This is a summary of the six major things that took me by surprise during a four-day visit to Paris. They include both cultural and practical surprises that I think everyone should be aware of before visiting this beautiful city. I have also included advice on how to deal with a lot of these surprises that I hope you will find useful.

1. The Colossal Size of Paris

Paris, to me, feels incomprehensibly huge; this might be due to my lack of experience in big cities as I grew up in a very small village with no large cities or towns around. However compared to cities that I have visited, for example London, Paris was gigantic. Just to give you a sense of how big it is, it takes about an hour and a half to get from Charles de Gaulle airport, on the outskirts, to the centre of Paris by train and metro. Furthermore, even once you are in the centre it is still a long walk between the major tourist attractions and none of them are located particularly close to each other- the walk between the Eiffel tower and the Sacre Coeur is about 1hour and 15 minutes.

Basically, Paris is absolutely massive, this is something that you realise stood on top of the Eiffel Tower; you can see for miles, as far as the eye can see, but even on the clearest day you cannot see where Paris ends- it just keeps going. The total area of Paris, including its outskirts, is 2,300 square km! I think the main reason Paris feels so big is that its very spread out, which is nice as it doesn’t feel crowded with buildings and people.

However, don’t let its size put you off visiting this amazing city. As long as you acknowledge that you cannot walk everywhere and that the metro, as confusing as it may seem, will be your best friend during your visit you will be fine. My next point will cover the ins and outs of the metro.

2. How Stressful, but useful, the metro is

As I’ve just mentioned Paris is BIG! If you want to see everything you will have to use some form of public transport and for many reasons, I recommend the metro. However it is stressful and confusing to get your head around at first.

When I say confusing, I mean 303 stations, 16 different lines all inter-crossing and 214 km of metro line to navigate. Far more confusing than the London underground. At first, it’s incredibly overwhelming working out what stations you need to be at to get to certain places you want to visit. Then once you work out the station you need to be at you often have to change metro halfway and swap to a different line. And don’t presume that just because you found the station you’ll get on the right train. Each station is a confusing network of platforms. On top of all this everyone else in the station walks around confidently like they know exactly what they’re doing, at an extremely fast pace. This is because the metro is the Parisienne way to travel; I didn’t see many tourists taking the metro.

Sound stressful?

Well don’t let this put you off, the metro is by far the best way to get around Paris. After a few days I was quite confident using the metro; walking around confidently like one of those true Parisiennes I just mentioned. And with time you will get a hang of it as well. In fact I can guarantee that you’ll find it essential to your visit. Everywhere in the centre of Paris has a metro close by. More importantly, in my opinion, the metro is the cheapest way to travel round Paris. I recommend buying a visit Paris metro ticket as soon as you get there. This will allow you to go to any metro stop, as many times as you like, for the amount of days you select. The average price of this ticket is around 6,75 Euros per day. Much cheaper than the bus or a taxi!

3. No Single Use Plastics

Unaware to me before visiting France, as of 2022 they have completely banned all single use plastics. Forgive me if this is common knowledge, and it may be due to me not paying enough attention to the news, but this really took me by surprise. Possibly this is because my own country, Britain, despite it’s close proximity to France, still feels so far away from making the move away from single use plastics. Here, they still feel like a massive and annoyingly unavoidable part of everyday life.

What I found more surprising though was how long into my trip it took me to notice that there were no single use plastics- only on the fourth day! This is when I decided to research about it and found out about the ban. For me, this highlighted how single use plastics aren’t actually as necessary as they sometimes seem. At no point did I find the ban to be an inconvenience. This made me rethink my own life and how environmentally unfriendly Britain, as an economically developed country, really is. France genuinely seems to care; the British government and common British culture needs to do better!

4. The Culture of Smoking

In Paris, the culture of smoking is the same as the culture of drinking coffee. A cigarette, like a good cup of coffee, is an occasion to sit down, be present and enjoy- and often the two go hand I hand. To encourage this culture of slower living, pretty much all cafes and restaurants in Paris have a designated smoking area, often indoors. It is very rare to see someone smoking a cigarette and walking down the street, similarly it is rare to see someone drinking a takeaway coffee. Undeniably, this creates a very sophisticated image around smoking that is accepted, and maybe even encouraged. Depending on your opinions on smoking you might see this as a positive of Parisienne culture or a negative. Either way, it’s definitely surprising

5. The Cleanliness of the Streets

When walking around Paris I hardly noticed any litter, public spaces seemed clean and respected. Compare this with some areas of London where you are attacked by plastic bags and crisp packets when walking down the street, and I was surprised. This lack of litter of course is likely a result of France’s ban on single use plastics, but I just got a sense that people had a more caring attitude towards the environment in general.

Furthermore, there were hardly any cigarette ends scattered across the streets and parks. This is arguably a benefit of encouraging people to smoke indoors and take time over a cigarette. In British cities, most people choosing to smoke will do it as there walking down the street and then throw the end on the ground, to become litter, when they have finished, but this doesn’t really happen in Paris. Additionally in Paris, I noticed there was a lot of public gardens, greenspace, birds and trees.

All part of what makes this city so beautiful.

6. How Nice the People are

This one is important!

I’ve often been told that Parisiennes, and French people in general, are rude and unfriendly. This is a completely untrue and unfair stereotype!

The staff in the hotel we stayed in were always looking to be helpful; giving us maps of Paris, recommending places to visit and a lot of them even complemented me on my French, despite it not always being perfect. Servers in restaurants were always very lovely as well. And you might be thinking “well this is their job, they get paid to be helpful and friendly”, but I genuinely felt that they were good people who were naturally kind and wanting to be helpful. Even the general public were wonderful people, no one was ever rude to me. For example, on our first night, the man sat next to me in the restaurant helped me with my French when ordering a meal. He was willing to help me and was not at all rude or unfriendly.

The only way that I could comprehend why some view the people in Paris in such a negative manner is down to a lack of cultural understanding. Smiling at strangers isn’t done, people don’t naturally throw themselves into conversation, it is normal to overtake people on the street or when getting onto the metro and generally people seemed more conservative- but this does not make them bad people. These things are all part of their culture; how they’re used to living and I think as a tourist we have a responsibility to approach foreign cultures with a non-judgemental outlook.