French Numbering Systems

The French approach to numbers has always struck me as somewhat odd. First, their names for "seventy" and "ninety" are basically "sixty-ten" and "eighty-ten." So seventy-one is "sixty-eleven." And what's more, their name for "eighty" is "four-twenty." So if you're saying "eighty-five" you're basically saying "four-twenty-five." It gets really funny when you're saying something like "ninety-seven" because the French word for (e.g.) "seventeen" is "ten-seven" ("dix-sept" similar to English: seventeen) so "ninety-seven" is "four-twenty-ten-seven" (quatre-vingt-dix-sept).

So now here's another oddity: I'm walking down the r. de Rivoli and, because I'm looking for 99 r. de Rivoli, I'm checking the numbers across the street to see if I'm getting close. So I see "106" and figure "99" must not be too far away. This would be WRONG. The numbers on either side of the street operate completely independently. If there's a garden, for example, on one side of the street (which obviously requires no numbers) the numbers on the buildings on the opposite side keep going up whereas the buildings beyond the garden just pick up where they left off. This results in number 47 r. de Rivoli being across the street from number 106! Hysterical, n'est-ce pas? I've got a long ways to go to get to number 99! (and then it turns out that 99 is underground anyway!).