French Kisses, and Kiss-offs - Do they like us, really like us? Yeah, in a way.(France and other European countries becoming more like America)

'Tell me," a successful French chef asked me yesterday, "is it true that Americans eat at least one meal a day in their cars?"

Like almost everything the Europeans believe about Americans, this is both true and untrue. We like our drive-through, yes, but not quite (I hope) once a day. I tried to explain this. We're an automobile culture, I said. To us, cars symbolize freedom and vitality. And we're always in a hurry to see things and do things, and in a country of such vast open spaces, eating in the car just seems natural.

He still seemed troubled by this. Europeans-especially the French-often zero in on this particular American habit when trying to figure us out. It's bewildering to them that anyone would choose to drive and eat at the same time, when both of those things are so pleasurable by themselves. It seems almost decadent to them, and vaguely unhygienic.

"But would it not be possible," he said after a moment, "to stop the car and maybe get out of the car and eat and then get back in the car and continue driving?"

"I guess so," I said.

He nodded. "Yes, I think that would be better. For the appetite. And for the health."

It's important to bear in mind, as the dollar-euro exchange rate hits summer-vacation-splurge levels, that we seem just as weird to them as they do to us. Weirder, actually. Imagine, if you can, the jarring, disconnected impression you'd get if your three sources of information about the United States were extravagant television shows, the International Herald Tribune, and baffled, overweight tourists. On television, rapacious young people with pearl-white teeth and fantastic bodies purr erotically at each other to the hoots and applause of a studio audience. In the Herald Tribune, the front page showcases the political struggle between the "far-right, anti-Europe" Republicans and the "moderate, progressive" Democrats, and the editorial page, a distillation of the deep thoughts of the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, is so reliably and reflexively anti-American that it's hard for the Europeans not to suspect some kind of trick. (I mean, what kind of country publishes a newspaper for its citizens abroad whose sole editorial thrust is to remind them that their country stinks?)