As some people know, I took a trip to Paris a bit ago to visit my wife while she was studying abroad. As such, I thought I would take a week and share some of the things that I learned while I was there. First thing? People apparently don’t wash their hands in France.
Now, I know that this might be a fairly sweeping statement, but hear me out. I had opportunity to visit quite a lot of restrooms while I was in Paris. I found paper towels in none of them. What does that indicate? That’s right, people don’t wash their hands in Paris.
Of course, some of you might think that they didn’t have paper towels because people in Paris are more ecologically minded than most Americans. I do admit, they did have electric hand driers (which are purported to be more ecologically friendly than paper towels). However, more often than not, the hand driers were non-functional. On the rare occasion that the hand driers did function, they functioned so poorly in general that they might as well have been broken.
You can see how this led to my conclusion. They have no paper towels. They have hand driers, as if they are pretending that people will wash their hands and need to dry them, but they don’t think people actually will and don’t bother to actually have functioning hand driers. Thus, people in Paris don’t wash their hands.
You might scoff at my reasoning, but the logic is sound. I walked out of almost every restroom I went into shaking my hands in the air after washing them until they dried. People didn’t seem to notice, not wanting to raise attention to the fact that their hands were obviously dirty because they hadn’t washed them, but I didn’t see them doing the same.
