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Comment by Jgrubb | Hacker News Reader

"Terrifyingly dirty"? The simple way they clean the gutters with the fountains on the corners is amazing to me as an American.

Layers of dirt on beautiful buildings? They're several hundred years old.

Felt quite unsafe even in good neighborhoods? I spent all last week there, on foot, at all hours alone and never once felt unsafe. It occurs to me now that maybe that's my male privilege so apologies if that's not the case for you but Paris is the greatest city in the world as far as I'm concerned.

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> "Terrifyingly dirty"? The simple way they clean the gutters with the fountains on the corners is amazing to me as an American.

As a Parisian, I can sadly attest that the city is currently disgustingly dirty, that it has been getting worse and worse in the five years since I moved there and that London is indeed a lot cleaner.

Paris suffers from a lot of incivilities, very lax policing, the current mayor puting cleanliness as a non priority and extremely poor supervision of the existing cleaning crews.

It has become such a pain point for Parisian that cleanliness is likely to be the main issue of next year electoral campaign.

I will never forget when I visited Paris as a tourist and in the green patches of grass in front of the Eiffel tower where everyone sets down their blankets and takes selfies is littered with Heineken bottle caps and cigarette butts, it was so uniformly covered in the things that I took a picture of it to remind me. I sort of got that Heineken and smokes are super popular there (at least amongst the touristy areas) but still.

May be the non-touristy areas are also considered dirty by you, but I'm an American, where we treat public places like shit but make sure interiors and the entrances near parking is pretty and the rest of the fucking street is trash since no one other than me apparently walk it. To me, the "grime" I see seems normal if not a little nicer than any city in Ohio.

My city (Oslo, Norway) also has buildings that are centuries old, but they are kept clean. When I went to Stockholm a couple of years back, their old buildings looked dirty because no one seemed to be cleaning them.

I am a man as well. Not sure how that has anything to do with male privilege lol. I still felt very unsafe. All kinds of people walking on the streets at night. Also all the terrorist attacks make it quite uncomforting too. If youve been to London you would be amazed at the condition of the buildings, the way the scaffolding is all done, how stuff under construction looks like. Its probably the most well organized city in the world, and Ive been to NY, Vegas, and all European big cities.

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