Some things you may not know about the French

They LOVE colored and scented toilet paper. More often than not, when you're out in a store or restaurant (or someone else's home), you'll encounter pink, blue, or green toilet paper. I have no clue why the find this fashionable. It's a little off-putting to me. Is it because everything is supposed to be prim and pretty, even the materials we use to do our business? Is it supposed to be more elegant? We will never know the answers to these questions.
All French supermarkets smell bad. Seriously. Every single one. Upon entering, your nostrils are assailed by an odor than smells like a combination of trash and rotting food. Or rather, an unidentifiable 'bad' smell. As in, "I don't know what that smell is, but it is portentous and I certainly don't want my FOOD PRODUCTS to come from the source of that smell". I think I've cracked the bad-smell code, though. So another thing you should know is that elecrticity and energy are mad expensive here, and so common appliances run on much less energy than their equivalents in the US of A. This means that refrigerators are kinda warm. The day I moved into my apartment, I bought some food, put it in the fridge, and left to run some errands. When I came back, THE SMELL had infiltrated my living space. I think this lower-energy-food-smell conundrum is also the reason why food spoils way faster here. I bought fresh strawberries on Sunday and put them in the fridge. By Tuesday they were ALL (every single last goddamn one) moldy. It was très triste.
Another fun caveat about living in France: if you come here for any extended period of time, get ready to hurry up and wait. I swear, I could spend my life waiting in line between the time I spend at Carrefour (supermarket) and Orange (phone/Internet provider) also the bank. In the united states, the customer is always right. Here, the person providing the service is always right, and it is their comfort and convenience that is the priority, not yours. For example, I wish to install Internet in my studio. I went to talk to someone about tis at SFR yesterday, and it will take about 20 days to install. Why? Well, it's not like no one in this apartment has never used Internet here. All the pervious tenants have. But they have to call the phone company and get the phone line working again, and I have to get a fixed phone installed, and all this mumbo jumbo. Things just take longer to get done here.