A tourist, but with taste

On moving abroad, feeling like a tourist and getting to the heart of things

I’ve always hated feeling like a tourist. Like I’m trying on someone else’s life for size, but never getting to the messy, beating heart of it.

I want to know the truth, but what I know best are Tripadvisor landmarks, tacky souvenir shops and TikTok recommendations. Selfie sticks at Sacré Cœur. American accents at Place du Tertre. Supermarket cashiers responding in English. Eiffel Tower-shaped key rings and fridge magnets and dildos (who buys these? Should I buy one? No. No? No.) I want to exist in this new life with elegance and ease, but moving to a city alone is clunky and clumsy, like a French word that comes out all wrong.

In spite of its associations with love, lots of people hate Paris. You hear stories all the time of tourists who save up for years to visit the city of light and love only to find it dirty, inhospitable and sorely overrated. They only want to love the city at its best, when it’s contained inside a perfect postcard where no one ever burps or swears or trips over the edge of the pavement. But what kind of love is that? A hollowed-out, profane kind. The kind that none of us would wish to receive.

When I lived in Brighton I sometimes resented the opportunistic summer tourists and daytrippers. They reaped the benefits of sunny days on the beach without experiencing the bitter coastal storms and biting cold that enveloped the town during winter. They only saw the postcard version. But to love a city, you must love it in its contradictions. Winter and summer. Beauty and squalor. Piss and art. Romance and froideur.

I’ve been living in a tiny studio in Montmartre for two weeks now, drinking coffee and eating too much bread and trying, but mostly failing, to write. I battle my way through tourists on my lunch break just for something to do, pretending that I am not one of them too.

One Tuesday night, I accidentally found myself alone in a karaoke bar in Bastille. I got so lost in a maze of metro stations on my way to a language exchange meet-up that by the time I got there, the group had disbanded. Instead, I was greeted by the dulcet tones of a French man singing ‘L’histoire de la Vie’ from the French version of The Lion King as purple disco lights bounced off his pale, round face. So, obviously, I had to stay.

Spending a Tuesday night drinking alone in the corner of a karaoke bar might be cause for concern if I did it in London, but here it felt cinematic, as most things in Paris do — as cliché and tourist-like as that sounds. Walking in Montmartre in the rain. Buying tulips from the florist. The view of Sacré Cœur from my window. Walking through Place de la Bastille, the smell of weed and cigarettes mingling in the cool spring evening air. Sometimes that still smells like adventure. Someone I meet calls me “a fucking tourist, but with taste” and I joke that I’ll add it to my Hinge bio.

14e arrondissement, Paris, Je t’aime (2006)

My favourite short film in the 2006 movie Paris, Je t’aime comes towards the end. An American woman played by Margo Martindale travels to Paris alone after taking French classes back home. She finds herself adrift in the city, suffering from jet lag and feelings of loneliness, all of which she recalls in a voiceover in American-accented French. As she sits on a park bench eating a sandwich, she has an epiphany.

She tells her French class about the experience after the trip, saying, “It was like remembering something I’d never known before or had always been waiting for, but I didn’t know what. Maybe it was something I’d forgotten or something I’ve been missing all my life. All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness. But not too much sadness. Because I felt alive. Yes, alive.”

This feeling creeps up on you when you visit a city alone. Loneliness taps on your shoulder, but it’s complete and satisfying like submerging yourself in cold water or releasing tears that have built up for a very long time.

I remember being 22 and walking along La Petite Ceinture, the abandoned railway line that circles Paris. It was high summer. Blue skies and the sun like a lightbulb. The city coming to a boil. Gravel crunch beneath my feet. Bars overflowing, pulsing with all the chaos the heat brings. I wanted to blend in, to be just another anonymous girl in her 20s drinking on a terrace with her friends. An experience that was close enough to touch, but just out of reach. Instead, I kept walking because I didn’t know anyone here yet. There was just me, the heat and a long August afternoon.

On Friday, I ended up in the bar I’d seen from the railway line on that day six years ago. The first warm spring weekend of the year, so there were people everywhere. Exchanging cigarettes and lighters. Speaking a language I half understand. A lonely man telling us stories from his youth when he played concerts across Paris. All the city sprawls out ahead of us. All that winged possibility hovering in the sky like a gargoyle. I’m getting a little closer. Nearer to the heart of things.

Some things I’ve been enjoying recently:

• The song ‘Shivers’ by The Boys Next Door

• The album ‘Jagged Little Pill’ by Alanis Morrissette

• The book ‘The Artist’s Way’