Pigeon Karma in Action: This is why people don't like the French.

The weather reported that today and tomorrow were to be the only sunny days in the next week, so we took the kids for a leisurely, tourist-clogged stroll down the Champs  Elysées today.  Bryan's been looking for some new, interesting and America-appropriate clothes.  I wanted to show the kids the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysées (which figured prominently in their bedtime story last night--I prime the pump of their imaginations, hoping it'll make for interested kids the next day).

Halfway down, we stopped for lunch.  The covered outdoor seating area boasted about 20 gutsy pigeons and two delighted American girls.  The girls had no food th throw yet, but clearly the pigeons knew which side their baguette was buttered on and were milling about the girls' feet, gleefully.

About three minutes into eating, a woman came in and sat down with her tray of sandwich, pastry, Orangina and coffee.  I remember thinking that I would have bought the meal to get the kids a dessert, but I didn't know what to do with all the extra drinks (Bryan's the only coffee lover in our brood).  After shushing the pigeons away with her foot a few times, unnecessarily in my opinion, they weren't that close; she told the kids "you shouldn't feed the pigeons, but if you do, throw the bread away from me."

OK, I know I'm the mom, but my kids were eating, not throwing bread.  But perhaps she saw something I didn't, so I just ignored her.  I don't like anyone telling me how to raise my kids--in fact, I think I'm sort of a manners Nazi.  So I didn't feel a need to say anything to them.  I pretended to not notice/understand what she'd said, but kept my eyes on the girls, in case she proved to be telling the truth.

She wasn't and they weren't.

After about two minutes, she packed up her tray and moved over to the next table, the one farther away from us.  I grimaced in annoyance, but said nothing.  There was now a substantial space between our tables--which the pigeons saw as an opportunity to jump up on her former table and use as a way to walk closer to the food level of her tray.  They did and she made efforts to shush them away.  Feeling annoyed at being rudely-called out for something my kids didn't do, I told Bryan what she said and then laughed at her continued pigeon-vigilance.

Enter café worker, emptying the trash bin next to our table.  He distracted me, so I didn't see when or what exactly prompted it, but the woman hopped from her table and rushed away, abruptly.

 

As you'd expect, within four seconds about 15 pigeons were milling about her table, devouring her lunch.  She pleaded her case to the trash bin guy whose immediate reaction was something along the lines of "they're pigeons, what'd you expect them to do?"  That made me smile--a truly French answer to a truly French woman.

Bryan's response:  "She shouldn't have been feeding the pigeons."