The French take life much slower than we do in America. They take long walks for the sake of getting out in the fresh air. They close most businesses between noon and 2:30 to go home and eat a long leisurely lunch. Many shops close on Mondays. Thursday afternoons as well. In other words, while I’m here I’m going to try not to work much either.

     I try to blend in. I say "Bonjour Monsieur", always putting the monsieur, madame, and mademoiselle after it as I’m told. I try to remember to change it to bon soir in the evening, though I’m not exactly sure when the dividing line is. Perhaps there are Bon Soir Tables, like tide charts, which are published in the newspaper every day, but since I don’t read them I’m in the dark.

     After a week I’m dying to read more in depth news than the two-sentence synopses I get emailed to me everyday. I tracked down a couple of English language newspapers at the train station. The International Herald Tribune is a small, but very well written, newspaper with good world news coverage. I learn that the stock market reached a new high, peace looks shaky but possible in Kosovo (depending on who you ask, the hour of the day, and the phase of the moon), and the Sherman Oaks Galleria—the Fertile Crescent of Valley Girls—is being gagged with a spoon and closing. You have to admire a newspaper that knows news when it prints it.

     Then I read the London Times, a newspaper that didn’t put the word London in the title for nothing. The worst photograph of Monica Lewinsky their money could buy fills the top half of the front page. With it is an article written by an obviously giggling writer about how Monica broke down in tears at her book signing in Harrod’s, yet still outsold the Queen. The bottom of the page is pretty much filled with a big story about how ramblers are in an uproar over some land that’s being closed to them. Or opened to them. Or something. It’s a little unclear, except it took me four paragraphs to figure out that they weren’t referring to the old cars, they meant hikers.

     So I adapt. I start walking after lunch like a Frenchman. Take today, for example. It’s a beautiful day. The sun is out, it’s about 60F degrees (or 15C), and the sea is a gorgeous green. It’s Sunday, so the digue is filled with people, each one of whom has eaten a lunch which puts most American dinners to shame—if there’s nothing else here there’s an abundance of good food, and everyone eats it. So how come no one’s smiling?

     No one even looks at me as I stroll down the digue. Those few who do quickly look away. I smile if I actually catch someone making eye contact, which makes them turn away faster. I would love to mutter "Bonjour, Madame" except no madames will give me the heure of day. People walk, talking quietly, but no one’s smiling. It reminds me of casinos where everyone is "having fun" yet no one’s smiling or laughing

     The children are different. They say bonjour to me. I make a mental note to call the Nobel Prize committee to tell them I’ve discovered that French unfriendliness isn’t a genetic thing embedded in their DNA since the days of the Druids and Celts, it’s learned behavior. Well, either that or it’s like original sin: they’re born with manners, they just lose them as they grow older.

     As I pass people on the digue I can see out of the corner of my eye that they’re checking me out! Is it that obvious that I’m an American? I know the French have a reputation for being cold to Americans—and all of Europe is in an uproar over the acquittal of the U.S. pilot in Italy—so one day last week I wore a Canada-Niagara Falls sweatshirt a friend gave as an experiment. It didn’t help.

     Does my appearance give me away? They can’t really know where I’m from by looking at me, can they? For one thing, I have this handlebar moustache. In England they thought it meant I was French. Here they seem to think it means I’m English. Then there’s the United States, where most people just assume I came back on the Mars probe. I’m resigned to the fact that I have a moustache without a country.