The smell of France

I’m not talking about the cheeses, although some of those are intense. I’m not talking about the lovely smell of a bakery, or the delicious smell of roti chickens in the market. I’m talking about the unpleasant smell that you can’t escape no matter where you are, the smell of urine. It is a rare and wonderful thing to find a public toilet in France which doesn’t smell of piss. Which is why you normally have to pay for the pleasure of an unscented toilet. The first thing that reminded me I was in France when I landed in Lyon airport after the Christmas holidays was the smell of the toilet. But it’s not just toilets. Possibly because of the extreme lack of public toilets in France, people pee in the streets. Often. So often that walking around a French town for 30 minutes you are nearly guaranteed the sight of someone urinating in the street. And not necessarily against a wall. I’ve seen it done off the bridge into the river, and as I had the... pleasure... of seeing the other day: a man facing and peeing into the middle of a busy pavement. It could be related to the lack of toilets, or it could be because they leave dog poo on the pavements and think ‘why can’t I leave my waste in the road too?’ disgusting, I know. And the smell... if you want an idea of what the roads smelt like before plumbing, certain streets in France might give you an idea.