10 more things Paris has taught me...

1. In older cities, Paris included, the nicest apartments are on the ground floor because you don't have to walk up any stairs to get there.  Guess what floor I live on?

2. Though I do see a lot of dogs walking around Paris (and they are somehow all incredibly well behaved), I have yet to see a poodle.

3. Peanut butter isn't a common thing here.  In fact, my homestay mom detests it.  So what do they eat instead? Nutella, which is a hazelnut-chocolate paste that is absolutely amazing.  They even use it the same way we use peanut butter to give dogs their pills.

4. French toast is called pain perdu (lost bread) and made slightly differently than in the US.  The French collect the excess butts of their baguettes and once they've accumulated enough of them, they make French Toast the next morning!

5.  Speaking of baguettes, yes, people do walk around with them in their bags like they do in movies.  It's because they usually cost about 1 euro and you pick one up daily at the nearest pâtisserie on your way home from work.

6. Sticking to the bread theme, most of the packaged bread that you can buy in grocery stores comes crustless.

7. I've mentioned this in passing before but I feel like it's important enough to warrant it's own number: the métro closes.  Coming from the city that never sleeps, I can't even comprehend how Paris could let their public transportation do this.  It closes at midnight on weekdays and 2am on Fridays and Saturdays and then doesn't open until 5:30 the next morning.

8.  Something that kind of makes up for the fact that the métro closes is the fact that you can get cellphone reception underground.  Pretty much anywhere in the métro, whether you be walking to your train or actually in a tunnel while you're riding the métro, you can still text, answer, and call people.  Oddly enough, this capability is not nearly as annoying as it has the potential to be.

9. There is this really awesome public bike system that they've implemented in Paris called the Velib.  (Someone told me that they just started it in DC too, as well as other cities in Europe).  Anyways, there are racks of bikes all over the city and if you have a métro pass and a European credit card (with that special chip thing) you can borrow the bike and ride it to wherever you're going for free.  Here's the trick about the "for free" part.  The first half an hour on the velib doesn't cost you anything, so people will ride their bikes for half an hour, find a bike rack, put their bike back, then take it out and continue on their way.  Surprising to me is how well this system works.  You always see people riding around on them and a lot of times, especially at night after the métro is closed, you fill come upon just completely empty bike racks because people don't want to pay for cabs.

10.  This last one isn't too exciting, but was definitely something that I had to get used to.  Since the whole city is built around the river, no one ever refers to things as being "north of..." or "to the south..." It's always either the right bank or left bank.  And the left and right is determined by the direction that the river flows, which is east to west.  So essentially, right bank is north and left bank is south.