The Purple Culture Guide to France

Chapter 1: First Impressions

You step off the train or out of the airport, and the first thing that hits you isn't the Eiffel Tower or the smell of croissants. It's the noise. Not loud noise, exactly, but a constant, low-grade hum of human activity - the scrape of a chair on a cafe terrace, the beep of a zebra crossing that you're not sure is telling you to walk or warning you to stop, the murmur of conversations that you catch fragments of but can't quite parse. It's the sound of a country that has been densely inhabited for centuries and isn't about to change its pace for anyone, especially not you.

That's the real first impression of France, for most people: not beauty (though there is plenty of that), but a kind of settledness. This is a place that knows what it is. Buildings are old, not in a museum way, but in a way that suggests they've been serving as cornershops and apartments for three hundred years. The streets in towns and cities are narrow, not for charm, but because they were laid out long before cars had been imagined. The effect is simultaneously charming and slightly unsettling - you are surrounded by proof that the world has been here a long time and will be here long after you've packed your bags.

Given the tourist industry's obsession with the place, you'd expect a certain theatricality. But the first thing that surprises most visitors is how