Tu m'étonnes ...

Literally: "You surprise me", this widely used phrase is normally spoken with utter-most non-surprise and at first, I thought my counterpart was mocking me. It turned out that "Tu m'étonnes" is really the equivalent to "I see".
For this post, however, I'm referring to the literal meaning - a list of things that I found bizarre, strange or just amazing about this wonderful city!

• "2o minutes": Every morning, two free newspapers are handed out on virtually every metro station. It's a pretty cool service because it gives you just the right amount of news and local gossip for your daily ride. But the thing that surprised me was that you never find any copy left in the trains or stations. In Munich people leave the newspapers - for which they paid - on the seats and during the day, it get's pretty messy. On page one of "20 minutes" it says "Do not throw away in public", but I wouldn't have expected the French to be so ... obedient.
• Mondays: Around the lab, everything's closed on Mondays. Even the supermarket. Admittedly, shops stay open on Sunday, but it can be quite annoying to find out which bakery follows which schedule.
• Prices: of course, this is Paris and I'm not complaining about rents. Clothes are partly even cheaper than in Germany, but that's not true for make-up and the-like. I paid 3€ for a tiny bottle of hairspray that would have cost me 0.50€ at dm. I know, it sounds a little cheapnik, but still ...
  
• Shopping: yesterday, the first shop of a Japanese clothing chain opened near the Opéra (I personally had never even heard of that chain). I was handed a flyer today when browsing through the Grand Magasins and as they had jeans on sale for under 10€, I thought I might as well drop by and have a look. When I was still on the other side of the street, I saw people near the shop standing behind a barrier. It looked as if they were queuing, but I attributed it to street works going on. When I had crossed the street, however, I discovered that the barriers were in fact fencing off the entrance of the shop and people were really queuing up to enter - not only on one side, but one both sides of the entrance! Altogether there must have been around 100-150 people waiting. Just for a shop! The last time I saw that in Munich was ... hang on, I've never seen that happen in Munich. But then again, people in Paris are in general better dressed than in Munich. Parisians obviously spend some energy on looking good!
• Ads: in the metro, about half of the ads are for theatres, concerts or exhibitions. The ratio in Munich is probably something like 10%. We have cultural things going on, too, it's just that the public is not so interested in them.
• Bonjour, merci, je vous en prie: the French are exceptionally polite. They always hold the door open for you and they rarely ever jostle, even if the metro is packed. During my first week in the lab, people must have thought me to be very impolite because I normally stop saying hi at around 11 am. Here, however, you greet everyone, no matter whether you know him and no matter what time of the day it is. And they have this special intonation for Bonjour that's a mixture between question and exclamation - and very hard for foreigners to imitate *g*.
• Cash desks: here it doesn't seem to matter if you spend hours queuing in the supermarket. The cashiers, no matter whether it's at Franprix, Monoprix or Auchan, are much slower than in Germany - and so are the customers, as you can see well when they are using help-yourself desks.