What I Like About You

For all of the negative publicity France may get (from us, from the general public, etc.) here is a post of

"Things They Got Right"


*Bathrooms stalls - Although sometimes you have to pay to use the "toilette" in France they do have pretty great bathroom stalls. As opposed to American stalls where, when you have to drag your 19 month and/or 3 year old in with you they have the ability to crawl on the floor, under the door, and into other people's stalls, not in France. Every stall is its own little room. Sure you still have kids crawling on the floor and there's frequently no toilet paper, but at least they can't escape. Additionally, some of the public bathrooms on the street are entire sealed rooms that get hosed down (i.e. sanitized) from top to bottom after you leave. You walk in and everything is wet -- no crawling on the floor in these but at least it is clean.

*#1 and #2 flushes - O.K. a bit graphic but all toilets here have two buttons. One for when you need less water, and another bigger button for when you need more water flow. BRILLIANT - enough said.

*Pie crusts - They have some pretty awesome flaky pre-made "Tart crusts." They have several versions, one specifically for sweet tarts, one for quiches, one for savory tarts, etc. No plain old frozen, unfold pie crusts here.

*Oil changes - They told us that we would not have to change the oil in their car. This is not necesarily a function of the car but may just be a function of the laissez-faire attitude regarding cars and service maitanence. The French people in our house are probably not loving that they have to change the oil in our car every 3 months.

*Stain remover - Now in the US, we have a million products that remove stains from clothing -- far too many to process. Here in France they have two choices, the name brand and the Carrefour brand. We currently have the latter and it is AWESOME. It has removed more stains from the kids clothes than anything we have at home (ballpoint pen all over a white shirt, for example.)

*Clothes pins - Since practically no one uses dryers in France because of HIGH electricity costs there is a great need for quality designed pins to hang all your laundy (and hey, you never have to worry about anything shrinking). None of those wooden ones where the spring breaks - they have well engenieered and sturdy plastic ones that can hold a fitted sheet in place through the strongest Mistral.


*Grocery store bags, or NOT - so France has made it a policy to not offer any type of bags at the grocery store. If you want to carry your groceries out in a bag, you either bring bags in yourself or buy them at the store. Now this can be good and bad. Clearly great for the environment. Clearly bad for me when I get all the way into the store, shop, and then realize we have no bags and I have to walk out to the car with all the gorceries loose in the cart and bag them later. But you only make that mistake a few times.

*Cart return - So at the grocery store they have normal carts MINUS the child restaint straps. BUT all the carts are locked up in the nice cart return area of the parking lot. In order to get the cart you have to put in 1 Euro to unlock it. Then, good to go, in order to get your money back (you got it) return the cart to the designated area. For the little amount that it is a pain it actually is nice because it prevents you from trying to pull into an awesome parking space right up front only to find out that there is a cart in it that someone has lazily not returned.

*Butter in a tub - not margarine, Real Butter, from Brittany. So tasty. Maybe we have this in the States but I've never seen it. It is nice to not have to wrap the unused portion of butter back up in the waxed paper, just put the lid on.

*Cheap wine - I know it has been said before but it is nice to not have the over inflated prices on wine. You can get very good bottles of wine for $4.00 and phenomenal bottles for $8.00. What more to ask, really?

That is all I got so far.