Learning the hard way

Last year, I lived in Paris for 11 months. By the end of that time I had acquired and polished many different skills. My spoken French improved considerably (I know five different words for "joint" as well as an impressive array of swear-words); I dealt with a wealth of French bureaucracy, studied at university and found employment in a variety of different sectors (including waitressing in a restaurant, serving chizburrgurrs to grumpy Frogs and eating frogs' legs on my lunch break); I found my own place to live, made French friends and navigated confidently around the capital. The thing that I perfected with the greatest success, however, was none of these CV-worthy skills, but was the art of staring expressionlessly into the middle distance whilst on public transport.

I don't know what it is about the underground networks of big cities that reduces their citizens to unsmiling statues who avoid looking at you whenever possible but, like the street entertainers you find above the ground, occasionally surprise you with a blink of an eye or a sudden sneeze. The same is true of London. It seems to be an unwritten rule that you must not acknowledge the presence of others.

Wonderfully inventive and useful though underground public transport is, the residents of a city must get pretty fed up with having to suffer smelly, crowded, noisy trains every day just to get to work and back, so it's not really surprising people aren't at their most communicative when travelling through a city. Things only get worse in the summer months when the hot weather and the tourists arrive, and you're forced to commute with hundreds of other smelly beings, with your nose in someone's armpit. And all this whilst trying desperately not to make eye contact.

Cross-channel cultural differences become apparent, though, when you do inadvertantly look somebody in the eye and acknowledge their presence with a small smile. Whenever I've done this on the tube, I've either been met with a bemused look, a returned smile from another non-Londoner or someone else whose guard has momentarily been forgotten, but in most cases, no response at all.

Being a young woman in Paris, however, a meeting of the eyes or a twitch of the lips, when directed at a member of the male half of the species, is frequently mistaken as a kind of mating call. More than once in my year in Paris, I found myself warding off invitations to "come to my 'ouse tonight" and firmly removing wandering French hands from my knee as a result of nothing more than a polite smile or a glance that lasted a second or two too long.

One time, my landlord was having some building work done on the exterior of my apartment, and for a few days I would wake up to find two or three men clattering and banging around outside the window. It seemed rude to ignore them, so in true English style, I offered them a cup of tea. They looked slightly surprised, but accepted, so I went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. When I returned, with two cups of strongly brewed Tetleys with milk and no sugar (I'd brought the teabags to Paris in bulk - the French don't really do tea a l'anglais) and some Garibaldi biscuits, I found them perched on the edge of my bed. It was my turn to be surprised, but I handed them the tea, which they tasted with suspicion, put down on the floor and proceded to chat me up. After an hour or so of various not-so-tempting offers, which included an invitation to go and stay in their house in Egypt, I managed to get rid of them. I poured the cold tea down the sink, locked the windows and put the kettle on. They did seem to like the Garibaldi biscuits though.

My experiences with Parisian men then and on the metro taught me a lot more about public transport etiquette, the European method of seduction and French taste in tea and biscuits than any grammar lessons or lectures at the Sorbonne ever did.