2023-11-29

A clueless American travel writer tries to present her ignorance and inability to learn as something cute.

Our travel agent had warned us that the French have different wall sockets, so we bought a power converter. All was well until we plugged in my white noise machine. To clarify, it’s a machine that makes white noise, not a noise machine that happens to be white. Who needs one of those?

I often travel with my white noise machine because I don’t sleep as well in a hotel as I do in a moving vehicle. But moments after we plugged the machine into the converter and turned it on, it stopped making white noise and started making black smoke. I’m joking. There was no smoke, and where there’s no smoke there’s no fire either. So we didn’t actually come close to burning the hotel down. That would have been embarrassing. But I had to sleep with no sound machine and a lingering odor reminiscent of burning tires.

Weights and measurements caused me some confusion too. The fact that they do things differently in France became clear when I stepped on a scale in our Paris hotel room. Yes, there really was a scale in our bathroom. That’s something you don’t see every day. Thankfully.

You would think weighing yourself while you’re traveling in a country known for its cuisine might take the fun out of the vacation. But when I stepped on this scale, it showed that I’d lost more than half my body weight. I was planning to eat a lot more French pastries until my husband reminded me that they use the metric system. Those weren’t pounds; they were kilograms. In order to find my actual weight I would need to multiply the number by 2.2. Oh.

EDIT: Added the link to the original story.