Paris as a ghost town

Heat and post-Olympics exhaustion grip the City of Light

Paris finally got its summer “canicule” (aka heatwave) but it was short and almost a sweet reminder that while this place is heaven for many, it’s hell in the heat.

Thankfully, the heat built as the hotels and sports stadiums emptied and the August hush that is common this time of year fell over the city. It’s become easy to find a terrance table at an outdoor café and getting a seat on the No. 4 Metro is a cinch

.Yesterday, my longtime roommate and I traveled across town (something we avoided during the Olympic games because of crowds, closed streets, metro stops and bus lines) for some errands and a spirited game of Mahjongg with friends in the 7th arrondissement.

The stroll through the 7th reminded me of why Parisians get the reputation of being grumpy. With the Eiffel Tower looming over the quartiers of the district, the crowd

of visitors was nearly unbearable.

Now I’m certain all these folks are perfectly lovely in their own right, but when they get here, tourists seem to lack the sense god promised a billy goat. Too many of them wander around staring at their phones trying to go around the block in a city that doesn’t have them. Blocks that is.

I’m willing to bet folding money most travelers couldn’t find the tower if it fell on them despite the fact you can’t miss it from any corner of town. But they’re usually found searching in vain in the tourist haunts of the 6th and 7th arrondissements.

We quickly skirted the crowds of camera toting, water-bottle-gripping visitors and walked the one kilometer route to our friend’s place through streets that were nearly deserted. My husband said it felt “creepy” on streets so deserted, I just found

it peaceful.

Not since the pandemic lockdowns have I seen the city’s streets and sidewalks so empty. Even the bike rental stands had plenty of velos from which to choose.

With the Olympians gone and Parisians on their normal August retreat, stores and restaurants are shuttered and plastered with signs proclaiming “congé estival”, summer holiday

.

It can be hard going out to eat or just have a cold beer at a café. Finding bread is

the obsession of most folks who stay in the city in August. Yesterday, my friends (all of us bucking the Get Out of Town in August trend) compared notes on how far we have to walk to find an open boulangerie this month. Folks, good bread availability is the reason people choose apartments, change jobs, alter their daily routine and whine a lot here. There are laws about bread availability, ingredients, price. Bread is serious business and wars have begun over it in France.

To avoid yet another revolution caused by bread shortages, the government regulates when and if boulangers can close. In each quartier, they must coordinate vacations — week days and holiday weeks — so that fresh baguettes are available to residents at all times.

I’m lucky to have five artisinal bakers within a two minute walk of my apartment in the Marais. My favorite (where the cashiers know I like a traditionel bien cuit chaude and are willing to go to the ovens to select one straight from the nice north African baker) is closed Sundays but three others nearby are open, so I’m safe.

But one of my friends reported being stopped by a pair of wandering visitors near her apartment who asked if she knew any place in the city to get a loaf of bread. She took pity on them and directed the hungry tourists to the open shop in her quartier. We do what we can to help.

The toughest thing of all here in August is finding a doctor who isn’t at his country house in Le Mans or sunning himself in Crete. On our way home yesterday, we spotted a collapsed traveler on the floor of the Réaumur-Sebastapol station, surrounded by RATP employees and concerned passengers. I could only think “Where’s he gonna find a doctor in August?”

Yes, it’s true. Paris is empty of Parisians in August and much of the city is shut down because the “Aoutens” (folks who take much of their mandatory five weeks of vacation per year in the month of August) are gone. The city isn’t nearly so empty in July when the “Juilletens” take off. Many companies are attempting to get their workers to stagger their holidays between the two months so they can avoid a complete

shutdown of operations.

Some organizations just give in and respond to any inquiry with “C’est Aout, bien sur.” It’s August, of course. Everybody here knows that means nothing is going to get done. Don’t even think of getting a haircut, your teeth cleaned, your resident’s permit updated or you electricity repaired.

September will get here eventually, but not until Jacques and Clotilde have ridden the mountain singletracks in the French Alps, rafted the rivers of the southern French Alps or windsurfed the Mistral-swept beaches of France's Mediterranean coast

That’s because this is a country that values leisure over productivity, rest and relaxation over business success. French workers don’t check email, send texts or chat with clients when they’re off the clock. In a country that generally disdains religion, vacations are sacred.

I think Parisians hold August vacation to be an almost religious experience because this is a country where conventional (that is French) wisdom states that air conditioning is bad for you. Nobody has it. (In fact, in France, only 25% of homes are “climatisé” and few businesses have more than a single fan circulating air.

Is air conditioning bad for you? Pre-chilled Americans arrive at the undertakers cold storage system nearly a decade sooner than the room-temp French, so there may be something to their old wives’ tales.

Most French also eschew fans, believing that having cool air blowing on you is dangerous. Ice is shunned because, say most French mamans, it causes your digestive system to spasm. You’ll be lucky to get a single glaçon in your room temperature Coke Zero and an iced tea (thé glacé) is a misnomer here.

The oddest thing is that most French you encounter day to day don’t complain much about the weather, the heat or the cold. They save their complaints for the important stuff: Bread, the latest public art (please don’t get them started on the idea of keeping the Olympic torch a permanent fixture in the Tuileries) and the owners of the PSG football team.

And in a country where a five-week annual vacation is mandated by law (my young French guest at lunch yesterday is ending three weeks of his annual eight weeks vacation time and reluctantly heading back to the office on Monday) no one brags about not taking all their vacation time. Unlike Americans who boast of being so necessary at work they can’t leave for more than a day or two, French workers are pleased to boast that they value their leisure time with friends and family above their careers. Yes, it’s different here.

The French also don’t approach heat like Americans. They cool their homes and apartments by firmly closing the windows after sunrise, drawing heavy drapes or shutters and not moving around much until the heat breaks. They drink water (not from bottles they carry, but at tables, seated with friends) and eat tiny sweet melons that are at their peak this time of year.

When the thermometer measured 39C (that’s 102 “Freedom” degrees as my husband calls them) out on the street and the code keypad on the building’s front door was too hot to touch, my 95-square meters on the second (American third) floor flat was a tolerable 25C (77F).

But most Parisians flee to cooler places when the heat descends on places like Paris. They spend time in their family country houses or in rented “gites” in rural districts like Brittany, Normandy and the French Alps. A few brave souls seek out the ovens known as Provence or the Cote d’Azur. These masochists remind me that the temps

in the south of France are “a dry heat.” So’s my oven, I usually reply.

Some of us actually enjoy the calm and quiet of Paris in August, despite the occasional heat wave. We are the esprits fantomatiques of la ville fantôme, sitting, not standing on the No. 4 metro and eating sweet Cavaillon melons in our shuttered, cool apartments. A la prochaine, mes amis.