The Disillusioned Suburban Youth who usually drink, smoke and sexually harass women in one of my neighborhood metro stations (obviously, the sleazier one) had a new one for me today with was oddly sincere, charming and made me smile even bigger:
"You look happy, Madame, what happened in your life today?"
Normally, no one smiles in Parisian public transport. It's kind of against the Parisian code of life as we know it. I think I've never smiled in the metro ever before for this very reason.
Instead, you have to put on your "metro face" which is stony and expressionless yet also hints at deep overwheming depression and untold suffering induced by being forced to share space with your idiot fellow commuters and the bumbling RATP bureaucracy (the French transportation authority) that morning. Your general attitude should say something like, no one has ever experienced such soul crushing existential merde as I have this morning. It also helps if you sigh dramatically (the ever eloquent French "pfft" sound) and roll your eyes a lot.
I was glad that the local neighborhood thugs, in their devotion to rejecting the dominant paradigm, appreciated the deviant social behaviour which is a rebelliously irrepressible smile in the Paris metro.
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