A Letter in Three Parts, Part Two: Things I Hate About France

  • Posted on July 12, 2007 at 6:47 pm

Living in France wasn’t always creme anglais, pain au chocolat and wine. Just like living anywhere, you have to take the good with the bad. (Right? RIGHT?? I think about this a lot lately.) As a follow-up to my post a few weeks ago about why I loved France (from a letter to my best friend when I lived in France seven years ago), I present to you the list of things I hated about France (in no particular order:)

  1. Everything except restaurants and bars closes at 7 or 8 p.m.
  2. French beer sucks.
  3. French men can be too effing forward and pushy.
  4. Dog shit.
  5. French TV sucks. Except for American shows dubbed in French.
  6. No concept of personal space–people shove, people run into you, people nudge you with their cars…(I really did get “nudged” by a car once, and I also got smacked on the ass by someone driving by, obviously slowly enough so as not to really injure either of us.)
  7. Air France. (EXTREME HATRED.) (they lost my baggage when I moved their and only recovered one of the bags. Somewhere in France, someone really made out on a suitcase full of shoes, undies and bras, makeup, cds and ALL MY JEWELRY. Jerks.)
  8. Men on the street notice you when you DON’T want to be noticed.
  9. No live music. And the not-live music is shit. (Lou Bega? Who is he?? Why do French people love him?)
  10. Women are too skinny.
  11. The French have no sense of humor. No joke.
  12. They smell bad in warm weather. The rumors are true.
  13. You can’t go into a pharmacy and just pick out your drug of choice; you have ask for it. Even aspirin. Which is hard in French.
  14. Speaking English way too much. Hearing English on the street.
  15. My upstairs neighbors blare Lauren Hill’s “Zion”. I’m sure they have no idea what the words mean.
  16. Ugly white platform tennis shoes. (We’re talking 4, 5, 6 inches!!)
  17. The campus that looks like 21 Jumpstreet.
  18. Centimes.
  19. Tiny water heaters.
  20. No umbrella etiquette.

Funny though, these things don’t really seem that bad now. And notice I could only come up with half the number–there’s so much more to love there rather than hate. My life really must have been mostly pain au chocolat and wine. It makes me miss France.
Stay tuned for part three: things I missed about the U.S.