The alps in the height of the ski season is a very safe bet for encountering some right rude bastards.
You’ll find them from many nations, and they all seem eager to conform to national stereotypes. You’ll find pissed up Brits more interested in necking as many beers as possible and picking fights than with skiing. You’ll see incredibly humourless germans barking orders at wait staff. And you will most certainly find appallingly rude french with the sort of breathtaking lack of manners that makes you wonder why they don’t just ask you to slap them and be done with it.
My sis, a fluent French speaker who has spent a year in France before, would back you up. She spent a weekend in Paris recently and had a bibleful of tales of rude Parisians. I’ve heard that those from outside Paris are in general less rude but je ne sais pas.
Love France, love the French. Been there several times and have always found Parisians to be witty, helpful, and generally delightful people. Nope, I’m not kidding! I generally found the people outside of Paris to be a bit more standoffish, but still helpful.
The worst I’ve run into are the British. I always get the impression that they fucking hate me.
My mind is well and truly boggling you know. And I don’t mean this in a nasty way, but I swear I must be in a different Paris to the one people are describing here. Yeah, I’ve had the odd rude Parisian, where I’ve ended up going off on one at some fucking rude imbeciles (Surcouf customer service springs to mind, the Paul on Rue de Rivoli too and the couple of daft idiots who’ve tried to push to the front of queues, but who, IME respond rather contritely to a " :dubious: Monsieur/Madam…"), but honestly, in over a year of living just outside Paris and going into Paris several times a week, I’ve not experienced even a quarter of the rudeness that people here describe. I’m beginning to think I’m not actually in Paris, France, Cité du Lumière, capital city of the French Republic…
Honestly, where ever you go there are assholes. Thankfully they are generally in the minority. I’ve visited France and had both good and bad experiences…much like most other places I’ve been to. In England I’ve had guys attempt to pick fights with me. In Spain I’ve had people be VERY rude to me because I’m Mexican and my Spanish is accented differently than theirs. In Germany I was given warm beer!
In the US you haven’t experienced ‘rude’ if you haven’t visited one of the big Eastern cities…Boston being perhaps the font of all rudeness in the world.
I don’t think the French have a lock on this by any means. And it’s not like I’m unbiased here…no one would accuse me of being a big fan of the French (or most other Europeans) and attempting to bend over backwards to accommodate out and out rudeness. But my own experiences there (even in Paris) have been mostly pleasant.
Don’t let the actions of a few assholes put you off…those type people can be found in every nation on earth.
Or as I said before, perhaps you’ve some aura or pheromone that means the French don’t hate you, unlike me and apparently most other non-French people.
I haven’t been in Paris in ages… and I only have HS French…but, most people reposnded to : "Madam, j’aim probleme.(insert what you want here)…
It worked fine!
I travel extensively, both for pleasure and for work, and whilst I will be going back to France (on the Eurostar, no less, to Paris in three weeks) for business and will likely go there again, possibly against my will for holidays - girlfriend’s brother runs a chalet there and she likely won’t ski anywhere else. Yes, there are assholes everywhere. I just think a huge proportion of them seem to be from France.
Although I am starting to think it was timing - I happened to ski the same week as Paris ski week, when apparently all the Parisians get a week off. So it may explain why there was such as shocking concentration of assholes all about the Alps and on the TGV and Eurostar on Saturday.
Labrador Deceiver is right on. Normandy is the least ‘French’ of anywhere I’ve been in France, and the Allied cemeteries and beaches are the only place I’ve ever seen French respect for those who died for their country. Plus, the food is some of the tastiest I’ve ever had. But do rent a car if you go - it’s a long walk from point to point and pretty country so I wouldn’t count on much in the way of public transportation.
I spent almost a year in France and spent a few weekends in Paris. I didn’t find the Parisians to be any ruder than customer help in any other big city. The only place that we had was a bit of bother was a bar cafe where the owner snapped at us that our drinks were only for the bar not a table. We finished up and went elsewhere.
I found the people to be friendlier in the south of France. I found Marseille to be a pretty friendly and fun city despite its reputation.
Just to throw one more anecdote on the pile, we spent eight days in Paris last fall and were pleasantly surprised by how friendly and accommodating people were. In my experience, I don’t think people in the U.S. are nearly as welcoming to foreign tourists who barely speak English as people in Paris were to us, overall.
As for the OP, you seem a little touchy, to be honest. Incident #1 seems like a natural misunderstanding (you had more people coming and weren’t just taking up half a table with ski gear) which you couldn’t quickly resolve because you didn’t speak the language. I’m not exactly sure what the point of Incident #2 is, except that you felt the resort’s restaurants should have had different policies regarding ski attire and not been upstairs (?). Incident #3 was another language barrier and/or rude customer service person. Incident #4 was you getting bumped into a lot on public transportation. I’m guessing that’s regular riders being impatient with people blocking the normal flow – when I first went to New York, I tended to stand near the doors on the subway and consequently got shoved a lot by people getting on and off at each stop. That’s just how they do things.
I’m sure the fact that I had such a positive experience has biased how I read your OP, but it seems like you’re pretty quick to get upset over relatively minor problems.
Not knowing the circumstances, I hesitate to butt in, but: Some cafes have (or used to have) a different pricelist for drinks etc. served at the bar, as compared to a table. Could you unwittingly have run into that?
Out of curiosity as a regular user of the service - and presuming you’re talking about at Gare du Nord here - during which bit of the boarding procedure was this?
Queueing to get through the ticket barrier, waiting for the French border control, at the UK equivalent, at the security check, queuing to have your ticket checked at the gate before you go down onto the platform after boarding is announced or actually at the door onto the train?
