On stormfront you’ll read in massive subs such as r/soccer that Paris has a pocket of safety surrounded by pure crime. They’ll say shit like, “I went to Vienna and Budapest and not once did I feel unsafe”
You ‘felt’ unsafe? Are you just shitting your pants everytime you encounter an Arab or someone with slightly more melanin content? Like, almost every city I’ve ever been to where people say it’s unsafe is just a place with more minorities and I’ve never once felt unsafe.
Edit: check out this thread
https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/y2uwg0/psg_ultras_hunted_down_and_attacked_with_a_knife/is51xl8/
Granted, this was several years ago when I was working in France and traveling around on my vacation, but Vienna then felt way more like a small pocket of safety surrounded by pure crime than Paris did. You step off the Ringstrasse and straight into an entirely different economic strata. I usually traveled with my friend, and being two short women wandering around Paris felt fine, but we were looking over our shoulders walking to our hostel in Vienna. :shrug-outta-hecks:
That's cause Vienna is a real city, Paris is for rich people and tourists
That makes sense. It's also funny because I live in an area that people are convinced is a war zone (and yeah, the crime rate is relatively high, but we're not dodging bullets daily), but it's home and normal to me, so I don't worry. I suppose there's something about being in an unfamiliar place that makes things feel more dangerous.
When I was in Vienna a few years back, I wandered every direction and suburb all day for a week without any worry or bad feelings. Maybe I was just lucky, but I'm also not sure what's the issue with just being in a 'different economic strata'. Quite a few European cities have visibly run-down areas, but I was never anywhere that felt unsafe.
Well, we had chatted with some locals at dinner who were very "oh no be careful" when we told them where we were staying, so we were definitely primed to view our surroundings with suspicion.