Germans love Indians, French love line dancing

You'd be surprised at how enamored Europeans are for American culture. 

There is the  German love affair with the Wild West.  Karl May, the best selling German author of all time, first stoked this love in the 19th century with his totally imaginary novels of cowboys and Indians.

Every summer the Karl May Festspiele  takes place in several German and Austrian locations and draws throngs of visitors .

German fetish for American Indians
At powwows — there are dozens every year — thousands of Germans with an American Indian fetish drink firewater, wear turquoise jewelry and run around Baden-Württemberg or Schleswig-Holstein dressed as Comanches and Apaches. There are clubs, magazines, trading cards, school curriculums, stupendously popular German-made Wild West films and outdoor theaters, including one high in the sandstone cliffs above the tiny medieval fortress town of Rathen, in Saxony, where cowboys fight Indians on horseback. A fake Wild West village, Eldorado, recently shot up on the outskirts of Templin, the city where Angela Merkel, the chancellor, grew up.

When I first skied the Jungfrau, the Swiss Alps above Grindenwald, I was astonished on my first run halfway down to come across  an enormous Indian teepee where where people stopped for coffee, raclette and sausage.

But the French passion for line dancing is a new one for me. 

They turn out in their hundreds in Stetsons and boots as hits such as the Crazy Foot Mambo and the Cowboy Strut echo around their village halls.
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“It's growing at a crazy rate. There are thousands of clubs and more are springing up all the time.”

But leave it to the French who will put line dancing under state regulation with rules, certifications and official country dancing diplomas.

Amateur instructors will have to take 200 hours of training under the new rules. Professionals will get 600 hours, including such subjects as line dancing techniques, “the mechanics of the human body” and the English (or at least Texan) language. They will also learn how to teach line dancing to the elderly.