A few observations after 10 days in France

1. Apparently this means “Drugs available. Inquire.”
2. The French keep dogs; they don’t keep cats. Which is just as well, because the dogs are rather silly. The cats have attitude.
3. The bath-cabin at my hostel has only two hooks. So where am I supposed to hang the clothes I got out of? And there’s nothing to hold my soap.
4. A small coffee costs 1 euro; a big coffee costs 2.4 euro. Now, it doesn’t take more effort to brew the big one than it takes to make the small one: In both cases, you just put a cup beneath a blender. Assuming everything costs so much (thrice as much as it does in India) because labour is so expensive here, why does the big coffee cost 2.5 times the small (actually, tiny) coffee.
5. The ladies at my present bank (CLC Victor Hugo) can hardly understand English; the ladies at my bank in India (Bank of India Vile Parle [E]) were fluent in English, Hindi, Marathi and Guajarati.
6. There is a great deal of giggling in the French class, and the Korean girl takes the cake. But when the instructor asked how many weeks of paid leave were normal in her country, she replied, “None. You may get a week or two. It depends…” In other words, that gaiety covers up extreme hard work, as was confirmed by her conversation with the Chinese girl (Me eavesdropping, as usual).
7. I thought hamburgers were the bottom of the gastronomical pyramid worldwide. They aren’t. That position goes to the ‘kebab’ grilled meat in a pitta, sold by Arab immigrants here. (I hope that doesn’t make me a racist.)