Learning the System

Okay, before we start today's blog I need to fill you in on a couple of stories that have happened to us because we don't know the language and we aren't quite sure what we are doing.

About our shopping. At the grocery store we found a nice selection of yogurt's. You know the kind that have different flavors in one box. It was a good deal so we bought it. The other day Jim opened one of the yogurt's and asked me what I thought it was. I looked at it and it had little pieces of something in it. Then I smelled it and it smelled somewhat familiar. THEN I looked at the picture and said, "Well it looks like you got the jackpot! It's prune yogurt!" Yes, they have prune yogurt here. We still have one more yogurt in our fridge, can you guess which one it is?

They don't seem to utilize bar soap here. You can find a few brands in the soap section, but not Dial, or any of the deodorant kinds. Next to the soap bars are tons and tons of bottles of gel douche. Once I figured out what that was, I decided I would buy a gel douche instead of bar soap since there were so many more to choose from. That's where the trouble started. I stood there looking at each kind. Mostly women were there with me and they were opening the bottles and smelling. I knew that whatever I bought Jim was going to have to use so I settled on AXE. It seemed like a masculine name. There were 4 different kinds: one with olive oil (nix that one, Jim won't like it), one with micro beads (nor that one), one with rose petals (definitely not that one) and one with ENERGIE. That's the one-it sounded masculine and it was a bright red color and it looked energetic! When I got home I looked more closely at it and I saw it was made with volcanic rock something or other. Hmmmm never heard of that before but sounds good. The next day I poured some on my washcloth and VOILA! I immediately smell a familiar smell, Listerine!. I think that my gel douche is made with Listerine because everytime I use it I smell like the dentist's office! (And FYI-I haven't noticed any increase in energy either!)

The Metro. OK we are trying to be nice and not say a lot about the smell in the Metro but yesterday on the way home from Versailles I was gagging. It is a long train ride, 30 minutes, and within the first minute from the train leaving the station there was a very bad odor wafting through the train car. I looked at Jim and there's no one really close to us. I finally open a handy-wipe and hold it to my nose so I wouldn't gag. We decided at the next stop we would get off and change cars to get away from the odor. At the same time we are discussing our plan, a man 2 rows ahead of us, starts holding up his old, worn, tennis shoes and starts shaking them out or something. At that we realized that he had probably been wearing his socks for weeks or months without changing and his shoes too. That was the odor, gross, smelly feet!! As the train stopped, we and another lady sitting next to him, jumped off and then we all jumped on again a few cars down. At least the next 25 minutes were odorless.

The seats on the Metro are very close together, usually 4 facing each other up and down the train with an aisle in between. It is so close together that your knees touch the other person's across from you. But the Metro is very crowded so you try and sit so people jumping off and on can stand by the door. We have noticed that when only 1 person is sitting in the group of 4 chairs, he or she doesn't want anyone else there. When you sit down at the available seats you get a dirty look like you just sat in their private space! So now this is my new fun thing to do. I go for the empty seats where just one person is sitting and politely say "Pardon" and sit down.

The Metro transfers are killers! They can go on and on, around corners, up stairs, down stairs forever. I thought London was bad, Paris is even worse. Sometimes I think we could get to the place faster just walking outside. Today we found a new station and it turned out to be a blast. After we walked and walked to find our new platform there were Tres Rapide or Comfortable Rapide people movers. Well I assumed that the Comfortable meant for slow pokes and Tres Rapide is what we are used to, like at the airport! Wrong-- I got on Tres Rapide and off it shoots me. Lucky I held on. Jim took the other one and I went twice as fast as his. There were all sorts of warning signs with pictures, but of course I didn't look at them.

Today was the first day that I think we might have been scammed. We were sitting on a bench figuring out where to walk next and a young man came up to us and it looked as though he had just found a gold wedding band right in front of us. He seem worried that someone might just had lost their gold band. He asked us (I think) if it was ours, no it wasn't, he kept touching my hand and wanting me to look and see if it was real gold. Then he tried to put it on his own finger, it wouldn't fit, so he indicated that he wanted me to have it. He touched my hand again and pressed the ring in my palm. I said thank you and he walked away. At the same time a very well dressed businessman walked by and said in English with a French accent, "Don't believe him--be carefull" and kept on walking. Well I put the ring down on the bench and was going to leave it there when the guy came back and started asking us for something, money I think or cigarettes or something. I just said "Non" then Bonjour trying to get him to leave. We hurriedly packed up or stuff, checked to see if we had just been pickpocketed and took off hoping he wouldn't follow us. The ring was nice and I am SO gullible..... Print this post