‘A Year in the Merde’, or walked anywhere in Paris, you’ll be familiar with the dilemma tourists are faced with here." | | Martin Stevenson |
If you’ve read ‘A Year in the Merde’, or walked anywhere in Paris, you’ll be familiar with the dilemma tourists are faced with here. Sometimes it’s piled high like the Magic Mountain at Euro Disney and ends in a little spiky flourish (this is the city of art after all). Sometimes, if the dog’s been getting a lot of roughage and the rain lets off for a few days, it’ll break off into greenish chunks resembling an aerial view of Thailand’s Koh Phi-Phi islands (if you imagined a bit of sand and some turquoise waters you could shoot a little poo-ey remake of ‘The Beach’), but with so much beautiful stuff to see as you walk around the city you have to decide whether to look up, at the way the pot plants have been arranged on one of Hausmann’s first floor balconies, or down, at that rather heavy-looking poodle.
 | | Martin Stevenson |
Before I came here I had the usual notions of what Parisians were like; towards foreigners generally, the English especially, and English people who didn’t have a Proust-ian command of the French language in particular, i.e. me. But rather than the expected distain, I’ve been treated, rather surprisingly, with an alarming amount of kindness. This wasn’t what I’d been led to expect at all. Another cliché I can dispel for you right now is the whole fashion thing. As you traverse Paris, look a bit more closely at the most well-dressed people - not the most sophisticated, or the most stylish, or the ones who carry it off with the greatest nonchalance, they’re the Parisians – look, or rather listen, to the most fashionably-dressed people in Paris. They’re foreign! Every single one! Such is Paris’s reputation; such is the level of terror it incites in a fashion-conscious visitor that they do all their shopping BEFORE they arrive so as to fit in! The welcome hasn’t been universal, of course - this is a capital city after all - but maybe Parisians could be forgiven a slight aloofness. Paris is the world’s most popular tourist destination. Imagine you lived anywhere in the vicinity of Montmartre. You would be surrounded by tourists. All the time. American students; little knots of loud, nasal optimism, the British; country cousins trying desperately not to appear unsophisticated, and the East Asian tour groups; giant waves of digital photography which break on the steps of the Sacre Coeur and recede as the next tour bus arrives. Passing through a group of Korean tourists with their diminutive, umbrella-wielding Fuhrers is like falling into a vat of plastercine. You can’t move. Every exit is blocked. You just have to hope their heading for the same Metro station as you. Given this horrific, international swarm of YSL wearing inconvenience - the ‘Are-we-there-yet?’-set - badly dressed, lost, in the way - how could the Parisians FAIL to feel superior?
Click on the link at the top of the page to hear Martin talk about the current riots in Paris, 07 November 2005. |
