The French

So almost everyone I talked to prior to our trip seemed to imply that we were bound to experience what has often been called "typical French rudeness". To me, having actually visited the place now, I can honestly say I didn't see any of that ... anywhere. So I'm not sure if this is a story that has been passed down and popularized over the years or if, just maybe, there may be some grain of truth to it and we were just lucky enough to avoid (or dumb enough not to notice).

In any case, I believe there were three main reasons we didn't run into that behavior and those are culture, language, and Sam.

From the culture perspective we got some excellent advice about key differences between Americans and the French when meeting strangers. For one thing, in America, most people when they encounter strangers will briefly smile or nod. In France, strangers simply don't acknowledge each other, smile or otherwise. It simply isn't done.

For another thing, it is considered rude in France to just walk up and start talking to someone out of the blue ... which happens between strangers all the time here in the States. The French expect that a basic tenet of communications between strangers begins with a request to communicate ... such as pardon me (excusez moi) or may I ask you a question (puis je vous poser une question). In other words, the target needs to be given the opportunity to participate ... or not. Failing to follow this simple procedure is considered very rude by the French. So I suspect that many American tourists bring on some of the rudeness themselves ... whether they know it or not.

Another method of keeping things cordial with the French is to at least attempt to speak their language, however minimally you are actually capable (in my case not very). Most of my conversations went pretty well by opening with excusez moi and following that up, assuming a suitable response, with parlez vous Anglaise (do you speak English?). That typically resulted in one of two things ... either someone would say yes, no problem, or they would say "a little bit". Incidentally the answer to do you speak French (parlais vous Francais) in my case is un petite peu (a little bit). :-)

At that point you can honestly say that you've tried to meet the person half way and, after all, it is their national language, so why not? Most were more than accommodating under such conditions. I do admit however that not every conversation went so well when each conversant spoke very little of the other's language. My effort to order a pizza one night with half cheese-half pepperoni, which carried on for at least 10 minutes of horribly fractured French (mine) & English (his) resulted in a pizza containing pepperoni on the whole thing but only half as much as they'd ordinarily use. Oh well. :-)

And finally, having someone who really speaks the language is invaluable. While I think Sam was a little nervous (at first) to engage in conversations with the locals, she got over that pretty quickly and received many compliments from various Parisians as to the quality of her accent and vocabulary. She is really a very, very good French language speaker. In fact, she bailed us out of a bad situation largely on the strength of her ability to speak French. More about that later.