DAVID ISAACSON IN PARIS | Mon Dieu! Friendly Parisians as games approach

I’ve been in Paris for four days now and I haven’t caught sight of the Eiffel Tower yet, but I’ve seen another side of this city almost as impressive — friendly Parisians.

The citizenry appear to have adopted the Olympics and are welcoming visitors into their city.

OK, it’s not all tea parties and cake for everyone. One local, a former South African, told me about a colleague of hers who was told to vacate her apartment recently on the pretext that the landlord’s relative needed it in a rush.

The suspicion was that they wanted to put it up on Airbnb to make a few extra bucks during the Olympics and maybe even the Paralympics.

The karma return is that the uptake on Airbnb has not been as high as expected.

The locals who have chosen to stick around for the games — many have apparently fled, fearing disruptions to their usual transport routes — are enjoying the high levels of visible policing, a normally rare sight.

“Every five minutes I see policemen,” said Annan, one of the smiling faces of the City of Light I’ve encountered.

Seeing I was struggling to negotiate the public transport system, which can get overwhelming at times, Annan accompanied me on a couple of lines to get me to the final train I needed to get home.

This type of hospitality was a far cry from when I came here as a teenage tourist on a family holiday. The moment we asked for help we were practically spat at. 

And there was one memorable waiter who gave us an impromptu elocution lesson on English pronunciation.

He hadn’t battled to understand us the whole meal until my mother asked for some milk to put into her after-dinner coffee.

This was suddenly too much for him; she might as well have been speaking gibberish.

Eventually my mom mimicked pouring milk into the black coffee in front of her, repeating her verbal request for milk.

“Aha,” the waiter said, as if a giant light bulb had gone off in his head. “Meelk,” he roared at her, clearly blaming her for his confusion. 

And he wasn’t done either. He then marched off to the kitchen, shouting loudly to no one in particular and punctuating each word with angry hand movements: “Milk? Milk? Meelk! Meelk!”

We couldn’t escape Paris fast enough.

A little more than four decades had passed when I landed here at the weekend, admittedly with a level of apprehension.

But attitudes have changed.

I’m reliant on a transport app that shows me what trains and buses I need to catch to get from one point to the next, but even so, navigating between lines and modes of transport can be confusing.

Some passers-by stop to help off their own bat, and when I approach people for assistance, they make the effort smilingly.

My Airbnb apartment is in a rustic hotel that seems so far out of Paris it might possibly be in a different time zone, but when paying in rand, beggars can’t be choosers.

When I went to the restaurant for supper on my first night the patrons were friendly, including a thickset husky-like dog which licked my hand endlessly.

Then a drunk guy tried talking to me, and another, realising I couldn’t speak French, explained the menu to me so I could order.

After I told them I was from Afrique du Sud, Drunk Guy started singing Scatterlings of Africa, admittedly a little off key.

I like this new version of the French capital.

Vive la Paris.