Not all French people are mean

Before coming to France I must admit, I did not have the best image of French people in my head - I'd heard that they were, to be blunt, not very nice. I never really gave my take on this stereotype at any point in my blog, and something that happened the other day made me want to write a bit about it.

The other day I was grocery shopping in Monoprix, which is one of the main supermarkets in France. This semester I have branched out a bit in the cooking department (by that I mean I cook more than just pasta now) and have started making stirfry quite a bit. So, I was picking out some vegetables, and when it came time to choose carrots I picked the biggest one I could find, as I normally do - you want to get as much as you can out of your carrot, right? Wrong, apparently. Some lovely French woman, maybe in her 60s, stopped me and very nicely told me I should be choosing skinnier carrots, as they were not going to be as hard and would cook all the way through. She said the same went for zucchinis and other similar shaped vegetables. After speaking with me a bit she asked where I was from (I don't think my accent will ever sound perfectly French) so I explained that I was from Canada, and was trying to learn how to grocery shop and cook pretty much on my own. I think this made her even more glad she had stopped to give me these tips! Anyway, I thanked her, wished her a "bonne journée" and carried on with my shopping.

The point of this little anecdote is that while many French people can be kind of cold, and sometimes downright rude, there are also plenty of nice ones that are more than willing to go out of their way to help out an international student such as myself. As far as the younger generation goes, there are some French students who seem like they cannot be bothered to befriend an international student (especially at my school, which has a bit of a reputation for breeding snobby political types) but I have met a LOVELY group of French students, mainly thanks to one guy on my floor who introduced me to his group of friends. They are always more than willing to include me in their group, even though that means explaining a joke or slang word from time to time, which I really appreciate.

So, even though I can get frustrated with being given a French cold shoulder now and again, the nice experiences I've had have been much more profound than the bad ones, and would therefore like to state (even though this may be stating the obvious) that not all French people are mean.