Apparently you can’t graduate from middle school in France unless you can not only smoke a cigarette, but also show that you can roll your own. Thus begins a lifelong love of Tabac.
The French seem to resist translating anything into English more than any other people. Menus, road signs, emergency exit instructions – tout seulement en Francais. I blame it on their resentment that English became the lingua franca of the world.
Now I’ve been around a little. I’ve lived in North Carolina where complete strangers will greet you on the street as if they’ve known you all your life. In New York City, as long as you don’t slow down the lunch line at the deli, the servers are perfectly affable. But I’ve found in France that if one accidentally makes eye contact with someone on the street, a nod or smile will get a sneer and sudden interest in the sidewalk more often that not. Connie has a little kindlier view.
And now a fun fact: Nimes is another small town in Provence not far from either Arles or Avignon. It is famous for a certain kind of fabric made there. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a Jew from Bavaria immigrated to the US and imported a lot of the fabric to make trousers for the gold miners in California. Thus was Levi Strauss & Company created. Denim means de Nimes.