Life in Paris: The Things I HATE (watch before you come here)

okay let me begin with this okay i love the city i think paris is amazing i wouldn't have moved here otherwise okay so this city hasn't made me bitter yet uh yet nah just kidding it's it really has not i don't think it will i hope it doesn't and look generally speaking i feel like i've contributed quite a bit to the dreamy romantic look of paris right there's just something about the city that has that effect on people i am constantly rooting for the french and i'm always trying to get all of my friends and family to come here to at least visit or even move i do think it's the most beautiful city in the world whoa are we gonna debate that no we're not i mean i don't know you can in the comments and look i have a responsibility don't i i can't just talk about the positive things right a lot of people come to paris after watching my videos and i don't want to let people down you should know you should know what you're getting yourself into and if i'm going to criticize the united states i have to be equal with my criticisms of europe so in this video despite the love i have for this place i am going to rent these are the things that i hate about living here and i'm gonna skip some of the big ones that i've talked about before okay like for example the bureaucracy the complete lack of ac the constant construction work and the cost of this place we're gonna get more into the nitty-gritty here all right without further ado let's dive in [Music] deliveries guys we lived through a pandemic at this point we should all know how to do deliveries we should have systems in place and those systems should be perfected and yet for whatever reason ordering stuff to my apartment here to this day is to one of the most stressful things ever first of all if you're getting a call from your delivery person you have to pick it up it's always like hold on hold on one second if you don't answer you are not going to get the package why because you need two codes to even just enter the building and even though i've written it all down in the delivery instructions nobody reads [ __ ] okay next because the french like to pretend that we're still living in the 1300s you also have to specify what floor and where the door is located because my apartment doesn't have a number it just doesn't it would be so much easier to just slap a number on the door right and then you just have like a number that corresponds with each door and that just makes everything easier but no instead we're like digicode now one partial solution to this it's kind of not really a full solution and you're going to see why in a second here is that many buildings have a guardian a guardian that name always kind of made me laugh the guardian is somebody who kind of works in the building and it can receive packages for you and kind of help sort of manage the building right except this too is problematic why because for example in my building my guardian retired months and months ago and it's taking the building an eternity to find a solution a replacement but on top of that like even if you do have a guardian they come in maybe a couple of hours a day and therefore most of the time can't even receive packages for you this leads me to my next point the french are allergic to work okay not actually but kind of a little bit you know whereas in the united states there's this really dumb unhealthy work culture of like who can work the most right it's like oh you work 80 hour work weeks well i do a hundred the french are sort of the opposite they're like no you know what 40 hours a week is too much so they passed a law in 2000 that basically made it illegal to work more than 35 hours a week and they took this very french thing and made it even more french by adding a million loopholes so you actually can work more than that but not and like look that's all cool okay i'm all for the four day work week or like shorter work days or whatever i'm not going to be toxic about this all i ask is that you clearly communicate to me when you're working and when you aren't but they don't they don't do that they don't do that google maps will say a place is open the website for the store itself will say that they're open and still you can go and there's a one in three chance that they're not open i came to pick up tiles for my apartment and they're closed right now they are closed for another hour so i'm gonna wait here because i'm way outside of the city right now god add to this the fact that there is a two-hour block right in the middle of the workday when everything closes for lunch and they seem unable to take shifts or cover for each other so everybody does this at the same time which means from like noon to two don't even bother trying to buy anything that you need so as you can imagine it becomes difficult sometimes to get stuff done oh yeah and while we're at it vacation time is basically all the time i am kind of exaggerating here but i will say that i've already sort of dedicated the month of august to getting absolutely nothing done nothing is open everyone is off but that's not even enough for the french one month a vacation is like the starter pack that's like for babies okay they they really go all out with this stuff and again like i get it all right work life balance that's cool but sometimes this much vacation can be problematic i'll give you an example okay my banker over the course of the time that i was trying to get a bank loan to buy my apartment here in paris went on vacation on three different occasions it's like come on how are we supposed to make this happen bikers versus cars biking here is insane can i film non-extremely bumpy material no not really bro we're going so fast the mayor and hidalgo is making a huge effort to make this city a lot more pedestrian and biker friendly which i think is great actually i think there should be less cars in my mind it's insane to own a car and to get around by car in the city so they're making these changes right over the last few years they've added bike lanes all over the place the problem is that some of these bike lanes are super dangerous this is because for whatever reason the bike lanes will go in the opposite direction as the cars look what we have here cars coming this way bikes going this way and then of course there's a bunch of motorcycles here parked to just make this even more chaotic to me that doesn't make any sense it's kind of like a suicide mission but this is just the beginning of my complaints regarding the transportation here because then there is the metro paris is a very walkable city which is a big plus okay but sometimes you do need to rely on the metro because you're trying to get across town and it would just take too long to walk the metro system is actually really great but it comes with some serious issues first issue with the metro [ __ ] gets packed in the summer and it gets hot you're cooking underground like some sort of brisket which by the way side tangent the french have this sort of national obsession with food metaphors and it's rubbing off on me second problem the weekly or monthly passes only begin like on the first day of the week or the month and so that makes no sense from a business perspective because you know if you buy the pass in the middle of the week or the middle of the month you only have that until the end of the week or the month and then it resets so basically you're paying the same price for this thing that is becoming increasingly less valuable over time it disincentivizes you from getting the pass like i'm not going to want to get a weekly pass if it's already thursday or friday right if it resets on monday third major issue the stairs the stairs are everywhere you can't avoid stairs stairs everywhere and you know they're trying to make the city more pedestrian friendly by removing cars which is cool but the only way to do that is if you make the public transport more accessible to people and so because of the fact that the stairs are absolutely inevitable if you have some sort of physical disability or you're trying to carry like a luggage for example because you're like me you're always kind of going on a trip or you're coming back it makes everything way harder really before i go any further to this video i want to briefly talk about the sponsor of this video who have been long time supporters of my work and that is skillshare now i am a major believer in online learning most of the things i know how to do today have been through consuming information online there is so much available to all of us now in a way that did not exist not that long ago in human history and i just feel like we cannot take that for granted skillshare offers a tremendous amount of courses on a whole variety of different things everything from filmmaking to photography to design to how to play the guitar and i have to say witnessing the evolution of the website has been impressive it just keeps getting better there are so many high quality classes on there now i myself have contributed to that i i felt like i wanted to make things on there and so i have made three classes of my own i have one class on how to find your voice as an artist online one class on how to speak more comfortably on camera and one class on how to document your life which i think is my favorite one it was just so fun to create and to share all of that information it's cool because you know i can take my time presenting the information it can go over the course of an hour instead of feeling like i have to keep your attention in a youtube video and it is absolutely crazy to me that tens of thousands of people have taken these classes the first 1 000 people to use this link will get a one month free trial skillshare consider checking them out it actually does help me out too thank you again skillshare for your support and let's dive back in smoking here's the thing about smoking i get that it looks kind of cool okay and if you see somebody smoking like over there out their window you might go like oh cool that's kind of cinematic and you know everybody's happy yay but smoking gets like considerably worse the closer you are to it and unfortunately smoking is still huge here way too many people smoke here still and they smoke like in your face you know it's like or i mean they might do like oh but they're just blowing this cloud still all over the place and they're smoking in your face i mean i first saw this when i was on exchange here in high school and there would be these 15-minute breaks between classes and in those 15-minute breaks everybody would go outside like there'd be this horde of people going outside and everybody would light up and it would create these like clouds of smoke and we are talking about like 14 and 15 year olds okay which to me is just incredibly depressing i gotta say this is a major point against french women for me because again like okay maybe it looks cool and french women have mastered that sort of blase i don't give a [ __ ] attitude but to make out with somebody who smokes is just not fun it's really just not fun i don't recommend it it's not good they say it's kind of like licking an ash tray and that is yeah open green spaces one of the most amazing things about paris is the density i mean there is an absolutely absurd amount of things to see do and absorb here it makes things really interesting but there is a cost okay well there are some really beautiful parks here okay we have the monsoon there's the jardin de luxembourg the city in general lacks big open green spaces there are a couple there's the void vonsen and the blood but they're kind of like at the exterior the periphery of the city and so while they're not super far away it is a trip and so basically what that means is that unless you make a conscious effort to get out to be in nature and whatnot paris can become this oppressive city this is why so many parisians leave like on weekends or when the weather's nice it's crazy how much outdoor space is prized in the city to where we would walk into nathaniel's courtyard and go oh wow this is beautiful green yeah it's slightly moldy concrete there's a plastic oh come on it's kind of funny it makes people obsessed with little green patches they're kind of like you know you see one potted plant and you're like nature parisians are inaccessible man here's the thing basically all of my friends here after years of living here are either foreigners that have moved here or french people that have lived abroad and look i'm not somebody that struggles to assimilate to different places i mean i love camouflaging myself you know i'm fully fluent in french i have no problems with that and still i found that it's really hard to connect with parisians themselves and it's funny i have actually found that parisians and french people in general are actually quite nice okay i'm not saying that they're mean that's not the criticism i'm making here i'm more so saying that parisians are not open it's that they're closed off to foreigners and other cultures and whatnot in many ways like an american that doesn't have a passport and has never traveled abroad and i have tried man you cannot blame me for not having tried a lot of french people that i've met here that i you know wanted to become friends with i would follow up with i'd send them messages and sometimes weeks would go by weeks on end where they don't even respond they kind of already have their friends you know from high school or college they've got their bubbles and maybe this is the defense mechanism against the amount of foreigners and tourists and whatnot that come through the city it's funny because of the french friends that i do have pretty much none of them are parisians they're all like french people that came from other parts of the country and have moved here parisians themselves are kind of like unicorns these mystical creatures that you can never really pin down and i mean look at the other day this is definitely a city that's full of many incredible people that are very open and welcoming all i'm saying is that i think the city owes a lot to the foreigners that live here okay but that's sort of like complimenting myself here and the parisians are not going to like that bad service at bars and restaurants okay look this is a stereotype okay but this doesn't apply to operations it's specifically less so like everybody's an [ __ ] but there definitely are [ __ ] here and you know pretty quick it's like you sit down at the restaurant there's no menu right and like 10 minutes go by and then you ask like hey can i have a sh they're like and they like respond to you with that kind of aggressive energy it's like whoa i'm here to sort of support your business we're doing an exchange here of services right there is no need to talk to each other like this and to be honest with you the solution i have found is just get up and leave like do not put up with that not everybody is like that but just don't don't eat that [ __ ] and then of course like let's say you have found a good spot and you've had your food or drink or whatever and then you want to get out of there and you want to sort of make eye contact and you're trying to get the addition the check and you're just kind of like for like 45 minutes that goes on for like 45 minutes you're just like i don't know what happens there's something weird that happens between like they place the check on your table and then they forget that you exist and again the only solution there is you got to get up and go and pay all right my concluding thoughts here are once again i don't hate this place okay that's a lot of renting for me and i don't want that to be like a major part of my brand it's nice to kind of let it out sometimes but i again really do love this place what makes paris doubly frustrating is it does so many things so well so when it does things poorly you're like really really i document and share many of my experiences living here and my travels in different cultures and different countries around the world and if that is something that interests you consider subscribing and giving this video a like it really does help i could definitely do another video where i talk about the things that i really really love about paris if that interests you let me know in the comments i also did a guide on paris with a bright trip that is available as part of their subscription offering you can kind of subscribe get access to a variety of different courses on there and that's one of them so if that interests you consider checking that out i also have a couple of other classes on there as well while i'm talking about it on language learning and storytelling both of which i've done with johnny harris and they came out amazingly so could be something worth taking a look at if you've lived in paris or visited i'd love to hear your thoughts on all of this all right thank you for watching and i will see you soon we're gonna get kicked off [Music] you

Channel: Nathaniel Drew

Views: 447,110

Keywords: paris, what I don't like, what I can't stand, the problems with paris, what I hate about paris, The problems with paris, paris france, honest review of paris, what to expect in paris, life in paris, is paris overrated?, nathaniel drew, The things I love about paris, france, nathaniel paris, paris nathaniel drew, what to expect before moving to paris, life in paris france, I can't stand paris

Id: 7Wil7nLQVI8

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 07 2022