5 Things About Parisian Culture I'll Probably Never Get Used to

(...because everyone needs a good "winge" once in a while, right?)

captiGzen92, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear Subscribers,

As someone who called Paris home for over a decade, and has been a French citizen for even longer, you might assume I’d stopped experiencing “cultural friction” of any kind. But this is far from being the case.

Countless binational vagabond types have reported similar sentiments— so this is hardly revelatory— but I never feel more French than when I’m away from France, and less so when I’m there. Well, ok, at least in certain moments, when things that seem perfectly rational and acceptable to your average Gallic person strike me as absurd or frustrating.

Earlier this week, my wife and I watched a stand-up show from the comic Sebastian Marx, a native New Yorker who’s lived in France for over 20 years and performs in both English and French. He’s amazingly (and enviably) fluent in the latter, despite poking fun at his remaining American accent — and basing a large part of his routine around what strikes him as the inherent weirdness and sometimes-absurdity of the French language.

His observations are often hilarious and spot-on (at least to me), and his experiences as a Franco-American person navigating the waters of both cultures— with eyes now wide open to the strangeness of each— really resonated with me.

I recommend watching this when time allows (he performs in French here, but there are subtitles throughout), and I’m also hoping to snag an interview with him at some point.

Anyway, his show led me to think it would be a fun exercise to start parsing the things about Parisian and French culture that continue to leave me perplexed, bemused and even infuriated after all these years. And since I spend most of my time focusing on how French culture has roped me in for life and won't let go, I figure it's fair 'nuff to "winge" a bit, as the Brits might put it.

So here goes….with the caveat, of course, that these points are mostly based on my subjective experiences. I’m not claiming there’s any hard data behind any of this, and like anything offered mostly in a spirit of humor, it’s to be taken with a grain of salt.