cultural revelations #5: waste

Q: what's the one thing seen by everyone who visits paris, but photographed by almost no-one?
A: rubbish!

with 22 million visitors per year, the earth's number one tourist destination certainly generates its fair share of waste. sometimes the 50 metres between bins is simply too much for people buckling under the weight of a chocolate wrapper, so a lot of rubbish ends up on the ground (or perhaps it's a case of people imitating the locals who don't seem to give a shit). so, how is it that paris is not being smothered by its own refuse?

it's because of the secret army! that's right: there's a secret army of rubbish collectors who groom the main tourist districts at dawn before the hordes arrive, and make everything just perfect for the photo of your authentic parisian experience. it turns out you can have your cake, eat it too, and then just discard the box it came in on the grass somewhere, assured that by doing so you're keeping people meaningfully employed.

but surely they can't pick up everything? what about the cigarette butts? we all know that there's an international smoking convention that bans smokers from properly discarding their rubbish: as if choking on noxious fumes wasn't enough, these poor people are obliged to flick their cigarette butts onto the street and pretend that they really don't care. that's where the paris street wash comes in, and this is seriously parisian stuff: twice a day at intervals, spouts along almost all parisian streets vomit out water from the seine to wash away all those nasty cigarette butts, dog shit, and whatever else is lying in the gutter, so that people don't have to be harassed by the presence of the incriminating evidence of their negligence, and can continue on with their wonderfully chic, cigarette butt-flicking lives in comfort.