GPS requirement for school: SLO 10. “Show an awareness of environmental and cultural responsibility.”

I don't really know exactly how to answer one of the questions in the description, "how does my being here affect people who live here?".  I ran into a mixture of answers to this question, so I will just describe my experiences with both sides.  Some people that I met loved getting to know us Americans and talking to us as we did them, but others were just rude and wanted nothing to do with us.  The employees at Pizza 30 which I discussed in one of my previous posts, loved hanging out with us and helping us learn french and the French culture and they also loved asking us questions and getting to know the American culture as well.  The things that they found kind of odd about our culture was how little we cared about soccer and how we drank coffee.  Every single place we went to eat, hang out, anything, had the world cup soccer games on the TV and when we didn't seem to care about it they thought it was strange and asked what kind of sports are more popular in America.  We explained to them that football is one of the biggest sports here that people get really into.  On one of our last days in Paris, we were at Pizza 30 and the one guy who always chatted with us asked us about drinking coffee and gave us a free cup of espresso.  The cup was so teeny tiny and when we were discussing that, he asked us how we usually drank coffee, so we explained to him that we typically drink regular coffee with sugar and milk or some type of creamer in large servings instead of very strong espresso in very small servings.  He found this to be very interesting and I also enjoyed getting to try the espresso, which was actually delicious!  Seeing as majority of the people I encountered spoke at least some english, I think that most of them do kind of embrace aspects of the American culture and seeing as there are McDonald's pretty much within walking distance of many places it is evident that they are embraced in our culture as well.