People think it’s so glamorous to live in Paris, and they are usually a bit surprised to find out how much I dislike it, unless they’ve actually lived here.

I suppose if I was here on vacation seeing Notre Dame and the Eifel Tower for the first time that there would definitely be some charm. However, I’m not on vacation.

I’ve never been somewhere quite this filthy, and I’ve been to some dirty places.

Seoul is a huge city with tons of people. There is definitely air pollution in Seoul, but what I didn’t notice in great abundance was a huge glob of the population that just didn’t think they should be responsible for anything.

Sure, I didn’t always feel safe breathing when I was in Korea, but I didn’t spend my life jumping over piles of feces and wading through garbage.

The sad thing is that the City of Paris tries to keep things clean. In fact, I’ve never seen so many street cleaners in my life! They run the cleaning trucks up and down the streets several times a week, empty the countless public trash bins, suck up cigarette butts with gigantic vacuums, and constantly hose down the feces and urine.

And yet the streets are still feculent. Why?

I’ve talked to several people who actually tried to convince me that if they pick up after themselves they will be putting street cleaners out of a job! They claim to be helping the economy by littering and letting their dogs defecate in the middle of the sidewalk.

Well, that’s one theory.

I’m not well acquainted with many big cities in the states. Are they all this filthy? Are the people all this apathetic towards the environment? Since I grew up in a small town in Washington State I used to consider Portland and Seattle to be quite dirty, but after being in Paris for a year I can appreciate why Portland is called the City of Roses and why Seattle is declared the Emerald City.

I think it’s sad that in a country with such a rich history and culture like France that most people seem to not be interested in taking care of it. There are many beautiful monuments to see in Paris, from afar. When you get up close there is so much graffiti and trash, that much of the illusion of beauty is lost.

Today I passed a young woman laughing and kicking a cassette tape down the street, which someone had probably tossed out a car window. She kicked it near me. Without thinking I bent over, picked it up, waived it around in the air a bit and mumbled in exasperated English, “Why don’t you pick it up?� Even if she didn’t understand me, she probably got the point as she watched me walk to a nearby garbage and toss the tape in. How difficult was that?

There is so much garbage on the streets here, I don’t expect any pedestrian to stop and pick up each piece. Where I grew up there isn’t a lot of garbage lying around so if I see something, I usually pick it up. Here though, it would be futile, I realize that. But if there is something wrapped around my leg (which happens quite often) I go ahead and throw it away.

My students will sometimes start kicking garbage when we walk somewhere. I make them stop and pick it up. My theory is that if you’re going to put the effort into kicking it around you might as well pick it up and put it in the garbage.

The students told me it wasn’t their job, and even they told me that they were taking away people’s jobs by picking up trash. I wonder where a 9 year old got that idea.

Well, it didn’t take long to figure out. Soon I had parents start complaining that I was making their kids touch garbage! I said, “Hey, if they don’t want to pick it up then they don’t need to be kicking it down the street.�

I also tried to organize a day for my class to go out and clean up, with gloves of course. But the parents complained to the director, who told me, guess what, that there were people paid to do that, so we shouldn’t waste our time.

I was allowed to organize a trip to a collection center for recycling, which I suppose was the best I could hope for. Also, there isn’t one of my students would dare litter around me. I see them start to, then look around to see if I’m watching, and then go and throw whatever it was away. At least that’s something.

(sigh…)