Waiting to pay for your grocery purchase, you might easily find yourself standing behind a French woman with a full shopping cart, naked except for her high-heeled sandals and pale blue nail polish, while behind you a portly German man wearing only a tight-fitting American T-shirt and broad straw sun hat waits impatiently to buy a bottle of ketchup.

Only on the white sand beach do you find signs reading Nudité Obligatoire -- ostensibly to discourage voyeurism. In the evenings, however, when it cools off, people dress for dinner -- this is still France, after all!