06 November 2006

I’m in my favorite café again. ‘Comptiers des Carmes,’ it’s called. It radiates all that is ‘traditional French café,’ the kind of place you come to on a rainy day in a long wool jacket, scarf pulled close to the face, cigarette in hand. A picturesque hole in the wall café; brick walls, adorned with pictures of the locals, funky lights suspended above the bar, tiny, wooden tables and chairs filling the small space, the air carrying a mélange of coffee and smoke. There’s always a steady flow of people, anywhere from the age of 13 to 70, most with a friend or two, who will sit and chat over a small espresso and cigarette. Sometimes people will bring their lunches, as has become my tradition. Locals stroll in, greeting the owner and/or person behind the bar with the oh-so-French faire bisous. Though my interactions have consisted of nothing more than a small hello and drink order, they recognize my face and know that I’ll most likely ‘prends un thé avec un peu de lait.’

Today the owner is eating his lunch at the bar. His two dogs, who moments before were lounging around their palace (a.k.a. the café), are now waiting attentively at his feet. They are unsatisfied with today’s selection, they don’t even touch the food handed to them. The owner leaves, shortly returning with two steaming bones in hand, the dark meat practically falling off them. Good choice I guess, the two pups now happily chow down right there on the floor of the café.

This is not unusual as the French really aren’t too concerned with germs in the same way us Americans are. Sanity rules really just don’t exist in the same way here. Americans truly are over concerned with health details. Apparently we think that everything is going to kill us and so we set up rules that prevent the .001% chance of something actually happening. Like the other day on my way to school, there were workers jack hammering on the same sidewalk on which I was walking. No goggles, no tape or barricades blocking the sidewalk, no warning signs. But none of that really bothered me too much. It was more the fact that they weren’t jack hammering INTO the ground…rather they had chunks of concrete on the sidewalk which they were trying to break apart, so you had bits of concrete flying all over the place. Transport this scene to a New York city sidewalk and I’m pretty sure that company would be sued in under 5 minutes.

So why does this fly in France but not in America? Where along the lines did Americans become so neurotic about sanity? About safety? I’ve been trying to come up with some reasons and honestly I don’t know. I have no idea how it got to this point, but I do know that never in my life would I see a dog eating off the floor of a restaurant in broad daylight in America. Never. That is not if the business cared about saying around for long. Maybe it’s just that the government truly is more involved in the affairs of Americans. Maybe the French do have sanitation rules that say ‘no dogs allowed in restaurant’ but it’s just that nobody follows them and nobody cares and the government doesn’t do anything about it. On the other hand in America we have inspectors coming by all the time to ‘check up’ and be sure that business is being run ‘by the books.’ Hmm, interesting.