California: 1, Paris: 1

I will write up France vs. US posts as they occur naturally in nature. Here's one now.

ITEM 1: THE SUPERMARCHÉ

In Paris, your time at the checkout is between you and the person at the checkout. There might be a line twenty people deep, but that checkout person certainly does not care. One time at the awful Monoprix by the UC Center, a lady decided that, oui, she would indeed like to get a carte de fidélité, a process that took about a ten minutes while the other 15 of us stood there getting dumber and uglier. The checkout lady went off to get the form, they filled it out together, they slowly, slowly resumed the process of checking out. By the time they were done, I was 30.

In general, supermarkets are designed like that in Paris: they're like little labyrinths of inconvenience, overstaffed with people who get in your way but understaffed by people who actually let you buy things and leave.

In California, your checkout person is, you know, sane. At Safeway the other day, the lady in front of me had been unable to locate four blueberry yogurts. While the Safeway helper guy went in search of yogurt, the checkout person had me walk past the lady and promptly checked me through. By the time I was done, the yogurts were there.

This may not seem like a big deal to you. But after dealing with four months of contempt and indifference, having a nice checkout person is pretty rad.

-however-

ITEM 2! MAD-DOGGIN'

This is a term my homie K introduced to me a few years back. A gentleman of southern-Californian extraction, K informed me that 'mad-doggin'' is when a man puffs out his chest and stares in an intimidating fashion at another man while passing him in the street. You have no doubt seen mad-doggin' in action; it arises naturally among Americans, who have somehow managed to never develop a basic set of rules for walking-down-the-street etiquette. There is always a very existential moment of anguish in walking past someone on the sidewalk, as you both struggle to pretend that you don't notice that they're there.

The thing is, Parisians are great about street etiquette, because their whole social persona revolves around being completely indifferent to one another. It's the same reason they go for such extravagant PDAs, openly making out on sidewalks and so on: the assumption is that you are to ignore everyone around you. While this means that they're also constantly blundering in to people, the advantage is that there is absolutely no social tension in walking past someone on a sidewalk; they are certainly going to pretend you aren't there, so you can follow suit. As far as I could tell, mad-doggin' is foreign to French soil.