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Thursday, April 21, 2005

Buying Cough Drops in France, a whole new experience

So I’ve started feeling sick today, I blame it on the metro, and decided to go get some cough drops after work. Now this is nothing new for me as I’ve bought cough drops on a few occasions here, again I blame the metro. But now that I have my blog I feel as though I should share this oddity that is buying cough drops in France with everyone else so as to bring a little humor into their lives.

So in France it seems there is only one place to buy cough drops, and that is at the Pharmacy. That alone I find kind of odd, but then again this is France and they are big on their specialty shops and not on their one stop shops like we love so much in the U.S. So ok, I go to the Pharmacy to get cough drops, no big deal, except they’re behind the counter. That means I have to go up to the pharmacist and ask for cough drops and then he’ll get them for me. I can’t just go in and look at the various brands/flavors/prices to pick out which one I want, I get the ones the pharmacist grabs for me. I find this odd because quite frankly I don’t understand the logic behind it. I can buy cigarettes out of vending machines, but I have to ask a pharmacist for cough drops. I can go to any doctor and tell them to write me a prescription for whatever medicine I want, yet I have to ask a pharmacist for cough drops. Are they afraid I’m going to abuse cough drops? Even if that is their concern, why do they have no way of limiting how much I buy? I mean the pharmacies are on every corner and they don’t take any information from me when I purchase them so I could easily run to every pharmacy in my vicinity to stock up on cough drops to feed my habit. Will I ever understand why they treat cough drops this way? Considering we’re dealing with the French my guess is no, I never will understand because there probably is no reason except “that’s just the way we do it.”

4 comments:

Sanjiv Gajiwala said...

Old news. We went through this in Marseille, remember? My cold. from Oktoberfest. Man, that sucked.

Kristine said...

Yes I know that's why I said it's not a new experience for me. You're not the only one that reads this so I thought I'd share with everyone else who were not in Marseille with us.

Anonymous said...

i can attest that it is very easy to convince a French doctor who has no idea who you are to write you a perscription for medicine that she doesn't even know if you need for the length of time that you tell her to write it for...and doing all of this convincing in a foreign language (french)...but yes, cough drops, it's a tight market here...i say we start the black market on that one, kristine...think of all those people out there in France who may be needing cough drops but whatever reason can't face that barrier we call "the counter".

Anonymous said...

Kristine let me know if you need a US supplier. I can go to Sams and stock up. Maybe the french like people to cough. It is tre sexy