What’s different
What’s different: Dog poo
Friday, April 1st, 2011 at 10:33 | categories: What's different
Imagine this: you’re walking down the street, enjoying the beautiful weather, listening to the birds chirping, feeling the soft asphalt under your feet. Wait, soft asphalt? Yeah, you probably just stepped on one of the many landmines on the French sidewalks.
Apparently there’s no law against this medieval behavior and the there are piles of crap everywhere. In Finland we have plastic bag thingies to pick up the crap, but I haven’t seen anyone use one of those here. And the owners don’t seem to give a–uhm–crap about it. They don’t even make the dogs crap in the side of the street agains the fence or a wall, the things are in the middle of the streets!
Luckily us exchange students seem to have developed a sixth sense for these piles of childish joy and there’s hardly any smelly and sticky accidents.
No, this is not what it looks like in real life
What’s different: the vegetation
Thursday, February 3rd, 2011 at 20:55 | categories: What's different
It’s time for the second part of my “What’s different” series. This time I’ll be talking about the plants and green things–not including aliens, though.
As I’ve said before, when I left Finland January 4th there was 50cm of snow everywhere and the thermometer showed -20C. Here, however, the grass is green and the girls are pretty. Take me home! (No, don’t!) The palm trees are swaying in the sun and supposedly all the other trees get their leaves in February. What’s even funnier to me, is that there are orange and lemon trees with ripe fruit in them. And not only oranges and lemons, there are also clementines, limes and probably a lot more that I haven’t noticed. What’s up with all the fruit?
Snow in Finland just before I left
Oranges
What’s different: Cash
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011 at 23:27 | categories: What's different
Having lived here in Antibes for almost a month now, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about the differences between France and Finland in a series I cryptically call “What’s different”. I’m going to get the ball rolling with a story about money.
In France people pay almost everything in cash. In Finland I would feel at ease if I didn’t have any dineros 0n my person, whereas here I’d freak out. The lack in the usage of plastic money means that you should be prepared to wait in the supermarket while the old lady in front starts to count her 1 and 2 cent coins to pay 60 euros worth of stuff. Also, your pockets will fill up with useless small coins that you’re never going to use (well, until you turn 60 apparently).
Like almost everything here, however, cash does feel a bit more traditional, so in some respects I like it–just not in the supermarkets.
French money. Oh wait, we got Euros in Finland, too.
