Removing shoes at the front door
Growing up in Australia, it was common to not wear any shoes at all especially in summer, but once it became the norm to wear shoes, we rarely removed our shoes before entering the house. Muddy boots, yes, we removed these but ordinary shoes no. That was until we started visiting our Asian friends, we quickly learnt to remove our shoes before entering their house.
I also became accustomed to looking for slippers in the Chinese hotels I stayed in, removed my shoes and made use of this great service.
I was not expecting, what to me is such an Asian cultural habit, to be so strongly followed in France. Today we visited a lovely couple living 7.2 km out of our village, we went for a walk through deep leaf litter in fields and dodged the cow poo, obviously we were expected to remove our shoes before stepping in their house. But we babysat our French teacher’s two lovely children last night, they live in our small village, no farm animals in sight and we dutifully removed our shoes for the evening.
We have found this is the norm in France, maybe this is reflection of living is a small country town and the larger cities are different.
Our flat has the above multiple shoe racks just inside our door, and we are slowly getting into the habit of removing out shoes, especially after walking in the mountains as below. On reflection it is not such a surprise the shoe removal culture is the same, when you take into consideration the similar ancient farming heritage of both countries.
