A blog about caca

After 9 months of living in Paris there are still days when I am very much a tourist here.
And now that tourist season has well and truly descended on the city of lights I've discovered on my daily walks and exploration of the city that there is one very obvious way (beyond the tell tale sign of a camera hanging around the neck) of picking out the tourists from the natives: simply watch out for who watches their feet while they walk.

Like many other heavily populated cities the majority of people in Paris live in an apartments. Consequently it also seems nearly everyone here owns a small dog - and the evidence of their existence is left all over the city. But combine this with the distracting beauty of the city and you have a disaster just waiting to happen - because the streets here are quite literally paved in shit.

And like so many others who come to Paris I had to learn the hard way to not be distracted by the beauty of the city and to watch my feet as I walked. Hence the trend: newly arrived tourists walk the streets ogling the sights around them and so can also often be spotted wiping the soles of their shoes on the kerb while cursing loudly. Regular visitors or those who have been here long enough to know better are the people who charge down the street with their eyes fixed firmly on the pavement, the better to dodge the bombs left behind.
But it's the true Parisians who amaze me, strutting down the street (more often than not in heels) playing on their phones or chatting easily with what I can only presume is an in-built radar allowing them to side step the mounds lying in wait without a second's hesitation.

During my first few months here I was disgusted by what I considered to be blind disregard for fellow citizens. Wouldn't simply picking up after their dogs be better for everyone concerned? But then The Boy and I began to embrace the mess and became child-like, jumping over the mounds or yelling out "poo", or even better "caca" - the French for poo -  at the top of our lungs as we strolled along the boulevards.

Even better, thanks to a sick dog in our apartment building we even have our very own caca spot on the interior stairs up to our apartment which has been well and truly embraced. Living on the sixth floor means regularly having to huff and puff up more than 100 stairs, and being lazy backpackers we are The Boy and I normally curse the whole way up. But once the initial smell disappeared this spot became loved as a mark of the fact we were nearly home, and huffed poo calls would echo down the stair well to each other.

In a similar way we've come to accept the fact that our regular streets will always be lined with caca, and if that means we get to hop, skip and jump around Paris while yelling out like children then these days that's just fine with me.

Until the next time I get bombed that is...