1. Don't worry about finding gyros. There's plenty around, though the meat shafts are taller and not as highly spiced as in America.

2. Sports gear isn't the standard for casual attire.

3. Violent fashionability is not much in evidence. There are people of extra style and beauty, but mostly they are just informally good looking. Preppy tastefulness seems the norm.

4. Shorts, T-shirts, baseball hats and team togs make Americans stick out, as does a certain obliviousness: We seem more relaxed than we should in someone else's country. Sometimes, however, apparent Americans are German.

5. Driving or walking. Parisians don't seem to like getting out of the way. It's like a city full of teenagers.

6. With a good air fare and a reasonable hotel, you actually can get by fairly cheaply. The Metro is really inexpensive, the museum pass is a great deal, and bakeries and ethnic restaurants are realistic alternatives to classy and/or touristy joints, which seem uniformly -- and remarkably -- overpriced.

7. Eventually you get tired of noticing that everything is cute.

8. London's National Gallery built a special gallery -- virtually a chapel -- for its da Vinci. At the Louvre, the most famous painting in the world is just another painting in a huge gallery except they've got it behind an ugly Plexiglas case they don't even keep clean.

9. The Cluny museum, devoted mostly to the Middle Ages, has a lot more stuff than you might expect. The Orsay, devoted to the 19th and early 20th Century, has less, which is a plus in terms of manageability.

10. Is it coincidence that platform shoes, all the rage, make their wearers look clumsy, no matter how naturally elegant they may be?

11. The flea market bears a day's visit, if only because it takes that long to pick your way through the thickets of fine antiques to the interesting stuff (like the erotica dealer Au Bonheur Du Jour in Marche Dauphine). On the edges are vendors of junk, new and old, who would fit well at Maxwell Street. And beyond the boundaries are hawkers -- mostly immigrant, it appears -- who keep their stuff on blankets and do indeed dissolve when a police van pulls up.

12. In the 15th Century, when they rebuilt Bern, they had the good sense to require arcades in front of all the buildings. The city's old town is lined for miles with these wonderful shelters.

13. Don't underestimate the beauty of Gothic cathedrals. It's pretty cliched to say, but an awful lot of the art we value today looks pretty pallid, and America's cultural output fairly pointless, compared with, say, the 13th Century glass at Sainte-Chapelle.

14. EuroBert, resident of Sesamstrasse, wears cords.