I've looked this up, but I still can't fathom why. I bought a sheet for my bed (withholding snarky comment, also known as being cautious about Internet rants coming back to bite you in the ass) and discovered that sheets can apparently differ between countries. Plugs, subway systems, healthcare... I can understand those being different. But a sheet? Seems pretty standard, like a bowl or a teapot. A sheet can mean a sheet of paper or a bed sheet or sheet rock (just for the sake of including all references), but I'm pretty sure they all look the same: a flat rectangle of some kind of material.
French sheets aren't simple rectangles. I guess they're technically octagons, but that term conjures up the wrong image. Let me use Tetris blocks to illustrate my point:
Note: Wildly not to scale. Imagine the middle like as like the length of the bed, so that those two shorter lines are hanging off the edge.
Why, just why? Somebody French please explain this to me.
It doesn't really cover the bed. And did I mention that it's a giant pocket? Because it is. The asymmetrical top has an opening, so the whole thing is like a weirdly shaped pillow case. Does this "pocket" fit around the mattress? You can be sure it doesn't.
I just don't understand. I wasn't expecting culture shock, but I mean, this is culture shock to me. I can handle people spitting in the streets--mostly because it's much, much worse in China--and dogs peeing and pooping everywhere--because dogs are cute--but I can't wrap my head around this bed sheet.
And this fascination with pockets doesn't stop at the bed sheets. I bought two dishtowels--it's impossible to know what some of these things are when the French is above your head--that are also pockets. I guess you could think of them as square potholders, but the material certainly wouldn't protect the user from burns. So I can only conclude that these towels are used for drying--like most towels--but then why the pocket? To hide food from roommates? To put your sponge in? Because that seems to defeat the whole purpose of a dishtowel being (relatively) clean.
Rant over. If you were skimming this, please begin here.
I attended a Safety in Paris session. Despite my suspicions that my father would love nothing more than to become Liam Neeson and kick some sex trafficking ass, I don't want to give him that opportunity. The session seemed to seesaw between "CONSTANT VIGILANCE" (Harry Potter references FTW*) and "why are you Americans so paranoid?" Be comfortable--but not too comfortable. Have fun--but not too much fun. I guess the message is don't overindulge. But don't hide underneath your bed for five months. You guys know what I mean, it just sounds terribly ambivalent when I summarize it here.
I heard some pretty weird "Paris is dangerous" stories:
1. A crook threw a baby at a woman so she had to drop her wallet and catch the baby. I mean, I don't even know what to say.
2. Four partying girls leave a club. Three live in the same arrondissement, the other doesn't. So what do they do? They jet off in a cab, leaving this poor girl by herself. And, in every parent's worst nightmare, she was attacked, but fortunately saved because some dude was walking his dog. This story does scare me, but the real terrifying part is that her friends just left her. Even inebriated, I wouldn't think this was a good idea.
3. A guy in our workshop admitted he was pickpocketed, but he said that he asked the thief for his wallet back, and the thief gave it back to him. Sounds anticlimactic, but still interesting.
I don't tell these stories to have people worry about me. A lot of the worry coming my way is similar to when GW parents were worried about the Navy Yard shooting...which is on the other side of DC. It's nice to know you're cared for, but I think another lesson we all have to learn is that cities are much bigger than they appear. I totally don't live next door to the Eiffel Tower or anything remotely famous. Turns out all these places on my Paris Bucket List are all over town, so the main problem is going to be how to not waste a day running around, transferring to tons of metro stops.
As a last note, I'm loving the emphasis on cheese and chocolate croissants sold the way we sell sliced bread in America, but I was devastated to find out that Monoprix doesn't have any microwave popcorn--or popcorn of any kind, for that matter. I'm still going hunting around Paris, so I haven't lost all hope, but this place has everything (I found a step stool, incidentally), so I worry about finding popcorn elsewhere. The salesperson seemed unimpressed with my terrible, elementary descriptions of popcorn. "Corn...that is hot?" Though I don't even know if I said "corn" correctly (probably not), and I didn't want to try to say, "What we eat at the movies," because she was looking at me like I had grown a third head. Maybe they don't serve popcorn at the movies, either. Wait, what if they're like Wisconsin and serve cheese at the theater? Actually, that might not be so bad.
So... If you want to help, please donate to the Katie Willard Popcorn Fund. :)
*FTW is an acronym for "For The Win."
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