Monday, October 13, 2008

The French shower

Till few weeks ago I had no idea of what a French shower is and my only experience on French shower is that the showers here are really small. And that's about it. Once Scott told me that he thought that in Europe people don't shower enough and they are on average dirtier than Americans. Of course, being European and not being able to start my day without a shower, I took that as an offense. Beside, I have been living in a lot of different European countries, I have a lot of European friends, my ex boyfriends are both European and so I thought that his judge was highly biased by the few Europeans he knows.
Of course, you can always find the stinky European, but you can also find a stinky American, right? Then, I have been traveling around for conferences in the past two weeks and I met a lot of Europeans and I have to say, taking a shower was on average not the main priority of each day.

I guess I have been really lucky to live till now in countries where people normally shower every day and have friends and boyfriends who change their shirt every day, they shower regularly and they are clean. But honestly, after living in France I started to have some doubt about how many times in a week French shower. Of course, probably I am generalizing, but you know, I am not that politically correct and yes, I think that French, at least the majority of the ones I met, don't shower enough, don't change their clothing and they don't care if they smell a lot or not. They make up a lot, sure, but shower is another thing.

Someone could tell me that this is more natural, that in this way you can smell better each other pheromones (a bit of science here), so you can attract more possible partners and so on. Beside the fact that someone who stinks wouldn't attract me (but not everyone fortunately is like me), the reason why perfumes have been invented is exactly to attract others.
French are not alone anyway. I found out that also Italians (I know, it can't possibly be, but it is painfully true) are not among the cleanest European. I would like to make a statistics, but based on my observations I would guess that men change their t-shirt or shirt every two days (in winter even after 3 days?) and they shower every second day. Women in Italy are much better. Outside in any case everyone looks good and wears perfume.

A general opinion is that if you don't see or feel the sweat, you don't transpire and thus you don't sweat and thus you don't smell.

Swiss are bad too. You see all the Swiss really elegant, going in and out of banks, looking important and then you find out (well, you smell it) that beside the appearance, they don't shower that much either. Then welcome to Portugal, the winner! I guess that maybe there they sweat so much, that it was a common decision to save water and resources and then to not take a shower more than once a week, not do the laundry more than once a month and wear the same clothing for multiple days in a row till they can stand alone.

I have to admit that my sample' size is not that big, that no statistician would accept my results and that I am sure I forgot some country (where I haven't been or I haven't meet anyone from or they just didn't smell). I will be happy to read other people experience about that.
I have anyway a question, are seriously Americans on average, of all the big and large America, so clean to shower and change their clothing every day?

PS. The French shower for the ones who don't know yet, it is when you don't shower and just pretend to be clean wearing a lot of perfume.

1 comment:

fromtheworld said...

Hey, I am happy to read your comments here again! Hope you are doing well. Scott should definitively read your comments...it looks like he only knows really clean Americans. I am glad (well, glad may be not the right word) to read that there are stinky people everywhere.
Welcome back here!