super-size me

My second day in France I chatted it up with an employee at a cell-phone store, and told him it was my first time living in the country. He asked how I liked it and I said it was rad.
"You probably think everything is really small here, don't you?"
This caught me off-guard. Marseille is a freaking huge city, and my first week I felt so small. I was an ant and Marseille was a driveway. I told him France was different in a lot of ways, but not in size.
"But in America, everything is big! You have sky-scrapers and New York City!"
I nodded, assuming he was a lunatic that thought Jay-Z and I ate hamburgers together for breakfast every morning in Central Park.

But now I realize he was right. Things are shrinking. My room is the size of a nice closet, and my bathroom is the size of a nice suitcase. When I walk through the supermarket my left elbow grazes the salami and my right hand gets caught in bunches of grapes. If I wear a backpack my whole day is a struggle, I think "Oh, I can't go to that store, I won't fit in with the backpack. I really have to use the bathroom, but I won't be able to get in there with the backpack." People cram in together on tiny chairs in the tiny metro and sometimes I just want to go to Costco in a minivan and run up and down the aisles with a giant cart of family-sized products and spread my arms way out.

I thought living in the second-largest city in the country might be the real cause of my claustrophobia, so I did some really intense math, and found out that the US has 80 people per square mile and France has 300 people per square mile. If you are living in the US right now, look at the personal space you have at this very instant- your room your apartment, your desk- and divide it by almost 4. We are packed in like sardines over here, guys.