Bread

I have a pet peeve about TV shows- they always show French people or try to denote French people as those carrying the grocery bags with one loaf of French bread sticking out.
But guess what? When we were in Paris, we saw people walking around like this everywhere. Around dinnertime, there would literally be tens of people walking down the street carrying unwrapped loaves of bread like this, either one or two loaves at a time. They all had a little tissue paper wrapped around where their hand touched the bread, as if that kept it sanitary-- like all the dirt and pollution from the cars wouldn't dust up the bread with black specks by the time they walked the few blocks home.

We were lucky enough to stay in a neighborhood that happened to be mostly Egyptians and other Africans. We made friends with this cool Egyptian guy that owned the little sandwich shop we stopped in our first day. The other customers were like from Senegal, and they sat around drinking coffee with the Egyptian guy, playing sudoku. He made really, really tasty ham sandwiches for us, with cheese, tomato and onion... and very, very good bread. He was really happy for us when he saw that we were pregnant. He told us about his own family, and how he met his wife (only one month after meeting her and she got pregnant! tsk tsk- oh! but they've been together now some 20-odd years), and how he actually got a scholarship to study engineering in Walla Walla so many years ago, but his dad died and he had to go to work instead. His daughter is now studying engineering in England, and he is so proud that she gets to complete the circle that he began a couple decades ago. How awesome is that!