Everyone needs to leave their bubble every now and again – go one town over or fly across the world to famous cities full of cigarette smokers supermodels and un-affordable fantastic architecture. I recently did the latter (air punch) and if you haven’t read the last few posts you’re lucky missing out on the type of garbage insight that only I can bring. I thought it might be interesting to lay out some of the observations I found while traveling; some are awesome, and some are terrible even more awesome. Okay, I promise I’m going to stop with the strike-through no I’m not.
Look at these casual shoots – on the left, you have orange on orange with African tote purse and leather sandals = French Hippie!! On the right you have red on red with a ciggie, bath shoes, and cellphone. Amazing.
- Little French girls all wear dresses and their mothers do not.
- Capri pants are very popular with the man in Paris
- Young French people all sound polite and adorable, even if they are cussing you out and insulting your choice of shoe wear.
- French people are not rude, at least not to me. I had a great experience with every French person I spoke with. Seriously, if you are from the Southwest (and I am going to call Texas the southwest) people are crazy, ridiculously friendly. Everybody here says ‘Yes Sir’ and ‘Yes Ma’am’, so by comparison, everybody else tends to appear rude. Everyone I spoke with might not have gone out of their way to be friendly like us Texans, but nobody was rude.
- French women don’t really wear bra’s – at least not the ones that should.
- Turned up collars apparently are coming back in style. I know you’re thinking ‘when did they ever go out of style?’. I know, that’s what I thought!
- Almost all French people are thin. Everyone is thin in Paris, despite eating carbohydrates like we breathe air because everyone smokes like a chimney. Seriously, I thought I was going to see little kids smoking by the time I left – I spent a lot of time explaining smoking to my daughter:
No funny story, just a good life lesson; but I will say this – if you ever meet me and I see you litter, I’m going to punch you right in the face. I just don’t understand littering. In the gutter beside every curb in France is 50 billion cigarette butts and it makes my blood boil to see someone just pitch that butt into the street when they are done. That same person probably wouldn’t throw a drink cup into the street but for some reason, smokers think cigarette butts don’t count as trash and throwing it into the street somehow isn’t littering. You have been warned…(do you think used cigarette butts could be fashioned together to provide relief housing? Just a thought).
Finally, I wanted to include a picture of the ‘Fire Evacuation Map’ that was in my hotel. I thought it was awesome – enough to take a picture so I have included it here for your amusement. Take a good look at the people indicated in the diagram. There are women in stilettos and wide-brimmed hats, barrel-chested (and one would assume good looking) men, – is that guy in green military? and is he escorting people? Awesome. The guy on the middle right looks like he is practicing his karate on stairs – Wax on! But the absolute best is the last picture on the bottom right – you got the fashionista, barrel-chested guy, and I’m going to say the next one is a middle-aged lady and probably a cougar.
Greatest evacuation map ever.
Cheers,
