Detective Work

You may have already discerned that one of the themes of my time in Paris has unexpectedly centered around some rather informal detective work. I, acting as detective, am constantly trying to figure out the rhyme or reason to Parisian customer service trends. It has gotten to the point that no interaction, no matter how seemingly trivial, escapes my scrutiny. It used to be that I could go buy, say, some milk, and then immediately forget what the entire transaction entailed.

Who would have thought that I would bemoan the loss of an ignorant existence? Raise your hand if you smell a hypocrite.

In any case, my current life as a self-appointed and non-professional intercultural detective does not afford me the luxury of taking ostensibly simple transactions such as milk-buying for granted. Now buying milk is an action that immediately becomes entangled within the social experiment that is my daily life in France.

This past Saturday afternoon, my husband and I embarked on a sort of hefty shopping trip. Normally, Saturday shopping excursions are a bit more extensive than the ones during the week, simply because the produce stand, the fromagerie, and the wine cave are all closed on Sundays and Mondays. Plus the "normal" grocery store, where we buy staples like coffee, cream, butter, mustard, and copious quantities of Lindt chocolate bars (I am going through a chocolate phase) has limited hours on Sundays.

Using the phrase, "limited hours" makes it sound like it is still a viable option to do some shopping on a Sunday. That implication is actually quite misleading. Technically, it is possible, but only if you are willing to wait in lines rivaling that of a U.S. shopping mall on Black Friday. Which I am not.

On this particular outing, we enjoyed three good interactions with salespeople. THREE! Are you kidding me? No one told us our money was "too old" to be accepted, no one announced to a room at large that he or she had no idea what we were saying and thus forced us to repeat a simple request five times in front of (possibly judgmental) fellow-shoppers. No one even gave an exaggerated and irritated "PFFFFT"! when we did not offer exact change.

Miracles do happen, people.

After this anomaly of an afternoon, my husband suggested we avoid speaking to French people altogether for a week or two afterwards in order to bask in the glorious afterglow that emerged after not inadvertantly offending Parisian vendeurs whilst attempting to purchase tomatoes.

Though an arguably good thought on my husband's part, we were actually invited to a French/American couple's house for lunch the following day, so we were unable to carry out the proposed idea. It would have been a little awkward to not address the French man--at whose house we were eating--for an entire afternoon.

Although maybe not so strange considering we ate lunch at a restaurant just outside Paris today and the waiter did his best not to address us the entire time we were there. So maybe this experiment within an experiment would have gone off with nary a hitch. But we'll never know now.

In light of my boasting about our recent interactions with Parisan shopkeepers, you may think I am getting too big for my britches over here in France. I understand the feeling that I just ascribed to you, and I can assuage your (possibly non-existent) worries toute suite. As it happens, my ego has actually been in constant check for the past few weeks. I can explain why in two words:

French lessons.

I recently resumed taking (formal) French lessons. I imagine that there is a limit as to how much public humiliation and demoralization one person can endure and thus the salespeople who demonstrated unprecedented friendliness this past weekend must have somehow identified me as someone already being well-pummeled by their country-folk through outlets other than food purchasing. The existence of this invisible radar system certainly explains why they were nice to us this past weekend. And there you go: one mystery of my life solved just like that.

Told you I was something of a detective.