Foot Cleaners!

French Foot Cleaner For two weeks over the summer of my freshman year, I got my first chance to experience a truly foreign culture firsthand. While I had previously been to both Canada and Maine, my mom took some time off of work in order to take my two younger brothers and me on a trip to Nice, in the south of France. Once there, it didn’t take very long for me to notice differences between their typical life and mine. For two weeks we had delicious, fresh bread with every meal, drove in tiny diesel cars past wind turbine and nuclear power plants, and played “futbol” with the other kids living around us. While I had expected discrepancies in cuisine and infrastructure, I was surprised to find that trips to the bathroom in France are much different than trips to the bathroom in America. For one, shiny chrome tubing calls out to be touched, only to burn you for giving in to temptation (turns out they have heated towel racks). But I was totally blown away by the fact that the French have, in all of their bathrooms, special ceramic devices dedicated to cleaning feet. This is a delightful invention, and my feet were sparkling and fresh as I hopped into bed every night.