I have become increasingly interested in the social act of kissing on the cheeks during my several summer holidays in France. France is one of the European countries where this gesture is most spread, but what makes it different from other European states is that the number of kisses changes from region to region and even from village to village.
So, I started studying this custom in the 1990s and, since then, I've kept looking at its practice in the European countries I have visited.
The main problem that justifies such a blog is that not all European peoples practise the cheek kissing the same way. Some exchange one kiss, some two kisses, some other three or more kisses. Furthermore, in some countries people kiss everytime they meet, whereas in others people never or rarely kiss.
This blog can be considered as the evolution of the Yahoo! group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kissing-cheeks-europe/, which has turned rather inactive lately. I will also post here what I have previously written in this discussion group or elsewhere.
I hope this blog will prove useful both to European visitors (to understand another element that adds on enriching our cultural diversity) and to non-European people (to learn about this custom which is unknown to some cultures).
Michele
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2 comments:
Ici, c'est un bec sur chaque joue, en commençant par la joue gauche.
I would very much love it if you could post more articles. This is a really interesting topic.
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