About Jay Swanson
I arrived in Paris on a visa no one had ever heard of. The immigration officer at Charles de Gaulle airport looked at me sideways. She proceeded to write down every detail on the visa stickered inside my passport and muttered, “Good thing you’re American,” before stamping me through.
I spent the first year in Paris uncertain I was even allowed to stay, let alone work. But I kept vlogging. It was something I’d started almost a year before, and the entire process of watching my projects crumble in my hands had been caught on camera. Moving back to Paris was something I had always wanted to do, I just didn’t want to do it under duress. Within the next year I would be a tour guide, an English teacher, a translator, and voice actor, and would continue vlogging and writing as I finally succumbed to my financial wounds and declared bankruptcy back in the States.
But as I hung on for dear life, pouring what little energy I had left into my vlog and the tiny community of viewers that stuck with me, things started to change. Patreon became my main source of income. I was able to discard the side hustles. And dozens, then hundreds, and then thousands of people began turning to me for advice on maximizing their time in Paris.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the idea of being a glorified tour guide at first. In fact I actively resisted it. But the more I saw the impact of a little good advice here, some solid recommendations there, and the overwhelmingly positive responses from the people who trusted me with both, my stance started to change.
I made the first few ‘touristy’ videos about Paris because I wanted to better equip people to love my chosen city. I heard people complain about how confusing the metro was, or how tricky it was to order in a restaurant, and went about making videos to help explain how it worked to anyone interested enough to look into it in advance.
I’d say the rest is history, but I fought the results for a long time. I was scared to succeed in a field I’d never intended to enter - YouTube was always meant to be a record of the projects I was working on, of my life, and the tourist advice was supposed to be a helpful aside. But as the value of both dawned on me, the way in which I could help people relish what might be their only trip to my chosen hometown, my attitude shifted. It took an embarrassingly long time, but I’m all in now. Let me show you the Paris I love and, if we have some shared sense of taste and style of travel, I just might be able to make it the the least stressful and easiest trip to Paris you’ve ever had.
~Jay
Grab My Guide to Paris
With hundreds of restaurant, bar, and café recommendations, plus a metric ton of tips and local tricks for everything from avoiding scams to where to stay, you’ll never have to worry that you’re missing out on a good time when you’re in Paris.
Years in the making, all on-the-ground. Let me show you Paris as I love it, and maybe I can help you love it all the more.