10 Weird Things About France

Bonjour tout le monde! I should definitely be working but then I thought, "stuff that, I want to write my blog instead". Only problem now is that after writing this, I think I've run out of procrastination tools. Urgh. Sundays in France are boooooooring (no public transport or shops open on Sundays = serious work avoidance tactics required). You know it's bad when you can't even go to the supermarket to procrastinate because it's not open on Sundays.


But I digress. I've been in this wonderful country for nearly 5 months so I feel that I am now sufficiently qualified to talk about why France can be a pretty strange place to live sometimes. Don't get me wrong, I love it here, but at the same time a lot of things seem to happen to me on a regular basis which make me very confused... 

1) The French do weird things to custard. This is not necessarily the weirdest thing on my list, it's just the first one which popped into my head. In the past two weeks I have eaten normal custard and custard in jelly form - managable. The straw that broke the camel's back had to be the custard cake. Cooked custard in a flan? Confusing. Yet they don't sell custard cream biscuits...

2) Even big, respectable supermarket chains seem to be doing dodgy deals. I went into my local supermarché in December looking for shampoo to find that all of the Garnier shampoo labels were in Polish. The conditioner, however, was in French, as were all the other shampoo brands.

3) The French aren't so big on dental hygiene (it seems). I haven't (thankfully) noticed this first hand, but when I went to said supermarket looking for mouthwash and dental floss (I had the dentist when I come home and I was feeling guilty), there was a choice of two mouthwashes and no dental floss. For an entire dental aisle. There was toothpaste, toothbrushes and denture glue stuff a plenty, but that was it. Apart from some plasters and verruca cream. For when you get verrucas in your mouth, y'know.

4) Fresh milk is as rare as gold dust. Enough said. I got laughed at recently by a group of people who asked me if I had to get my milk straight out of the cow to be able to drink it. While I'm not that much of a purist, it is true that I am prepared to walk 15 mins each way a couple of times a week to the only supermarket in town which sells fresh milk. I tried with the UHT, I really did, but I just couldn't handle it day in, day out.

5) There is a brand of sugar called "Daddy". LOL! It's even in a pink packet.

6) You can get a doctor's note to get you three days sick leave if you have a cold. A COLD. Unless you're me and you still don't have any health insurance, that is...


7) The keyboards are all mixed up (and very difficult to type with as a result). For example, you have to press shift to get any of the numbers on the top line. Eh?! And you have to press shift to get a full stop, but not for an exclamation mark, colon, semi-colon or comma. Eh?! And you have to press Alt Gr to get the @ symbol. Not cool, and definitely not useful.


8) School here is from 8am to 5pm (6pm in some schools) but the French government thinks the kids aren't working hard enough so wants to cut their school holidays so that they're in line with other European countries...? Go figure.


9) The French seem to be obsessed by the 80's phenomenon which is Happy Days. Not only is the themetune used as a radio jingle for a particular supermarket ad, there is a Happy Days themed restaurant nearby. Erm, what?!


10) French bureaucracy and my quest for health insurance. See earlier blogs.


So that's all for now, folks. I'm off on a wild weekend to Lyon with the lovely Michèle next weekend, so I will have some news and photos for you then. Very excited for this!


Bises,


Sophia xx