Shameless Coffee

For as long as I can remember, Hollywood has been brainwashing me into believing that a woman alone in Paris should be near suicidal with loneliness and should never consider going anywhere near the Eiffel Tower, or Notre Dame, or any of the other touristy landmarks in Paris for fear of suddenly realising that you were standing there alone and would have the undeniable urge to throw yourself into the Siene River.

So when I arrived in Paris alone, fully aware of the fact that my boyfriend was halfway around the world, I was suddenly hit by severe anxiety. What if being in the so-called city of love alone would be too much for me to handle and I ended up depressed and lonely? What if I regretted travelling to this wonderful city because I didn’t have my ridiculously silly boyfriend with me?

As usual, Hollywood was wrong.

There is nothing particularly romantic about Paris and it as not as if anything is specifically designed for couples. It is not as if you have to see the Eiffel Tower as a couple and the pavements are covered in dog poo as opposed to rose petals. In fact, I missed my boyfriend no more than usual and at no point was I semi-suicidal.

If anything, I actually rather enjoyed being in Paris alone.

French men are the most self-assured, cocksure people I have ever met and it was utterly liberating to be chatted up by these foreign men with strange accents. It is not as if I haven’t been shamelessly hit on by South African men who believe that the sun shines out of their bums, but the French have a certain belief in their own ‘irrisistability’ that makes the shameless flirtation rather amusing.

Obviously there are a few problems with their flirting techniques, the first of which is the obvious language barrier, but once you have accepted that the French are fully capable of declaring their love to a complete stranger who doesn’t understand their language then you start to understand why most of the famous poetry happens to be set in France.

It is not that the French are particularly romantic, and their accents are actually rather annoying because there is no way of telling whether they are speaking French or English. No it has nothing to do with real love but is rather based on something far more shallow, and that is their self-worship.

The French man loves himself so much that he feels absolutely no fear at the thought of being shot down by a pretty lady and will quite happily shower a girl in compliments and declare his undying love to a complete stranger. This is not love, this is the ultimate flirtation, and it is what hundreds of years of poetry and Hollywood movies are based on.

And I have to say, right now I am a hundred percent on Nicole Kidman’s side of the argument, pre-Moulin Rouge. In France you may as well go for the diamonds because the love is usually fake, shallow and all too brisk for my liking.

This is not to say that the shameless flirtation isn’t wonderful to hear, and after a week in Paris I felt better about myself than I ever have before. Strange old men who owned fish stalls were offering me their life’s worth and a cup of coffee and gorgeous young men who said all the right things were batting their eyelids at me hoping for a chance to continue the conversation over an espresso.

Before long, I was so sure of myself that even I considered chatting up an unbelievably gorgeous man who happened to own a chocolate shop, and found myself Googling the nearest café in the hopes of getting him there, along with all his free chocolate. Paris had turned me into a monster and soon I was just like every other Frenchmen; addicted to coffee and chatting up the nearest semi-good looking man.

So to all those women who have been dying to visit Paris but are scared to do it alone, there is nothing to fear because you can quite easily cope on your own, and if you get there and decide that you can’t, it’ll take five minutes and maybe a cup of coffee before you have a partner who will gladly show you the best that Paris has to offer.