Do you take your shoes off?

For instance it's not that uncommon in the North and East parts of the city for a parent to walk their toddler over to a tree or curb, hike down the kid's pants and there they go, doing their business

Ewwwww. My child can hold it, thank you very much!!!

I think people think Paris is romantic because of all the movies. Whenever you ask say 10 people about where they would like to travel I would say 6-7 of them say Paris.
 
I generally take my shoes / sneakers off once I am home but not necessarily at the door. I never ask visitors to take theirs off. Most of the time we use slippers to trod around the house.

Nate
 
Shoes off in Chicago. All the different weather we get. Now my next question would be " tell me in Paris the first thing you do is wash your hands?" after reading
about the public toilet habits, I had some bad visions. I picture poop, pee and someone opening a door. I'm gagging big time.
 
I have slate tile throughout so I guess it really doesn't matter here. However, when I was growing up my grandmother insisted we kept our shoes off in the house, so it's almost like a second nature to me. She is from Italy and it's considered disrespectful to her to walk around her house in shoes, but she has white carpet also so I think I would feel the same.

I cannot stand to be barefoot though so I always have my "house shoes" on. I never wear them out of the house though.
 
There are "scoop your dog's poop" laws here in Paris too, signs up in public spaces, but no one pays much attention. The did a bunch of on-the-street interviews when the laws came in several years ago and some of them were hilarious. In our neighbourhood people said "oh yeah, we'll scoop" but when the interviewer asked them how they would pick it up and where they put the "package" once they had it they were obviously clueless.

One guy said he'd pick it up with a special shovel he'd carry for the purpose but when they asked him how big this shovel would be and where would he keep it it was obvious he was thinking of his credit cards.

My favourite one was an interview with a posh lady in the kind of neighbourhood where they put on the mink and pearls to walk the dog. They asked her if she had heard of the new scooping law. "Yes" she said rather briskly with that "why are you talking to me?" look rich Parisians trot out whenever a stranger of an obviously inferior social class deigns to interrupt their busy day. "Will you respect the new law?" they asked her. "I am French," she said, "I respect all of our government's laws". "So you will be scooping up your dog's droppings?" "Certainly not!" she fired back. Without skipping a beat the interviewer said "Oh, why is that?". "It would be unpleasant" she said and walked off with her bouncy little foo-foo doggie in tow, presumably to make a deposit nearby. That's Paris in a nutshell for you!

As to hand washing in Paris the sad truth is that the truth would curl your hair. I loitered in a men's loo at a movie theater a few years after we arrived here and counted the number of guys that washed their hands after using the urinals or stalls. About one in three, maybe less. Tests on currency has shown that Parisians are only slightly less filthy than Londoners when it comes to their bathroom habits: fully three in four bills in people's wallets had fecal matter on them, 70% of credit cards were in the same "lovely" condition. The Metro here is a Petri dish: if you want to catch something that's the place to be. Covering your face when you cough here usually means turning your head and doing it on the person standing next to you: as long as you've turned your head then hey, you made an effort, non?

Paris can be a great place but sometimes it does drive an old Anglo like me straight up the wall.
 
Other French cities have police municipale under the authority of the mayor, but Paris is policed by the Police Nationale, for whom it is below their dignity to deal with dog excrement.
 
There are "scoop your dog's poop" laws here in Paris too, signs up in public spaces, but no one pays much attention. The did a bunch of on-the-street interviews when the laws came in several years ago and some of them were hilarious. In our neighbourhood people said "oh yeah, we'll scoop" but when the interviewer asked them how they would pick it up and where they put the "package" once they had it they were obviously clueless.


We actually get a ticket, much like a traffic ticket. A "dog poop ticket" if you will. :laugh: I'm not sure how much it is.

Isn't there trash cans all over the streets of Paris? All our surrounding cities have them. If I walk from one end of our town to the next end there must be 20 trash cans and I live in a very small town. They are attached to the street light poles. So we use grocery plastic bags, pick up the poop, walk about 50-100 steps and there's a trash can.
 
Isn't there trash cans all over the streets of Paris?

Trash bags actually. They removed the cans because they were apparently a great place for terrorists to hide bombs. Not sure when the change-over started but by the time we arrived about a decade ago there were no cans to be seen.

Anyway, yes, they are there. All over the place in public parks and such. But having and using are sometimes a goodly distance apart. I think it's like the lady said, picking up a handful of steaming dog poop is unpleasant and Parisians tend to have a very highly developed sense of what they do and do not want to do.

To be fair probably half of the dog owners do pick up but for the rest of them ... not a chance! Given that there's an estimated 11 Million pets in Paris, say half of them dogs, and half of those (one guesstimates) pooping when and where they please that still leaves you with well over two million little doggy bung-holes busy at work on the city streets more or less every single day of the year. Isn't that a pleasant image? :D

And all of that says nothing of the rivers of urine that streak the sidewalks from one end of the city to the other, no one bats an eyelash at those. It seems to be an unwritten rule here that once a dog hits the street he is master of his domain: they're permitted to wee on anything they please whether it be cars, bikes, people's luggage, curbside trash, storefronts, welcome mats, open car doors, electrical and telephone boxes, city maintenance equipment, whatever! It's all fair game. We tend to make a point of stepping over the little golden rivers and the looks we get sometimes makes it pretty clear that what we see and what the Parisians see are not the same thing.

There are good reasons why Paris is sometimes called "the world's biggest outdoor toilet".
 

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