My country.

My own country.

Where I have voting rights and a passport, just like every other citizen.

I thought living there for four months would be a great way to enrich myself in French culture and appreciate the amazing things that the country has to offer.

I was so excited to go!

Yet, I left with the exact opposite feeling.

The feeling that there was nothing I would miss if I never, ever returned.

Okay, maybe the boulangeries. I mean who doesn't love a hot-and-ready French croissant?

It turned out that living in France caused the negatives about the country to outshine the positives in such an emphatic way that I seldom had to opportunity to appreciate any of the good stuff.

In case it isn't already clear, there was a lot of bad stuff.

Four Months in Metz

In case you haven't already given it a read, I wrote an entire post talking about the city of Metz and why I believe Georgia Tech should move their international campus from the city to...literally anywhere else. You can check it out here.

I now aim to expand on French culture that is not exclusive to Metz, but rather apply to their society as a whole.

Here's a few things I couldn't stand about France that visitors are largely immune to, but make living there hell on Earth.

The People

I've now visited 30 countries and counting. France is the rudest country I have ever visited.

Many travelers complain about French people, especially Parisians, acting disdainful when you address them in English, as if they don't also speak the language.

I'm here to tell you that the disdainful act doesn't stop when you speak to them in French.

They're just a grumpy bunch. Helping you is a chore at the bottom of their to-do list and they would do anything to avoid the inconvenience.

They also come across as extremely standoff-ish. I thought that speaking French would give me a nice "in" to a French-speaking group of friends, but I never felt any friendliness or invitation to be apart of any friend groups of French people I met.

Eventually I got the hint and stopped trying.

That's not to say I haven't met some great French people. The reality is that good and bad people exist everywhere.

It is to say however, my sample size of people I've talked to in France is big enough to know that the average French person is ruder than the average person in any other country I've visited.

The Work

Depending on your idea of what work should be, France's work culture can be heaven on Earth, or the reincarnation of the devil.

As someone with a "rise and grind" attitude, it would have me pulling my hair out. France has a 35-hour workweek madated by law. They typically get 30 (!) days of paid vacation leave plus 11 public holidays (only 1 is a paid holiday).

Those numbers are among the most extreme in the world.

Not only did this make me never want to work in the country, it made living there mildly inconvenient in many ways. Service industries like restaurants and supermarkets close early and on Sundays, and tend to not be accomodating the way they would be in the US.

Let's not forget the constant strikes and protests about the extremely cushy life they live.

The Bureaucracy

Dealing with bureaucracy is frustruating in almost every country, but in France, they do their best to make your extra miserable.

This is due in large part to the lack of adoption of software in governmental processes that could easily be streamlined by simply going digital, but it's not the only issue.

The amount of documents needed to do anything is absolutely mind-boggling. For a month-to-month lease I had to do ridiculous things like submit my parent's tax returns from two years ago, translated from English to French by an "official French translator."

A month-to-month lease? Plus, my parents weren't even the ones paying rent...

As a student, I qualified for a stipend from the French government to help with expenses while staying in the country. I filled out the necessary forms in the first week I arrived–one of the few bureaucratic processes you could do online(!)–but I should have known better: by the time I left four months later, it still had not been processed.

There goes $700+ that will probably never make it to my bank account.

The list of these bureaucratic inefficiencies is as long as it mildly infuriating.

Each one of them piles up to where I felt like I was walking on landmines. To do anything in the country, you had to deal with a bureaucratic nightmare so atrocious it makes you reconsider if it's really worth it.

Like renewing a passport. Mine expires in 2028, but I'll probably start the process this summer.

I'll never complain about the DMV in America again.

La Poste

One of the worst government-run programs is without a doubt their postal service. It's not to say that USPS in America is any good, but at least we have viable alternatives–UPS and FedEx which at least create a little competition.

La Poste, the French equivalent of USPS, is extremely bad, but what makes it worse is how much France relies on snail mail for unnecessary things in 2024.

Almost any paperwork needed to engage with the government, the healthcare system, or the banking sector must be mailed, and inevitably lost, creating a never-ending cycle of feeling like I was being drowned in paperwork, none of which would matter in four months.

Another incredibly illogical situation arose more than once whereby I would order a package on Amazon, not be present at my apartment when it arrived, and then be forced to go retrieve it at the post office, a 15-minute walk from my apartment.

Why my apartment didn't have a package room was beyond me, but hey, it's France. Nothing shocks you.

"C'est Pas Possible"

If you've been to France, no doubt you've heard someone tell you this.

"It's not possible."

Nothing is ever possible in France. Asking for an extra piece of meat at the dining hall? C'est pas possible. Filling a prescription at the pharmacy for more than one month at a time? C'est pas possible. Moving up a doctor's appointment because it's scheduled for a time when I'll have left the country? C'est pas possible.

The thing is, all these things are possible. The people in charge are either just too set in their ways to do something that goes harmlessly against policy, or too lazy to care about doing something that can be a huge convenience to someone else.

It's a country full of people who do not seek solutions to problems. They'd rather go for their two-hour lunch break instead.

The Month of August

This shouldn't be a big deal because everyone has to take time off at some point.

It's just that I happened to arrive in France in the month of August, the month in which the entire country decides to stop working at the exact same time.

In doing so, all the above problems were magnified because everything was closed, no one was working, and the few people who were working were angry about the fact that they were working, further purpetrating the cycle of a grumpy country with not a care in the world for the people they serve.

The day I arrived in August, I went to the hotel restaurant for lunch. The restaurant said that they had decided to end lunch early because no one showed up.

It was 12:15 PM...Lunch ended at 1:00 PM.

I then walked to the nearest restaurant, only to see a sign that said they were closed for the entire month of August. So I walked 10 minutes to the next closest place.

McDonald's.

It turned out that my first afternoon in France would only be a foreshadowing of the four months that followed.

A Tourist Hotspot

More people visit France than any other country.

It's been that way for years. Between the Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa, and of course, Disneyland, there's plenty of things to do.

In fact, I would still agree that it's a great place to visit. When you visit, hardly any of the issues mentioned above will affect you.

But when you live there, you have to deal with these things on a weekly basis.

In some cities, like Paris, the argument could be made that the pros outweigh the cons. I'd probably disagree, but I understand the appeal because I also do love Paris.

In a city like Metz, there is no doubt that the cons outweigh the pros.

For that reason, I won't be back anytime soon. It's a shame, but the further I am from France, the happier I seem to be.