Most
Australians shake hands to say hello or nice to meet you. We don’t usually kiss
unless it’s girls and we already know each other (or we’re a couple). Guys
NEVER kiss each other (not including couples). It's just not done (not manly
enough I suspect).
My family
always kisses hello and goodbye with other French people. Men and women kiss
each other and women and women kiss each other. Men sometimes kiss each other
if they haven’t seen one another for a long time or if they are congratulating
someone on something pretty important. And I’m not talking about French
kissing. Normal greetings kissing, pecks on the cheeks. I thought that when we
got to France I’d have the kissing thing sorted for sure. Surely sorted it was
not.
In most of
Burgundy, it’s polite to kiss even if someone is meeting you for the first
time. When saying hello and goodbye it is polite to give 2 kisses. Older
generations of men kiss each other hello and goodbye. But not everyone living
in Dijon is originally from Burgundy and it seems that the number of kisses
that you greet someone with depends on which region of France you come from.
This is fine when two people come from the same region. There is no confusion.
The confusion comes when two people meet and are not from the same area of
France.
Take my
family, for example, which is from the centre of France near the Loire Valley.
We kiss 4 times. Our friend was from Brittany and he kissed 3 times. How do you
know how many kisses to give? Do you just keep kissing until someone pulls away
(you’d have to know them pretty well)?
I always thought
that the kissing thing in France was an older generation thing, that the
younger generations wouldn’t really be into physical contact so much. But I was
wrong! At Michael’s lab, where students were in their early twenties, kissing
is the norm, but only in social situations. If you’re both at work, kissing is
not performed. If you are outside of work you kiss and if someone not from your
work comes to your work you kiss. Spinning your head? Well consider this:
before you even get to the kissing part, you have to work out which side you’re
supposed to start on! Now you can see where the Eskimo kiss (picture nose
rubbing) comes from – not from the North Pole but from France!
I have to
say that it took many trials and many errors to get used to the number of
kisses, which side to start and when it was appropriate to kiss at all. It was
easier for me because I’m a girl. Once it’s been established that kissing is to
occur, I just kiss everyone. For Michael it was harder to adapt. He had to
gauge whether it was appropriate to kiss someone he’d only just met. He had
many embarrassing moments of hesitation (possible offence to the girl for not
wanting to kiss her) and just going for it when she hesitated (maybe he wasn’t
supposed to). My advice in these situations is you have to just follow the
experts’ lead. If they keep kissing past the 2 Dijon kisses, just go with the
flow. After all, even the French get confused between themselves and they just
laugh about it.
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