What Stinks?

Here's another memory for the "only in Paris" category.

We had just gotten through security at the airport.  We were walking toward our gate, past the usual array of shops selling luggage, designer scarves, and chocolate.  All of a sudden an unmistakeable odor assailed us.

"What is that SMELL?! Did someone...?" 

Not long after waiting ten minutes for the saleswoman at the Maison du Chocolat counter to place four tiny chocolates into a bag, between conversations with her fellow saleswoman that inexplicably could not wait until after she had finished bagging our minuscule order, we found the source of the pungent odor.

The duty free shop across the way.  It had a CHEESE section.  As if passing all the major historic sites of Paris on the drive out of the city hadn't been enough salt in our wounds, here was an olfactory reminder from Paris, which seemed to be telling us with her characteristic self-satisfaction, "Yes, here, only here, can you find the world's finest culinary delights, and you are leaving them all behind. I stink wonderfully in your general direction.  Enjoy and weep."  

On top of that, in a final, almost iconic gesture of inexplicable, arbitrary Parisian unpleasantness, the saleswoman in THAT shop curtly hissed at me, when I tried to snatch a bloggable memento of this cheese corner, "Taking photos is forbidden!" I mean, honestly.  Why the heck should you care, lady?  Leave me alone. I took one anyway, because I can  be stubborn and defiant, but I couldn't get a really good one.

But it was soooooo typical.  Paris shopkeepers will make up a rule on the spot if you so much as get a hair out of place that annoys them.  They'll size you up to see if you're worthy of their attention.  They will look down on you if you're too sweet. They will take FOR. EVER. to do the smallest thing - wrap an item in tissue paper, top a pizza, enter information into a log book - often because they'll be chit-chatting at the same time (after all, how dare you intrude on their day by actually wanting service).  If you get a defective product, forget about returns, exchanges, or refunds that you've tried to obtain after standing forty to sixty minutes in a line that several Parisians have tried to jump.  Besides, who are you to assert their products are defective?  How dare you.  Lowly expat.

Customer service and work ethic seem totally absent in the workings of small French businesses.  As a Frenchman once said to me of his perception of the French mentality toward work, "Employment is just a vehicle for obtaining paid vacation and paid maternity leave. Why should they put in more than minimum effort when they can get a lot of benefits and by law can almost never get fired?"  I realized that the motivation, the drive, to work as hard as possible, as efficiently as possible, and always try to do better than one has done before, is very, very American.  "Your French employees would never tolerate your standards if you tried to run a business here American-style," he continued, as if reading my thoughts.

I found myself pondering these annoyances as I sat in the airport trying not to be sad about leaving.  Trying to convince myself that visiting was great, but living here would be a pain.  Would I really want to spend the rest of my days in a place where people don't seem to believe in deodorant, or shower curtains, or proper food preparation hygiene, or air conditioning during heat waves, or helping customers struggling to bag groceries at the store before the next person's groceries come rolling mercilessly down the conveyor? Where they just have to judge you by appearances, and everything has to be just so? Where the bureaucrats are arbitrary and nasty, and the red tape thicker than the Conciergerie walls?  Where a single load of laundry (about half the volume of a load in the States) takes two hours to get through a wash cycle, where nothing's open late or on weekends, where you're lucky if you can find a bathroom in a public place, much less a clean one, and where it seems people would almost rather let someone exsanguinate in front of them rather than take the initiative - rather than be bothered - to help a person who's hurt?

The truth is, I could totally see myself living there, despite all my pet peeves.  I could make a pet peeve list for any country - the Philippines, the United States - just as I could make a list of things that make those places great.  Every time I go to France to visit my husband's family, I fall in love with it all over again, and every time I have to leave France, my heart aches a little more.  I don't know that I could ever develop a true sense of belonging over there, but that has eluded me almost everywhere, so that wouldn't be such a big deal.  

I wonder what makes our souls crave certain places with an almost primal longing.  I guess I'm not going to solve that mystery any time soon.  One thing's certain:  I definitely appreciated the more laid-back demeanor of the folks we've encountered back on American soil.  People live and let live over here, and it was nice to come home to that.