When you think about Paris, you think of love, good food and fashion. However, having just spent 24 hours there, I can tell you that there’s a lot more too it than that… and it’s not great. I went out to Paris on Saturday with my wife to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary, and that aspect of the trip was great.
But what let Paris down was the “WATCH OUT FOR THE POO” warnings my wife and I were exchanging every five minutes because the historic city appears to be bathed in dog poo, literally everywhere.
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The Champs-Élysées has great shops and even greater baked goods, but look down on the ground and you’ll see that you’re having to avoid piles and piles of dog mess every 10-15ft.
Fancy a nice romantic walk along the Seine? Well, be careful, because it’s not just in the infamous river where poo is everywhere, it’s all along the side pavements as well.
And hovering around the brown piles of dog faeces are pigeons, many of which appear to frequent the local cafes and restaurants without staff seeming to care.
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The dog mess is then dragged into some of these places where locals and tourists alike are trying to enjoy themselves with the local food. And the pigeons also want your food, so you’re getting dog poo on your food when the pigeons attempt to attack you for it. A truly wild experience.
But how do I know it’s dog poo? Well, around 90% of Parisians we saw had dogs… so it’s either that or there’s some weird Parisian pastime of humans taking a dump in the street that we Brits don’t know about.
And before anyone goes “BuT BritAiN haS dOg MeSS iN tHe StREEtS” – correct, but I didn’t go for a romantic break in Slough, did I?
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Don’t get me wrong, Paris has its charms and we ate some great food and visited some great places while there, but the poo-dodging assault course in between each nice thing really did take the shine off things.
And if you try to escape via the Metro, be warned as there are several dilapidated stops with miles of boarding attempting to cover up crumbling walls and flood floors. There’s also a huge warning sign when you enter the country about potentially contracting Mpox, so that’s nice.
Maybe Emmanuel Macron should focus more on cleaning up his streets rather than literally everything else.
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