Forget the snooty city, the natives have become friendly. Lee Aitken reveals all the pleasures of the new attitude.

When I first moved to Paris a few years ago, Christopher Dickey, a novelist and journalist who has lived here for more than a decade, cautioned me to remember the difference between joie de vivre and savoir vivre. Both are phrases commonly used to describe the particular flair for living that attracts people to France. But only the latter, he explained, really applies to Parisians, who strive for the correct wine and food and fashion and decor with such determination that joie rarely enters the picture.

I adore Chris, and I know him to be a first-rate reporter. His advice was sourced at a hundred stuffy Gallic dinner parties. But I don't travel in those circles, and my experience of the city has been different. I find it relaxed and playful in ways I never would have imagined, given the dour French stereotypes. The first hint that I would have to revise my expectations came early on, when I was buying curtain rods in Neuilly, the leafy, family-friendly neighborhood at the top of the Bois de Boulogne that most Parisians consider très snob. My daughter, Sophie, then nine, had come into the small hardware store with her Razor scooter—a fad that was just taking off in Paris. Neither of us spoke much French. But I knew enough to understand the grandmotherly woman, perfectly turned out in a suit and an Hermés scarf, who approached Sophie and said, "I've never tried one of those," pointing to the scooter. "Do you mind?" Then off she sailed, down the narrow aisles of the store.

After that I was forced to shed any number of preconceptions about the French: the surly salesclerk, the unbending bureaucrat, the balky services. I'm not saying they don't exist in Paris, but I very rarely encounter them. Instead, I find myself amazed, again and again, by how efficient and up-to-date the city is and how much random goodwill comes my way, despite my badly conjugated French verbs and the geopolitical depredations of my president.

Paris cannot be captured in a few generalizations any more than New York or Miami or Chicago can. That said, here is mine: Behind the "old Europe" facade of majestic buildings and elegant traditions lies an extremely modern, multiethnic city that is wired, both literally and figuratively, into the new global culture. It may not be the absolute cutting edge of twenty-first-century Europe—I'd nominate Berlin or London for that. But it is not a Belle Epoque theme park, either, despite the Disney-esque lines outside famous landmarks. The view from the Pont des Arts may be unchanged, but Parisians are not. Yet this can be difficult for visitors to see through the heavy scrim of French caricatures and "we'll always have Paris" nostalgia.

How many people, for example, strolled through the Tuileries last summer entranced by the stately order of its formal gardens and failed to note the huge bronze casting of an uprooted tree in an overgrown corner near the Pont de Solférino? This is a signature image of Italian conceptual artist Giuseppe Penone, who simultaneously had a spectacular show at the Pompidou Center. But, frankly, I might have missed it too, if it hadn't been for my friend David Ross. A former director of both the Whitney Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, David comes to Paris—as he does to every city—with an eager eye for the new. Walking with him through the new gallery district in the thirteenth arrondissement—a charmless area around the rue Louise Weiss, where boxy modern buildings are going to seed—was like having a backstage pass to the international art circuit. In fact, at the Art:Concept gallery we were taken into a back room to see a few additional pieces once David and the staff, strangers two minutes earlier, got into one of those small-world conversations, finishing each other's sentences:
"So you were in Athens last week too—"
"At Jeremy Deller's performance on the roof—"
"With the brass band?"
"Yes!"