Normal French etiquette

[kerouac2]

I have been watching videos from this person (Rosie from New Zealand) for a few years.  She lived in France with her French husband for a number of years and tried her best to learn how to do things.  She still gets quite a few things wrong, but this is one of her better videos about the dos and don'ts, even though she stresses a bit too much the consequences for not doing things right.  The French (or at least the Parisians) are very indulgent about the faux-pas of foreigners.

[fumobici]

It was interesting comparing that to equivalent Italian cultural practices. Some similar; some very different. It must be especially hard for recent immigrants from Africa and South Asia who are light years from expressing many of those demure, conservatively dressed, and reserved French cultural norms, much further even than loud, boisterous American tourists. The Middle Eastern and Africans in the 11th last time I stayed in Paris would make the loudest and most emotive anglophone tourists ever seen or heard seem shy, reserved, and quiet by comparison. I could hardly tell a friendly conversation among neighbors from a free-for-all fistfight without peeking.

[patricklondon]

May 31, 2021 21:27:44 GMT fumobici said:

I could hardly tell a friendly conversation among neighbors from a free-for-all fistfight without peeking.

I had a similar experience when I first visited Greece, just as the military dictatorship collapsed, and took a tour up to some relatively remote place. At a refreshment stop in a mountain village, there were two old ladies going at it hammer and tongs at the top of their voices, gesticulating and beating their chests for emphasis. I asked the (Greek) guide what it was all about:

"Their arthritis".

[bjd]

When I was a kid in Toronto, the neighbourhood we lived in was full of recent European immigrants. Across the street lived a family of Hungarians -- I always thought the father was yelling at his daughter but it was just his way of talking.

[kerouac2]

I don't know if I'm just used to it now, but it seems to me that the groups of African immigrants no longer talk as loudly as they did when they first arrived in Paris.

[lagatta]

That is entirely possible, as the Subsaharan African communities are by now far better integrated in Parisian society than some decades ago.