Things I Hate About Living In France

It’s a great country and I like being here but no matter how much I love it, there will always be some things that I can’t get used to.

It feels kinda weird to write this because I’ve been here for around 3 years now and there’s so much that I love but there are also things that I don’t like. And that’s inevitable. I think that it’d be pretty hard to find someone that loves every aspect of the country that they live in.

Everything closes really early

I grew up in Canada and I was so used to having Walmart open until 11 pm, having some stores and fast food open nearly 24/7. But in France, just about every store is closed by 8 pm, and restaurants closed at 11 pm.

I usually eat my dinner pretty late and since my apartment fridge is pretty small and my cravings change on a whim, I usually go grocery shopping every couple of days. But because I eat late, I’m usually running to the store last minute because the one near me closes at 8:30 pm.

The constant strikes

This one is kind of a weird one because one of the beautiful things about the French people is that they bring the change they want by making their displeasure known with strikes. But these strikes are so inconvenient and irritating (as they’re supposed to be).

One year I had an exam in a city about an hour away. I bought my ticket a couple of days in advance and when I showed up at the train station that morning, the train was cancelled. Luckily, I’m an anxious traveller and picked a train that left an hour before I actually needed to leave so I had time to get a new train ticket. I bought my ticket for a train departing soon and then it ended up being cancelled shortly after. I had to book a third train and thankfully it wasn’t cancelled but I’m sure that you can imagine the stress that I felt.

The never-ending exhaustion

I want to start by saying that I don’t want this to sound like I’m upset with people for speaking French in France. I just want to talk about the exhaustion that comes from having to do everything in my second language.

I learned French as a second language at school and as comfortable as I am with the language and having classes in French, I really underestimated how tiring it would be.

I feel like this one is a little hard to explain. But every time I leave the house I feel like I’m always doing so much work to understand and communicate and it’s really tiring.

I used to live in a flatshare with a few other French students so I didn’t even really get a break when I was at home. I’d go downstairs to eat lunch and I’d be speaking French; I’d be doing some work at the table and they’re around me speaking French.

I know that this comes with moving to a French country. It’s weird to complain about having to do everything in French while in a France-speaking country, I just really wasn’t ready for the exhaustion that came with it.

The smoking culture

I hadn’t even been in France for 6 months when I did my med school exams. It was 7 exams over 2 days and once you enter the building in the morning, you aren’t allowed to leave until the exams are done for the day. So we’re all in the same building for about 5/6 hours.

That first evening when everyone was leaving the building, the second these doctors-to-be crossed the threshold, they were pulling out a lighter and a cigarette. It was just crazy to me that all these people are studying to become doctors but so many people are basically addicted to smoking.

The thing that I don’t like about it, is that when I go out, I am constantly breathing in everyone’s secondhand smoke. And if you’re walking in a crowd, there’s no way to dodge it. I just wish it was easier to avoid all the smoke.

Final thoughts

Even though there are a few things that I don’t like about living in France, I still love living here and I love my experience living abroad. There are always downsides to everything, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying different experiences. I will always recommend that everyone should at least consider some type of study or travel abroad if they can.

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