#1. No Window Screens

    No window screens means a direct link between you and the great outdoors. Nothing to marr your view. Nothing to stop you from leaning out your window to become one with nature. Ahhhh nice. Or so one would think. Until the bugs start flying around. While living in the suburbs, we weren't plagued with them terribly, but what about in the countryside? Are there not many there either in France?

    As an aside, french style windows are the norm, not surprisingly.  But why is that? For as idyllic and picturesque as they look, they really are inconvenient at times.

   One night, after yet another frustrating day of battling with windows banging back and forth due to the wind, I was desperately looking for a way to get them to stay in just the right position.  Which is to say, enough to let in a nice little breeze but not gusts big enough to send the paperwork in the room flying or to flap the windows around causing them to bang into and damage the adjacent walls and furniture or hit me in the head where I'm seated at the desk next to it.

  Desperation led me to try the latest in a long line of tactics, which that night was paperback books jammed in between the casing and the window near the hinges.  At my wits end, when finding that that wasn't working out too well either, as they kept falling out after a few minutes each time, I posed the question of ' why in the  %$#&  do they make these types of windows?" in a growl, ok, more like scream, to my resident frenchman.

   His reply was that american guillotine style windows were thought by the french to be too dangerous compared to french style windows.