Caen, France

We ate many slooooow meals. They say the French remember every dinner they ever eat. They hold going out to dinner as a important as I consider going to a Longhorn football game. It took a while to adjust. I did not block off 3 hours for every dinner and 30 minutes between visits my non-English speaking server.

I must admit, 2 hours into the first dinner, we called it quits. Apparently this was quite an insult to our server. I was not mad, but we had a bottle of wine in the afternoon and one with dinner. We had been served 3 tiny plates of appetizers and consumed the entire bottle of wine. I was tired and I did care what other delicacies they planned on serving me, bedtime was entirely more appealing. We found the closest employee and told then we needed to go. A few minutes later our server showed up and looked like something terrible had happened. She had obviously been crying and very upset. My first thought was this was going to work out good for all of us. She obviously had bigger problems than us at the moment… Until I realized that I wad the one, making her cry. Walking out in the middle of a fancy dinner is rude and would only be done if completely unsatisfied with the service and the food. To her credit both had been perfect according to French standards. All this made a lot more sense a few days later but a the time it was very confusing. It was a good first step in the adapting French culture because we will never forget the end of that dinner.