The List

So during my visit here, I have, obviously, noticed a few differences between the U.S. and France (or Europe in general). My friends and I sit around at lunch time and over the weekends discussing all the “weird” things the French people do or have or say or eat or whatever. And I have confirmed most of these observations with my friends so that I am sure these things are not particular to the family I live with. So I have tried to compile a list for you of all the things that I’ve noticed. It has been difficult to get all this from my eyes to my head to thoughts to words to paper to internet. I hope you find this enlightening.

1.First, and probably foremost, everything here is smaller, except maybe the household fruit platter and the refrigerator’s stock of yogurt (though the refrigerator is smaller). The cars, the buildings, the meals, everything. The glasses that we use for meals are about the size of the juice glasses that everyone in the states uses. I don’t know how French people don’t die of dehydration. The other day, my family’s fridge broke, so they had to get a new one. Their new one is bigger than the old one. Their daughter pointed it out and said, “Look, we have an American fridge.” I told her it was still smaller than fridges in America. She found it astounding that a normal fridge in the U.S. could possibly be bigger than their new monstrous fridge.

2.Cars. Hardly anybody drives an SUV. And if they do, it’s a relatively small one. And 90% of the cars in France are hatchbacks. Many people drive diesel fuel cars. Most families also have scooters (mopeds, but they don’t call them that). Scooters come in quite a variety. The family I live with has one car, which is driven to work by Mme. Gendre. M. Gendre goes to work on a scooter that’s not much less than motorcycle. (I still find it amusing to see men in business suits or women in heels riding mopeds or bikes to work.) Their daughter has a mobylette, which is not much more than a bicycle with a motor. Lots of people walk and take bikes to places. Traffic comes in all forms.


3.Milk. I could probably dedicate an entire post to the milk situation here. Where to begin. Okay, I’ll create a beginning. The sterilization of milk here is different (something about really high temperatures, but I don’t know anything about the sterilization of milk in the U.S., so I can’t give a better explanation). It is sterilized in way that allows it to stay good for a much longer time. And as far as I have seen, they don’t have different fat percentages (no skim, 2%, whole, etc.). It’s all the same. And it all tastes like half-and-half. Anyways, milk comes in liters (not gallons, but I knew it’d be like that since they don’t even have gallons in the metric system), either bottles or boxes. At the store, you buy a six-pack (non-refrigerated) of these one liter containers of milk. My family puts one or two in the fridge to have over the next few days and stores the rest of the in a basket sitting next to the fridge. My friends have told me that their families don’t store any of it in the fridge (which isn’t all that cold to begin with). Whether or not they are in the process of drinking it, it goes in the cabinet (supposedly it can stay good for up to 3 months or something like that). So milk is always lukewarm. Our professor told us that French people don’t like to drink their milk très cold because it hurts their stomachs (please go ahead and imagine me rolling my eyes, because that’s what I did when she told us this in class). Anyways, on to the use of said lukewarm milk. French people, as far as I have observed, don’t drink milk. They put it on their cereal and in their tea and coffee. They don’t just have a glass of milk. I don’t know how many of you know me and my affinity for milk, but I can go through a gallon of milk in 3 or 4 days by myself, and it only takes me that long because I ration myself. If I drank milk the way I would like to, I would go through an entire bottle or box in one day. I think I may come home with osteoporosis. So after a few weeks of being cruelly deprived of milk, my professor bought me a six pack of my very own that I can keep in the teacher’s lounge at school and drink during the day with my snacks. Chouette! I was very grateful, though my stomach is still trying to readjust to the dairy that it got used to not having regularly. Yeah, that should’ve been its own post.

4.I would like everyone to imagine the typical hobo/beggar in Atlanta or some other American city. Mostly kinda crazy. Doesn’t usually bug you too much. You feel bad for some of them. Maybe you give them something to eat or some change. Those of you who went to Paris with me, please recall those beggars. Most of them were old. Many were missing limbs or eyeballs or something. They did it right, man. They knew how to make you feel sorry for them. How could you not give a little change to an 80-year-old woman with nubs for legs? Let me describe for you the beggars in Toulouse. They range from about 20 to 50 (a perfectly reasonable working age range in my opinion). They are almost always in one piece (also perfectly reasonable working condition). They don’t seem particularly mentally unstable or emaciated or dirty or anything. So I’m not sure what the problem is. It’s hard to feel sorry for someone who appears perfectly capable of working and who seems to have no problem getting fed. Many of them have dogs too. Maybe it’s part of their tactic to get you to feel sorry for them, but it doesn’t work very well. And a lot of them are friends with each other. There are a few women who hang around the same area everyday trying to look pitiful. One day I saw all three of them walking down the street together, all with identical bags from the same store down the street. Seems to me that they are doing fine on their own and don’t need any of my spare change.

5.French people consume bread like it’s air (more evidence in favor of my theory that carbs are not what makes you fat). And not any kind of bread. Baguettes. They are everywhere. And they are all the same. You get it in restaurants, at home, for breakfast, for lunch and dinner, for snacks. Women walk around with them sticking out of their purses. One of the guys in my group got drunk one night, stumbled home, and woke up the next morning to find a huge chunk of baguette stuck to his shoe like toilet paper. And it is very difficult to find any other kind of bread. Wheat bread is nearly nonexistent. I sometimes wonder if the French people have any idea what they are missing out on by limiting the range of bread that they eat. I am hard-pressed to think that they would continue this silly baguette nonsense if they had one roll from O’Charley’s. And baguettes are hard. They’re difficult to eat. The first week here, I had a toothache that was severely bothered by the ridiculously hard bread. The only thing that I really do like baguettes for is breakfast. Saw off a chunk, saw it in half, toast it, put butter and a little bit of jelly on it (and I don’t even normally like jelly!), and you’ve got quite an enjoyable little breakfast meal (that and a bowl of cereal in order to get at least a little bit of milk in my diet). They even have a baguette setting on their toaster. It makes the toaster a little wider so that the baguette doesn’t get stuck (I, of course, was not told this until I did get my baguette stuck in the toaster). I think that the day I return I will go to the store and buy an entire package of King’s Hawaiian rolls.

6.Utensils are a little different. Spoons are ridiculously small. It takes about twice as long to eat a bowl of cereal with those tiny little spoons. And knives aren’t much in the way of knives. They are more like slabs of metal without a distinct blade, making cutting meat and fruit quite difficult. I think I make a fool out of myself anytime we have fruit. Because, of course, they don’t just pick up a piece of fruit and eat it with their hands. They always cut it into pieces to be eaten. I don’t get it. The peaches we have at dinner would be a million times easier to eat if I could just bite into it.

7.Mexican food does not exist in France. If I were to have had one meal in the U.S. before I left, I would have had Mexican food for the mere reason that I can’t here. One day at a boulangerie, I saw a sign for a quesadilla with guacamole. There’s not much in this world that is better than a quesadilla with guacamole. Cheese is only the most amazing food in the world and guacamole is not too far behind it in line. So, naturally, I ordered this quesadilla. Imagine my disappointment when it was, by no means, a quesadilla. First of all, there was no cheese in it. Last time I checked “queso” means cheese in Spanish, and a quesadilla, by the laws of physics, must have cheese. But it didn’t. It had an egg (as if that made up for it). The guacamole was a small lump of green mush absolutely unidentifiable as guacamole. It didn’t taste anything like it. And there was barely any of it. And then this quesadilla was not flat. It was wrapped up into a tube. And it had turkey or chicken (deli meat style) in it. So basically I had a wrap for lunch. It, in no way, resembled a quesadilla. Highly disappointing.

8.Toilets are an interesting concept here, especially public ones. You often have to pay for them unless they are in a restaurant or museum in which you have already paid to be there. They are also often co-ed, but that doesn’t bother me a whole lot, it just startles me a little to see a man in what I have thought to be the women’s restroom. And many public toilets do not have toilet seats or toilet paper. I inquired aloud as to why there are no toilet seats. One of my friends said it was probably to discourage people from pooping in public toilets. Soap and/or paper towels are also a precious commodity. I feel that if I pay to use the bathroom I have the right to sit my butt down on a toilet seat, poop if I feel so inclined, pipe myself with toilet paper, and clean and dry my hands with soap and paper towels or an electric hand dryer (that actually works). I feel that I have paid for that right. The French feel differently. They feel you have paid for the right to hover over a bowl, drip dry, rinse your hands with cold water and shake them dry. My favorite public bathrooms are the shower stall things. There is a hole in the ground about 8 inches or so in diameter, places for you to put your feet so they won’t slip, and handles on the wall. You are supposed to place your feet in the special spots, hang on to the handles, lean back and hover over the hole and somehow aim your pee to land in this hole. It’s ridiculous. I won’t do it. My friends and I plan our day so that we end up places with bathrooms that we can use for free. Often times we also go even if we don’t have to for fear of having to find a public restroom and hour later. (“Okay, we’ll eat lunch first and we can use that bathroom. Then we’ll go to the museum where there will probably be a bathroom for us. Then we can go back by the hotel before dinner, and we can go to the bathroom there before we leave.”) And, in all toilets, there is not much water. So whatever falls out of you has a lot of time to fall and gather speed. This makes for slightly embarrassing situations occasionally. And there is no uniform flush handle. It is different everywhere you go. Sometimes it’s a big button on the wall; sometimes a chain to pull; sometimes this weird double button thing in the top of the toilet (which apparently allows you to have two different levels of water flow); sometimes a button that you have to pull up on. Quite varied. In general, it is a miracle to have a lock on the door, a toilet seat, toilet paper, warm water, soap, AND paper towels all in one bathroom. As you can imagine, using the bathroom is always an adventure, though not one I particularly enjoy going through on a regular basis.

9.During mass, they say the short creed instead of the long one, at least at the church in Toulouse that I’ve gone to. Maybe it’s not like that everywhere.

10.Whether I’m in Toulouse or some other city, at the end of the day, my feet are filthy. I wear flip-flops everyday, but I don’t ever walk around barefoot. Still my feet are perpetually dirty. When I get back, it’ll take a week to scrub off all the grime and get my feet back into the immaculate condition they were in before coming to Europe.

11.Upon mentioning that I am from the U.S., many people immediately ask about California. I have to inform them that I am from Georgia, which is quite far away from California. Sometimes they ask about Canada. Again I tell them that Georgia is very far away from Canada. Once, at that party I went to, I told a guy I was from the state, and he immediately started talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger and some movie I had never seen before. Of course, it took me a long time to figure out who he was talking about because he was saying Schwarzenegger very strangely. My friend Mandy lives with a family who seems to think Americans are a big joke. Anytime she mentions anything about the U.S., their general response is, “Maybe that’s why all Americans are fat.” And it’s often a silly notion. Either way, it seems that we are making a great impression of the rest of the world.

12.There are not a lot of outlets in a single room. Maybe only one or two. At home it’s not a problem because I only have one adaptor. But during class, when everybody wants to plug in their computer, it becomes a little bit of a problem. And sometimes there is something in the outlet that covers the holes and won’t allow you to plug anything in. I have no idea what’s up with that. But it proved to be a pain in the butt the other day when I need to plug in my computer.

13.There are a lot of dogs in France. They seem to be generally better natured than their American counterparts. And most places are pretty tolerant of dogs. I’ve seen them in restaurants, stores, on the trains, etc. The problem with so many dogs is that there is dog crap everywhere. It’s all over the sidewalks, and I spend most of my voyages dodging dog crap. If they even have a “Do your doodie” law, it’s certainly badly enforced.

14.Everyone asks or mentions the topless beaches upon hearing that I am in or would be traveling to Europe. Most of the time people said, “Oh, nudity is different in Europe. There’s nothing sexual about the topless beaches. Everyone is much more tolerant of nudity.” Let’s start with “topless beaches”. There are no “topless beaches”. There are beaches. And there are Europeans. Which means that there are beaches with topless Europeans everywhere. Beaches are not designated one or the other. And the earlier comment about nudity less sexual. That statement is completely limited to the beach (where it is truly not a sexual thing). But Europe is more open about nudity, and it is very sexual. Ladies, I would like you all to think about all those times you stand in line at the store, looking at the magazines covered in pictures of beautiful women and celebrities. Please recall how this usually makes you feel pretty bad about yourself. Well now remove their clothes. Congratulations. You’re in Europe. Not a day goes by that I don’t see pictures of nude people. Excuse me, let me clarify, nude women. The only nude men I’ve seen were the Greco-Roman statues in the museum we went to. All the nude pictures are of women (coincidentally, all with big boobs). If I ever walk up to a magazine stand or go into a magazine and book store in a train station or something, I sometimes wonder if I accidentally stumbled into a porn shop. It’s everywhere. And it’s very sexual. If anyone tells you otherwise, they are lying out of their butt hole.

15.So America makes better movies than everybody else (for the most part at least). And people in other countries love to watch our movies, but in their own language of course. But instead of using subtitles, they dub over the voices with different voices in the country’s respective language. Well, France is no exception. They do it with all the movies and TV shows (like Friends). I don’t know about you guys, but that would drive me nuts. I would rather have subtitles that I have to read than have to listen to dubbed voices. The voices never match up quite right to the characters and, obviously, the words don’t match the lips. It makes me wonder if the French people ever get tired of this discombobulation of entertainment. I would hate it. I guess I should be thankful to the U.S. for something.

16.PDA runs rampant here in France. Couples feel the need to hang around the bus stops, buses, metros, and many other public arenas professing their love very physically. I’m a little tired of watching couples making out everywhere. And it’s not just teenagers. It’s everybody of all ages. I guess I have to hand it to the French for living up to their romantic and passionate stereotype.

17.Before leaving for France, I was told that I should use my credit card as much as possible because it would get the best exchange rate. I was told that, in general, I wouldn’t need much cash and that most places accept credit cards. So that was m general plan. Unfortunately, nobody bothered to let us know that most of the places you go on a daily basis do not accept credit cards. The vast majority of boulangeries, patisseries, sandwicheries, restaurants, etc. only take cash. Meaning that I often had to make trips to the ATM for cash. And they also don’t like to accept big bills. And by big bills, I mean anything bigger than a ten. I think if it was up to France, all money amounts would be in the form of a coin. They would love to be able to pay for everything in one and two euro pieces. Americans generally don’t like to carry change. They would rather bills. France (and most of Europe I believe) would rather coins and no bills. Additionally, all French people have a “carte bleue”, which is a kind of credit card thing that comes with a PIN. I think it makes everything easier for them, but a pain in the butt for me. There are a lot of places that accept this “carte bleue” but not regular credit cards. A lot of money borrowing and “covering” went on when we found ourselves in sticky situations of needing cash and not having it. Generally, it was not as easy as the study abroad information people made it sound.

18.Adding –erie to the end of any word makes it a shop/restaurant for that thing. Examples: boulangerie, pâtisserie, sandwicherie, chocolaterie, saladerie, crêperie, papeterie, viennoiserie, librairie, brasserie. I’m sure there are many more that I just can’t think of right now. And you can always make up new ones. I’m sure a shop for suitcases could be called a “valiserie” if the owner so chose so. And here are the translations for you (in case you couldn’t figure them out), respectively. A store for: bread, pastries, sandwiches, chocolate, salads, crêpes, paper supplies, drinks (cocktails), books, bar/restaurant (I’m not sure of a good translation for this one; it was usually a bar and restaurant combination thing).

19.The atmosphere in restaurants is generally more relaxed and laid back. In most cities, there are restaurants and cafés everywhere. You walk up, tell them how many people you have in your group, and they either tell you to sit anywhere you feel like (if the place isn’t too crowded) or set up a table for you. There is no hostess with a seating chart or anything silly like that. There is no line outside the door while people wait for a table to be empty. If a restaurant appears to be full, people just move along to the next one. After eating, there’s no rush for the check. They only bring it once you have asked for it. You can sit around and socialize for as long as you feel. And they don’t split the check for you. Most of the time people just pay their part of the check or their fraction of the check (1/4 if there are 4 people, for example). And tipping is not customary in France (or in Spain), and unfortunately customer service is not particularly customary in return. But overall it’s more relaxed. There’s no rush to get out for the next people who are standing in line or anything. It’s kinda nice.