Tonight, dear reader, I will be living your fantasy.

I hurry now to finish this post, knowing that you are the only thing standing between me and a private club that I recently joined.

The doorman will flash me a smile as I slip him my card. I’ll descend into the basement and past the kids who are already going at it. I’ll follow a corridor into the heart of the club and find myself surrounded by dozens of half-naked women. They will be readying themselves for the effort to come - adding jewelry and adjusting their complicated lingerie.

Welcome to the Club Med gym.

Cloob Med is the city’s largest chain of fitness centers, and the site of tonight’s continuing anthropology fieldwork. I observe as the natives try to adapt to this curious new technology.

Behold: the female approaches the Stair Master. She walks twice around, sniffing, and gingerly mounts it from behind. The hair is perfect, her makeup fresh. She climbs for fifteen minutes on level 2 without breaking a sweat. She remains the picture of perfect aloofness, even while a jewel-encrusted string (I am not making this up) carves a new trench in her backside.

What (really--I’m asking) is up with French women and their lingerie?

A recent study confirmed that they spend, on average, 20% of their clothing budget on lingerie – an estimated 2.6 billion euros per year.

I’m not knocking the general idea, mind you, but at the gym?

For my own part, I’ll be riding tonight in my sensible whites. For there’s nothing worse while working on cardio (and mentally rehearsing your next karaoke triumph) than the cold hard feel of rhinestone in your ass.

Or so I suspect…

This morning I'd like to break a seal of sorts and take a moment to mock my French boyfriend. He doesn't read the blog so this will be our little secret.

An entire series could spring from the unintentional smut that sometimes falls from his mouth - the happy accidents that arise from the difficulty of certain sounds.

The majority are related to the aspirated 'h' that many French add, unnecessarily, to English words that begin with 'a'.

To illustrate: Once, as we were stolling along the Bassin de la Villette, he offered to "rent us a rowboat, along with some hoars."

This happens all the time.

And it brings me so much amusement that I have adopted, in some cases, his particular pronunciations. I will ask him with a straight face to take me in his harms, or if my hass looks okay in certain pants.

But my all-time-favorite has nothing to do with the aspirated 'h'. It revolves instead around a preferred spread, and its French designation as Evil. Dorie Greenspan addressed this recently on her blog when she noted that,

"French children never get peanut-butter because their parents are convinced it's the root of all obesity."

The boyfriend looks bemused whenever I bring out my overpriced jar of peanut butter. He watches me uncomfortably as I spread the stuff on bread, as if I were wiping boogers on the sofa.

And then he asks me every time, inverting the word order and fatally omitting the last 't',

"Do you really like this butter peanus?"

I have never corrected him, and have in fact doubled my consumption just to hear him mispronounce it. I suppose this means, in a roundabout way, that the French parents are right.

That is the question.

Whether t'is nobler in the mind to suffer the stings and stares of jellyfish and fellow swimmers while clothed, or to bare arms and legs against a sea of turquoise...

Hamlet, remember, was European. One can deduce, then, that he had no problem exposing his (royal) family jewels while on vacation.

For an ameriçaine, however, going natural is anything but. And thus I found myself recently wrestling with the question along the crystal blue waters of Naked Cove. A secluded spot on the southern tip of Istria, we found this place following a vigorous bike ride past the tourist hordes through pine stands and berry-laden brush.

Our group, composed of 2 Americans and 2 Europeans, had discussed this on the previous day. "You will see me naked in Croatia," said the Austrian, his tone carrying a finality that promised no escape. True to his word, Bernhard was the first among us to doff his drawers, splashing into the sea in the way that God intended. This reasssured the naked Slavs who had been eyeing us warily from their spot several hundred meters to the right. Upon seeing genitalia they returned to smoking and playing with their dog.

I, meanwhile, was warily eyeing my toes. And everything north of them, egad. Was I really qualified for this?

"Americans believe that nakedness is sexual," Bernhard told me. Yes and no. Americans believe in the perfectability of the body. And every freckle and roll is a reminder that we have not worked hard enough, will not be going to heaven, and deserve neither sex nor sunshine. Whether this reminder is personal or shared depends on the alcohol available.

Fueled only by lemonade, I was taking a particularly long time with my bikini.

It was the only child in me, the competitive one who tries to out-cliff jump the boys, who won out in the end. There was no way I was going to be left behind on the safe and sexless shore. So I dropped them. And then ran like hell into the protective waters of the Adriatic.

Hours later, after seeing my scraped and sunburned companions pulling themselves gracelessly over sharp rocks, I too settled into a state of corporal indifference. I put on my flippers and mask, and set out for some naked snorkeling.

Which, it turns out, is better than heaven.