This evening, I went to buy bread. Not exactly Earth-shaking, right? Our baker was hardly stunned; as soon as she saw me, she set aside a baguette for me while she chatted with her current customer. When it was my turn to pay, I set down my five-euro bill on the little curved dish that she keeps on the counter. She began to set my change down on the same dish, and then hesitated, and held the coins out awkwardly.
This is my fault, of course. It took me a while to notice that no one here ever exchanges money hand-to-hand; they all have cute little recepticles near the cash register, like the baker up the hill with the big slab of agate. The customer sets down their money; the merchant picks it up and replaces it with change.
For the first two weeks or so I kept holding out my cash to our baker like a yokel, and even though I pointedly no longer do so, she has always remembered me for it. It’s so weird that I actually tend to draw looks from the other customers in the shop.
There is a right way and a wrong way here. The way that we walk Jolie is quite obviously wrong–we tend to tear down the street, calling to her and throwing tennis balls, while wearing sneakers and occasionally stopping to hug her. The way that I go to the market is improving, if the attitudes of the various merchants are any indication, although I was flat-out pitied by a fishmonger not too long ago (“It’ll get easier,” he promised), and that does not sit well with me.
The thing is, though, that everyone just assumes that everyone else knows what they know. Nick’s book about the differences between the French and Americans, for example, made a rather scornful remark about how French cookbooks tend to be much less detailed than American ones, if only because they assume that people already know how to boil water.
But it’s more than that.
The directions on the back of my quick-cooking barley say (give or take), “Use four parts water for one part barley. Add barley to lightly salted boiling water and cook 10-12 minutes to taste.” When I first read it, I translated “to taste” to mean “according to your convenience,” which it might as well be, because that’s precisely the sort of direction that one could expect to find on the back of a French package.
And it’s all like that: frozen things will often tell you how many people the packages are intended for, but the idea of a “serving size” is apparently nonexistant here. You cook in proportions, not amounts, and you just cook as much as you will need. Even the nutrition information follows this bizarre logic; if there is a calorie count on a box, it will almost invariably be “per 100 grams.” I nearly had a heart attack the first time that I checked the back of a box of something I happened to be nibbling on; the counts tend to be nearly as astronomical as they are useless.
I think that I need new landmarks.