Rules: how not to be a well-mannered foreigner.

Since arriving in France, I have noticed that I seem to be breaking rules that I never even knew existed. I am an unwitting recidivist, flouting social (and perhaps even legal) conventions all day long.

Take, for example, when I ate my lunch out of proper order. Go ahead—gasp! Then sigh, shake your head at me and make a not-so-subtle tsk-tsk sound in my general direction.

I attended a buffet-style lunch the other day with two dozen of my coworkers. After eating my main course, I got myself dessert and cheese like everyone else. I took my plate of cheese and dessert back to the small group of friends I had been standing with.

When I put my fork into the dessert without having first touched the cheese, I noticed a distinct reaction in the body language of everyone I was standing with. Instead of trying to hide whatever my error was, I said, “okay, what is it? What did I do wrong?”

“okay, what is it? What did I do wrong?” Quotation

They all gently explained to me that in France one eats one’s cheese and then dessert, never the other way around. They knew that I did not grow up this way, so it was fine with them. Then one of them, trying to be helpful, explained to the rest of the group that in Mexico, one eats dessert and then cheese.

Completely bewildered by that random explanation, I couldn’t bring myself to show her up and explain that we don’t even eat a separate cheese course and if we did, we would eat it whenever and however we wanted; after all, she was trying to show that I was doing it somehow right, so why correct that by telling them all how freakish we all are, not eating cheese at every meal.

Social conventions like this are all around us, without most expats even realizing it. Of course, these things must exist back home, too, but since they’re second nature to us, we don’t even realize that we’re abiding by the rules, just like how we don’t realize that we’re breaking them here.

Another common rule that I frequently break and have heard of friends getting in trouble with is this: when you stop someone on the street to ask a question, it should be preceded with a Bonjour, Madame/Monsieur, a nice little excusez-moi and maybe even, just for extra credit, a little puis-je vous dérangez? (“may I disturb you?”) before actually posing the question.

Having made this mistake and then had my question responded to with a greater degree of derision than usual, I have adapted. Now I immediately blurt out all three introductions in rapid-fire succession. The only problem: after tripping over that mouthful of introductory phrases, it’s easy to forgot what you question was in the first place.