Closing (shops etc.)
Shouting / shrugging / frowning
Making rules and regulations
These 3 are linked – a part of French culture that goes back to their revolution basically legislates out a lot of ‘efficiency’ and competition to ensure more people, even poorer people work to live and not live to work. It’s almost the complete opposite of US culture. It can be a bit jarring to us, but we’ve gotten a bit too used to assuming whoever is paying is always right and we should be able to spend money at 2am because we’re too busy working at normal times.
Riding mopeds with engine size to noise ratio of 1:64 – yep, antisocial / daft vehicle stuff is invariably linked to how young the owner is IME. My town has a hardcore of 16 year olds on 50cc peds being dicks and fitting stupid exhausts to them – in France you can ride a ‘ped at 14 that’s another 2 whole years of stupid they can glue to a knackered old Puch.
Not making eye contact in public areas. I think the Brits lead the world when it comes to ignoring each other, they’re decades behind us in the dehumanising other people stakes.
Eating things you wouldn’t even look at, they think the same about us, even if you discount the really odd – like fried pigs blood, they look at a Iceland Frozen Deepan Pizza with a greater revulsion than we do snails etc.
Buying cigarettes in bulk – I thought the era of the Frenchie sucking on 40 Gitanes a day was over? I know they’ve made it so you can only buy them in tobacconists now – hence the bulk buying by the junkies?
Not cleaning cars / repairing dents, Cars are less of a status symbol in France (they have a lot less of them in general) as a rule French people couldn’t give a monkey’s about their car – but still if you’re a bit of a geek like me you might notice that whilst that entry level Clio down the road in that odd Mushroom brown you only see on French cars might be wearing a few ‘character’ marks, it’ll have decent tyres and be in decent nick mechanically – unlike for example my neighbours sparklingly clean white A5 on mismatched and worn Linglong ditchfinders.
Wearing swimming trunks that provide hi-res detail of genitals. Yeah, it’s a bit odd that one – I know it’s a rule is a lot of their pools, I’m told they don’t like pulling handfuls of pubes out of the filters so insist in tight fitting trunks, but still… keeps lard arses like me out of the pool I guess. You should see the state of the Russians in Bulgaria, Jesus Wept, no one wants to see a 25 stone, tanned to the point of worn leather Russian “business man” in a thong.
Eating ham, cheese and bread but of course!
