I am definitely French. Today I went to the bank to deposit 134€ to make a payment. I had 135€. The bank teller told me, “We don’t have any change.” And the funny thing was—this didn’t surprise me. Like, at all. Related Posts Finally French 5 Absolute, Sure-Fire Ways to Get Rich in France WTF French Train Mix Crazy Americans 15 Things I’d Miss About…
If you want to see a what a human head looks like when it explodes, there’s no reason to waste your money on tickets to the latest Mel Gibson movie. Just take me to Ikea. At first, it seems the shopping day is going to be a lot of fun as you prepare for the big trip, flipping through that cheery Ikea catalog featuring handsome…
The water is Paris is rife with calcium. Which perhaps means there’s a low rate of osteoporosis in women around here. But it also means for the rest of us, we have to deal with this: Oh, the humiliation…But why, I ask? Why me? Because je suis Parisian (and it’s not just me), so I dump sel in my dishwasher and dutifully pop in one…
Rarely do things get marked down in Paris, except twice a year when stores have les soldes during dates specified by the govenment. But they do sometimes reduce the price of something by offering a promotion. The difference is that during a sale, they mark something down. A promotion is different: it’s when they reduce the price of something. Got it? Commonly, I find, that…
Although most of the comments and messages I get are friendly and kind, a few do slip through that are less-than-complimentary. A majority of them illuminate the errors of my ways by pointing out the faults in my cross-cultural observations. So I was delighted when I found Socio-Site Scan v1.01, some brand-new software which allows me to simply input all my blog entries, and tells…
“I am screwed”, I’m thinking. Ok, I’ve been living here for a few years now, and I should know better, but I fell for the oldest trick in the book. A week or so ago, I invited a few friends and acquaintances over for dinner. One of them, who is French, has always been a bit scornful of me, from my lack of complete fluency…
One of the hardest things about living in any foreign country is, of course, the language. Seriously, learning any language is really hard I’m sure, but anyone who can master French, who wasn’t pushed from the womb and spent their lifetime in an all-French speaking environment, I take my chapeau off to you. For the rest of us, it’s a challenge. Even the most mundane…
So far, this week… …I ran over a not-quite-yet-dead pigeon by accident with my shopping cart. …My mobile phone died. …My ATM card expired. The bank told me to wait for the replacement card. Which was sent in May. …My credit card was cancelled, which I learned while at the cashier with a overloaded cart at BHV. There were thirty people behind me. And they…
There are two periods during the year when stores are allowed to have Les Soldes, or The Sales. They occur once in the winter, beginning shortly after New Years Day, while the summer soldes start in late June. Although Americans think it’s odd, the government’s official explanation is that les soldes give stores a chance to blow-out all last season’s merchandise quickly by creating a…
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