A few small nuggets from my cahier (notebook) that haven’t made it into a blog post:

-The speed limit on open highways here is 130km/h, which is about 81mph.

-Rectangular bed pillows are almost impossible to find. Large and square is the trend here.

-The French call six-pack abs les tablettes de chocolat. A chocolate-bar belly: seems to make them even more desirable.

-British people are called les rosbifs, the Frenchman’s way of trying to say “the roast beefs”. In return the Brits call them (and me?) “frogs”.

-Baguettes were invented because their shape maximized what the French liked most: crust.

-While reading my post “Le Pain: A Love Story” for the first time, Charlotte had to stop in the middle of it to grab a piece of bread because it was making her hungry.

-You thought the cable guy giving you a 1pm-6pm window was ridiculous. Here they smash that record by our telephone company saying they’d install between 10am and 5pm, Monday or Tuesday. Then they arrived the Friday before.

-The Eiffel Tower was meant to be a temporary exhibit piece. It lucked out by existing during the boom of radio, as it became way too valuable as an antenna to ever be destroyed like the rest of the art around it.

-Every first Wednesday of the month at noon exactly, everyone hears the air raid sirens go off. For 101 seconds you feel like you’re in a black and white WWII movie. Seemed a bit of overkill at first, but then again I never lived in a country that’s been invaded twice in the last century. Charlotte says everyone learns as a kid that if you hear it any other time than this, something’s wrong. Not sure what happens if we ever get invaded the first Wednesday of the month at noon. That could be tricky.

-There are 700 varieties of pork products in France.

-Celine Dion is a real paradox to the people of France. While they consider her singing voice to be amazing and unparalleled, when she speaks in Canadian french her accent sounds unrefined, uneducated and downright gross.

-In french the movie Ghostbusters is called S.O.S. Fantôme, in other words, “Holy Shit Somebody Help Me There’s a Phantom”.

Class dismissed.