France

Phone numbers are often written as five pairs of digits, separated by a space or a period.

French text has plenty of "â, î, û, ê, ô" and "é" characters.

Street-name plaques are often mounted on building walls, reading "Rue". If you see "Rue", you're probably in a French-speaking area.

Bollards are thick, round white posts with a red reflector. Some have a differently colored tip or reflector, and some look like an eraser.

If a utility pole has a blue plate attached, it's French territory 99% of the time. There are rare exceptions, so betting against it is risky.

There are square concrete utility poles, and poles divided into segments.

Yellow plates show road numbers starting with D, like "D653".

As in most other EU countries, license plates are usually blue on the left side only. Some are blue on both sides, and some are all yellow.

In France's overseas departments too, you'll sometimes see the same EU-style plates that are blue on the left side.

• Saint-Pierre and Miquelon
• Réunion
• Martinique

Blue-and-white chevron arrows exist. France and Spain are the only European countries that use blue-and-white chevrons.

Red regulatory signs, like speed limits, have a white border.

France is the only place where the blue "keep right" sign is square.

A center line made of two joined squares (□□) is only seen in France.

Cube-shaped mailboxes are common.

Completely flat land with shallow saltwater ponds, reed beds, square rice paddies, and salt pans mixed together means the Camargue at the mouth of the Rhône. It's mostly wetland, and the black cattle and white horses grazing there are another landmark.

Small pastures each enclosed by tall hedgerows growing on earthen banks, with roads sunk between banks on both sides, mean bocage. It's densest in western Normandy. It also survives in places such as inland Mayenne and Vendée.

The north and west are mostly flat land or low hills, while the south and east have many mountains. The high mountains are the Alpes, the Pyrénées, and Corsica; the mid-height ranges are the Massif Central, the Jura, and the Vosges.

Endless stands of tall pine (maritime pine) forest are found in the Landes forest in the southwest (the triangle from Pointe de Grave to Hossegor to Nérac).

Short, umbrella-shaped pine (stone pine) and pine with twisted trunks (Aleppo pine) are found along the Mediterranean coast, especially in Provence east of the Rhône.

Giant reed is common in a band about 50km wide along the Mediterranean coast and in the lower Rhône valley. It's also seen around Toulouse and on the Basque coast. In general it grows in warm areas, up to about 900m elevation.

Along the Atlantic coast, especially on the offshore islands (Île de Ré, Oléron, etc.), single-story white-walled houses are common. Window shutters are often coloured.

The more easily available slate (a black, plate-like material) is in a region, the darker its roofs tend to be. It's especially common in the northwest, from the Brittany peninsula to Anjou. It's also common around Corrèze in the centre, in the Pyrenees, the northern Alps, and the Ardennes. The shading here is fairly rough, so black roofs are perfectly common even outside the shaded areas.

In the mountains near Switzerland, houses look more Swiss in style, and you'll find houses built from wooden planks.

Huge, flat fields of wheat, rapeseed, and sugar beet stretching to the horizon (no hedges, no fences) mean the Paris Basin. That covers a wide area from Lille–Amiens in the north through Paris and Orléans to Champagne in the east, and the Caen plain and around Bourges look the same.

Long, windowless livestock sheds (pigs, chickens) lined up beside farmhouses, surrounded by corn fields and small hedge-bordered plots, mean Brittany.

Crops follow a regional pattern. Rapeseed fields are common from the Paris Basin through northern Burgundy to Lorraine, while sunflower fields are common in the southwest around Gers–Toulouse, and in Poitou–Charentes and Berry. Both are rare in Brittany, Normandy, and along the Mediterranean coast.

On a dry plateau, purple plants in rows running parallel to the horizon mean a lavender field. The centres are the Valensole plateau in Alpes-de-Haute-Provence and around Sault in Vaucluse.

If gently sloping hills are covered in vineyards and the road cuts or field soil look whitish, that's Champagne.

Town names take on the flavor of neighboring languages. "-heim" or "-ett" suggests you're near the German border, "-court" or "-ville" suggests the north, and "-ac" suggests the southwest.

If you see Occitan text on signs, you're probably in southern France.

Around the Luberon in the southeast, you'll find stone walls and other structures built from thin, flat, white stone slabs.

If you see lots of brick houses, consider that you might be near Belgium.

On Corsica, signs are bilingual in Corsican and French, and for historical reasons the French text is sometimes blacked out or covered with graffiti or holes.

Corsica is a small island, but it has a chain of mountains over 2500m, with dull-coloured rocky peaks made of schist. Outside the area near the east coast there's almost no flat land, and 40% of the island is nature park.

The island of Noirmoutier is a Ramsar-listed wetland, and its completely flat surroundings are a very rare sight in France. It has many channels, and lots of floating duckweed.

Porquerolles, an island in the Hyères Islands off the Mediterranean coast, has lots of unpaved roads and yellow signs. It has a Mediterranean climate, and the trees have a warm feel too.

The Mediterranean coast has karst inlets called calanques. The area outside Marseille has a lot of this karst terrain.

The Col de la Bonette pass, sometimes called the "highest road in Europe," carries road D64.

There's a road up to the Aiguille de la Grande Sassière, an Alpine mountain in the Savoie department. At first glance it's hard to tell you're in France.

Paris's arrondissement (administrative district) numbers start at 1 in Le Louvre and increase in a clockwise spiral.