Is Paris considered a great place to live? I've been there a couple times in the last few years, and it just seemed like every other big western city. (except for the police walking around with assault weapons.)
I'm surprised, to me it always looks & feels very different than most other Western cities, in part due to low-rise buildings and almost exclusively independently operated restaurants and shops.
Most other large European cities allowed for high rises and chain coffee shops & restaurants, to the point where they've started to become indistinguishable from one another.
Paris has the CBD called La Défense which looked like most cities to me. Apparently tourists and residents alike hate it.
The rest of Paris is pretty "European city" and maybe I'm not tuned into the differences, but it seemed quite like Munich, Rome, or Barcelona except for the language, etc.
For me the size of the core of Paris what make it different. It's still comparatively small, but you can walk for hours through streets with shops and restaurants. In other European cities I feel like I hit much faster the suburbs.
I think like every city it has good parts and bad parts. Food is great, lots of stuff to do, employment is ok, the city is generally superb. But the population is irascible, the metro is a dark, overcrowded, grafiti covered, piss-stinking place, and the city is one gigantic traffic jam. Health and education is cheap, though state-run schools are in free fall and parents rush to put their kids in private schools. And the city is surrounded with poor neighbourhoods that are a ticking timebomb (with regular riots that are now spreading inside Paris).
Sorry my communication skills aren’t great. It was a genuine question. I spent a total of 14 days there, but I’m an adventurous walker and covered much of the city. My expectations were too high, probably. (Too high expectations lead to disappointment)
"the disorder is caused by positive representations of the city in popular culture, which leads to immense disappointment as the reality of experiencing the city is very different from expectations: tourists are confronted with an overcrowded and littered city ... and a less than welcoming attitude by French hospitality workers like shopkeepers, restaurant and hotel personnel without considering the higher safety risks to which tourists used to safer cities are suddenly exposed."
In the United States the AR or shotgun will generally be kept in the car. It's fairly common to see automatic weapons in Mexico, depending on where you are.
(I don't remember how the Canadian police typically do things. I think I was dazzled by how attractive the police officers in Canada are compared to the United States, particularly in Montreal, but they definitely carry pistols and wear kevlar...)
Thanks. It's not too surprising that Canada would do things similarly to the US, perhaps sans some of the over-the-top use of surplus military equipment and with fewer donuts.
By all accounts, heavily armed security (and I'm sure it's not just sworn law enforcement officers, but also private security) in tourist areas are a bigger thing in Mexico than elsewhere in North America.
I've been to most major American cities, and Toronto, and D.F., as well as Paris and Brussels.
What Paris and Brussels have in common with D.F., which they do not share with either the major American cities or Toronto, is police open-carrying machine guns.
I assume by "machine guns" you mean rifles, and by "open carrying" you mean "carrying." (there's no way to carry a rifle concealed) I have no idea what "D.F." is.
Another response above mentioned that American cops generally keep the long gun in the car. Since today we've got National Guardsmen with rifles in the NY subways acting as police, this conversation all feels a little tone deaf, but it's fair enough to point out that French law enforcement do like their rifles. I noticed that the first time I used a French airport, though, not out in the street. I don't remember ever seeing police walking in Paris, although I admit that I was a pretty sheltered tourist there.
(I bet there's a more nuanced conversation to be had here about the difference between police and gendarmerie and I just don't know enough about it, except I sort of wonder what the OP was doing that caused him to cross paths with heavily armed law enforcement outside of the airport or government buildings. Maybe Paris really has changed.)
I mean both fully-automatic rifles and submachine guns, but sure, I never saw someone lugging around an M2 like a 1980s action character.
> and by "open carrying" you mean "carrying."
I mainly meant to contrast it with having one easily accessible in their squad car, actually. American police do have long rifles, although these are mostly semiauto.
Since there is no way to carry a rifle concealed, all carry is in fact open carry... or is it? Is a rifle in a case open carry? It is not. The term means something in the U.S., and I was using it correctly. In places where citizens have the right to open carry, this applies to a slung rifle as well, in places where they do not, it's legal to carry a rifle, but it must be in a case.
This is no stranger than referring to New York City as NYC, it is an utterly commonplace term for the city, the one which Mexicans normally use in referring to it.
> Since today we've got National Guardsmen with rifles in the NY subways acting as police, this conversation all feels a little tone deaf
That may be the case, I've been to New York many times but not for many years now. If I had seen this, I would have mentioned it.
I don't see what about this conversation is tone deaf, other than perhaps your refusal to read what I said with reasonable generosity, or look up a common term for the largest city in North America when you didn't recognize it.
> I noticed that the first time I used a French airport, though, not out in the street.
They do tend to cluster around airports and train stations in both Paris and Brussels, although not exclusively. In D.F. you'll see machine guns open carried pretty much anywhere, true throughout Mexico in fact.
