Cultural Differences: the good with the bad

So: I think the way your prior education prepares you for various cultural differences makes a BIG difference in where you will place them on the scale from enchanting to these-people-are-crazy. For example, French people smoke a lot. Everyone knows this. You come to France, and someone at the table next to you is puffing gauloises in your direction, and you think, "Oh, the French. How...French." You go to a party and everyone gives you the bises, that two-cheek kiss-kiss, and you feel exotic, sophisticated, and chic, because the bises fit into your pre-conceived notion of what it means to be French.

But sometimes you don't know about a custom until you find out you've transgressed some social rule. I do not like learning this way. I've recently discovered that "excuse me" is not a polite way to start a conversation here unless accompanied with "hello." I found this out after I started to notice I was getting evil looks from people I stopped to ask for help or information. Last week I went into a shop to ask their hours, and the conversation went like this:

Me: Excuse me, what time--

Shop girl: HELLO.

Me (nodding confusedly): Yes, what time--

Shop girl: HELLO.

Me: Yes, what time--

Shop girl: HELLO.

Me: WHAT TIME DO YOU CLOSE TODAY?

The shop girl and other customers were rolling their eyes and shaking their heads, and a post-game analysis with Josh sorted it out: I was supposed to start with, "Hello excuse me," or "Excuse me hello," but not just, "Excuse me." The thing that stinks is that the better you get in a foreign language, the less people are accepting of this kind of mistake. A researcher gave a presentation on this phenomenon at a conference for language teachers I attended last summer, and it was like bells started ringing in my head and fireworks exploded in my brain when she explained it. Because it is SO TRUE: the better your French (or Spanish, or American) accent, the more you seem like "one of us," and the more surprised (and offended) we are when you don't follow our social rules. But if you have a heinous accent and are fumbling for words like "hello," and "thank you," people generally put aside their ideas of how the conversation should go (did you remember to say please?) and focus on just understanding what on earth you're trying to say.

But back to my point. It can be REALLY FRUSTRATING to have to learn by getting it wrong. Example: yesterday I went, for the first time, to one of Josh's ultimate frisbee tournaments. We pulled up at the crack of dawn to the team's meeting spot here in Aix to pack more people into the car and caravan to Nîmes, where the tournament was going to take place. I was coccooned in my seat with bags of snacks and other gear for the day, and munching happily on my breakfast. So, I stayed put (as did M, another American rider who we'd already picked up), the car was packed with more people, and we left. And as we were pulling out, someone mentioned that it had been rude of us to stay in the car instead of getting out to give everyone their good morning bises.

This rankled us. We're going to spend all weekend with you engaged in (or watching you play) a team sport, which is a significant amount of quality time, and politeness dictates that instead of a smile and a wave, we begin the weekend by extracting ourselves from the car in order to kiss you all? How much of me do you people want?!?!

I think the problem is that most adults have confidence in their abilities to act logically. So when you are faced with a small problem to solve (stay in car vs. get out and kiss people), you do what is logical to you, and you think nothing of it. And then, when you find out that you were expected to act otherwise, since you had determined what to do using your well-functioning logic, it makes the French course of action seem illogical. It leaves you thinking everyone around you is crazy for wanting you to kiss them good morning, file reams of paperwork, or say "hello" before you say "excuse me."

Luckily, Josh's frisbee team thinks of M and I as "the clueless Americans," a notion of which I do not plan to disabuse them. So even though they thought we were being rude (and we thought they were crazy), they also thought it was funny.

M and my annoyance at the French bises was exacerbated when we got to the tournament. The team got into their pre-game huddle, where we knew Josh was going to lay out his plan for beating their first opponents, Discobol. Last year Josh's team, T-R'Aix, beat Discobol by a hair, and this tournament, Discobol was gunning to take them out. So, Josh circled everyone up and began his pre-match pep talk and strategy briefing...and was promptly interrupted by a member of KLB, a "friendly" team, who sauntered onto the field to say hello. They were playing later in the day, so they'd be rooting for T-R'Aix during the first game, and their arrival occasioned the bises. Which means, as Josh tried valiantly to rally his team, first one, and then another of KLB's players walked around his huddle, pulling out each T-R'Aix player in turn to give them two kisses. Their focus was blown. Finally Josh stopped an approaching KLB player in his tracks and told him to stay away until the huddle was over, but the damage was done. T-R'Aix lost the first game in overtime and the defeat weighed down on them for the rest of the day. I'm waiting now to hear from Josh how today's matches went, but T-R'Aix had gotten off on the wrong foot.

As KLB's captain actually walked THROUGH THE HUDDLE to give those $%#& bises, I caught M's eye and mouthed, "I WANT TO GO HOME." Sometimes I just can't take this culture. But the bad comes along with some nice surprises--not least of which is how they treat pregnant women in France. We knew that historically, France has been very pro-reproduction because of a low-population crisis after WWII. We didn't know that we're going to be getting a nice little payment from the government to help buy baby gear. Or that a body pillow for my pregnancy-related backaches will be covered by our insurance. But apparently pregnant women themselves are given really cushy treatment. I had my first experience with this today. The grocery store was packed, and I joined the back of a verrrrrry long line at the "priority" (handicapped or pregnant) register. I wondered why non-priority clients were in the line, but I also didn't expect what happened next: I was ushered all the way up to the front, even past a woman with a baby who was only buying three boxes of granola bars. I tried to make her go before me (I had a giant basket of stuff) and everyone insisted: pregnant girl goes first.

It was nice to get special treatment...but I still thought everyone was crazy. I wonder, when I get back to the US, will I have reverse culture shock and think all the Americans are crazy? Probably, but hopefully I'll be able to take the bad with the good, eat cupcakes, and be happy.

I wonder...

This evening Josh said to me:

"Today I went swimming in my underwear. People looked at me funny, but I think it was because of my hat."



If we were in France, he would have been right. If we were in the US...not so much. But where does Spain stand on the swimming in underwear vs. floppy sunhat opinion spectrum? This is something they have neglected to discuss in my "Spanish Culture" class. But we do have class again tomorrow; maybe I'll bring it up.

Update: I DID ask the culture professor about it. She said a hat was normal for summer, and then burst out laughing when I mentioned that Josh had gone swimming in his calzoncillos. Case closed.

La vida aquí

I just took the cross-town bus home from Josh's apartment (I got "free" dorm housing, he found a sublet for the month). And I passed the bilboard with a digital clock/thermometer on it and sighed with relief, because it's only 35 degrees out. It's finally cooled off a bit. How nice. 35 degrees celcius, for anyone who thinks in farenheit, is a whopping 95. About fifteen degrees cooler than it was this afternoon, when we got dragged around to see a bunch of old renaissance palaces. But I'm not complaining.

Really, I'm not. I might hazard a bet that this is one of the most fun summers I've had since I went to essay-writing camp when I was 14. I really don't know what to do with myself when I'm not staring out a window wishing class were over. I currently have 7 hours a day in which I can stare out the window wishing class were over, although this is not generally how I'm spending my time. The classes are pretty interesting (some more so, some less so) and I'm REALLY getting a kick out of being in a room full of other language teachers. Especially when they get into shushing fights, because the people that were being shushed two minutes ago are now annoyed with the shushers, who have given up shushing and started talking to their neighbors (not even bothering to whisper), and then finally someone gets mad enough to yell at someone and say that they can't hear the professor, who is looking mildly bewildered at the fact that a room full of adults can't manage to raise their hands to ask a question. This has only happened a handful of times, though--I'd say less than 20.

Ok, so I'm tired, because it's 11:30 and it's still too hot to go to bed, and so I'm getting cranky. But I'm really enjoying my classes, the best one by far being the class where we're figuring out how to look at a Latin word and explain how two millennia of people mispronouncing it gave us the Spanish word we have today. For example, someone hanging out on the Iberian peninsula around 200 a.d. couldn't say the sound made by "f" and "l" together, and their mispronunciation gave us the "y" sound at the beginning of the word "llama," which the Romans called "flamma." If you know me, you can imagine how much I am enjoying this. It's nothing like the academic glee I feel for 8th/9th century norse invaders (aka vikings) but I'm definitely having a good time. And I really do like my classmates. After two years of having to surmount cultural differences just to be able to chit-chat happily with the person beside me in class, I am SO HAPPY to be in a giant group of Americans. Can I just say how great Americans can be?

It's also just cool to be in Spain again. The first time I ever "lived" abroad was when I studied in Madrid for a semester, and even the things I completely forgot about or never knew about, I still feel like they're a little familiar. Like people pushing you to get past instead of asking you to move, or the juice boxes of wine in the grocery store.

This weekend we had a mandatory field trip to Segovia, a town about 2 hours away.

I had been there before, and remembered the Roman aqueduct:

And the castle:

And was not at all surprised by the random old man trying to pick up any of us he could while we were standing around trying to listen to our professor lecture on the aqueduct's history. Here he is hitting on my friend Erin.

(Check out how cool his belt is. People here are much crazier dressers than in France.)

Hm, it's 11:40 and one thing I had totally forgotten about Spain is how late people go to bed. It's just too hot to do anything between 1 and 7 pm, and the sun doesn't set until 10:30. People are just waking up about now. Sounds like there's a fiesta in the dorm courtyard. Do I try to sleep in spite of the racket or go join the party? Eh, when in Rome. . . besides, it's too hot to close my window, so I don't think sleeping stands a chance.

Samedi

Today we played hard. It was the birthday of some friends in Marseille who have an AMAZING rooftop deck with views over the sailboat-filled old port, the medieval fortresses guarding it, and the islands in the Mediterranean. We baked ourselves in the sunshine and "partied hard" which in this case meant eating about a zillion kinds of pork sausage. If Josh doesn't wake up with a stomach ache it will be a MIRACLE.

I was proud of myself and my humble offering to the party fare; this was one of the first times I've decided entirely what to cook based on "what looks good" at the market. I made a basic crust-and-fruit tart with "pêches de vigne" -- very fruity, fragrant peaches (David Lebovitz calls them a cross between peaches and raspberries), and sprinkled it with dried lavender. In the 45 seconds it took me to buy lavender at the dried herbs stand, I think the little old man working there gave me eight or nine other suggestions for how to use lavender in cooking (put it in tea. put it in pasta. put it on meats.) and then tried to sell me three or four other kinds of herbs. Desolée, monsieur. You've got me stocked up on enough herbes de provence to last me for at least another two months.


For the tart, I used Smitten Kitchen's amazing basic apple tart recipe, and I don't have any pictures but I was really proud of the finished result. I made some lemon-lavender syrop at the same time by tossing in some of the lavender as I heated up a simple syrup for lemonade. Flavored syrop are really big here, and you can get all different kinds (our favorites are peach and almond). People add them to water, seltzer, or even beer (a demi-pêche--beer with peach syrup--is SO good on a hot day). I stuck the syrup and lemon juice combo in a bottle in the fridge to be watered down into lemonade on a per-glass basis, and it's saving me space for an extra bottle of sparkling mineral water, my newest obsession. Even with some sugar syrup splashed in, it's got less fat than a yogurt.

So with my home-made syrop in the fridge and my tart in the bellies of the nice people at the party today, I'm feeling pretty good about my samedi. I also had a first: my first bises while blowing my nose. The standard greeting at any social event here is the bises, the two-cheek kiss-kiss. When I lived in Spain, I had no problem with the kiss-kiss but for some reason, here it drives me nuts. I never know when it's appropriate or not, so I always stand around looking awkward when it's time to say goodbye or be introduced. I feel like my personal space is being invaded and the person giving me the bises is probably giving me some kind of virus simultaneously. And now that I wear glasses, if I bises somebody who has them too, our glasses clink, which is mildly unpleasant. None of this ever bothered me in Spain. Maybe it's because Spanish speakers just seem so much warmer to me that I don't mind being drawn in and touched and connected with. Doing the bises here in France seems to be contrary to the way I'm treated the rest of the time. Lean in for a quick cheek-cheek and then back away to a safe emotional distance. This is, of course, a huge generalization and there are cold Spanish speakers and very warm and open French people. But still, at the party this afternoon (where maybe 80% of attendees were from somewhere in the hispanophone universe), it just wasn't weird to be bised. Not even really by the host, who came over and bised me while I was blowing my nose--as in, tissue held to face during the entire interaction.

Josh is brushing his teeth which is the sign that my samedi is over. Oh dear...just realized I never did the dishes from today's culinary exertions. Guess my day will last just a little while longer, then.

Bonne nuit!

Au Boulot!

Exams are coming up in a few weeks and Josh and I both have beaucoup du boulot--tons of work. Not much more than should be expected for people both in school and working, but since it's the first time we've tried this, it's a bit overwhelming. I pulled an all-nighter last Thursday to finish a paper and my college roommate sent me this:

Hear, hear! Makes me want to toss the books and go get ice cream!

Muguets du Printemps

Spring is here! Sortof! The trees have all flowered and then leaved (grown leaves?) but it's still kinda cold and rainy. What happened to this being the south of France!?!?! One particularly nice aspect of the rain (aside from how gorgeous a cloudy sky looks over the hills) is that the rain chases away the droves of smokers who hang out on the doorstep of our apartment building. Our alley is just wide enough to count as a "place" (pronounced "plahss," the french equivalent of an open square or plaza), and everyone working in the neighboring shops seems to come here for their smoking break. And since our building has the most sit-able doorstep. . . we get a lot of second-hand smoke. Josh is especially not-cool with breathing in chemicals, so I wasn't surprised the other day when I stuck my head out for something and the smokers jumped up and asked if they were bothering me. But I WAS surprised when they added, "Is that your husband who lives here with you?" "Yes...pour quoi?" I hoped Josh hadn't pissed off this particular group of loiters--they looked like up-to-no-good teenage punks. "Because he's a really nice guy! He let us ride his bike!" Josh told me later he had gotten them to lend him a hand while he was changing a bike tire and they'd struck up a friendship. The last time we saw them take their smoking break (they've moved up the alley, I guess Josh did mention he's not cool with breathing tar), Josh even called them over to try some banana bread. "It's our job to be good cultural ambassadors," I told them. "We want everyone to know that Americans eat stuff other than hamburgers."

So, anyway, Spring is here, and today was May 1st, which is Labor Day here. For some reason, on May 1st everyone gives each other lily-of-the-valley, which I think is really cool. Unfortunately for the flower, its french name is muguet, (moo-GAY) which is just not as pretty as its American name, but it's still hugely popular here. I think the story goes that some fair maid gave a spring to her knight-in-shining-armor before a tournament and it became a good luck symbol...but what it has to do with May 1st is beyond me. It's a flower with a soft spot in my heart from being the favorite of my dear old great-great-aunt Kitty, and the name of one of my little cousins, and I was excited to see it pop up everywhere on May 1st last year. We were in Paris with my family, and I snapped a shot of the window of the Ladurée patisserie, one of the nicest in the city of lights:
(I just love that little box with the bouquet on it in the lower left-hand corner! so cute! so french!)

I thought about buying myself a sprig of muguet at the market this morning--I'm not french enough yet to think of getting it for someone else. After spending WAY too much on broccoli and splurging on a barquette of gorgeous local strawberries, though, I decided it was an unnecessary expense. I could have gotten a potted lily-of-the-valley, too (how cool is THAT?) but our ivy is hanging on by a tendril and I didn't want to kill something I got because it reminds me of Aunt Kitty. So I contented myself with the lovely springtime purchases of picture-perfect strawberries and a fresh local goat cheese:

Mmmm... made for a good samedi brunch.

I LOVE getting our fruits and veggies from farmers with dirt still under their fingernails. Tonight's dinner was another market offering, summery courgettes farcis. As we were sitting down to eat it, we were interrupted by someone outside yelling, "Hey, Uncle Sam!" Seriously. We went over and opened the curtain, and it was the punky teenage loiterers. "Sorry," they said. "We couldn't think of something else to call you." And then they handed us a spring of lily-of-the-valley and thanked us again for the banana bread.

I love my life some times.

Uncle Josh wants YOU to be kind to your neighbors!

What we love (and what shocks us)

I LOVE hearing French people tell me about their vacations to the US. I spend so much time musing over the quirky things about French culture that I like to get the reverse viewpoint. So, back at school after spring break (two weeks!), one of the third graders came up to me in complete raptures to gush about his trip to New York. His highlights: eating a hotdog from a street vendor, and the Phantom of the Opera marquee. He didn’t see the show, but there was something about the image of the mask he found intriguing. His mom did take him to see Mary Poppins on Broadway (a smarter choice for an eight year old boy), and we had a good time discussing how cool the set was—it was funny to find myself reminiscing about New York with a French third grader. The American cultural quirk he found the most interesting? “Instead of asking for the toilet, we had to say something about a bathroom.” Yeah, just like the British, the French think we’re weird for using euphemisms to talk about...um...restrooms.

On Tuesday, somehow the conversation in the teachers’ lounge turned to visits to the US, and the CP (Kindergarten) teacher had been to the states a few times to visit a cousin. “I liked Virginia,” she told me, “But the people there seemed a bit prude.” I figured she must be talking about that stereotype of wearing skirts to football games and going jogging in pearls. On further questioning, though, this was her culture shock: “Oh, well, you know, I was just eightteen, and my cousin told me we absolutely had to put clothes on in the morning. My sister and I couldn’t stay in our bras and underwear for breakfast. She said, ‘I’m sorry, but we get dressed here.'” I assured my co-worker that we tend to get dressed in the morning in other parts of the US, too, and that she had definitely played her part to contribute to American stereotypes about the French. I wonder what the conversation had been like between her cousin and her cousin’s new American husband before they put a stop to their visitors' morning...Frenchness.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many people want to tell me all about their favorite US vacations when they find out I’m an americaine. Last Monday the guy sitting beside me in class had some questions about my life as a foreign student, since he wants to do the same thing, but reverse: it’s his dream to study in the US. He wanted to know if I go into Marseille much (it’s our nearest big city) and I said I would, but I don’t know what to do there, and did he have any suggestions? He looked a bit stumped. “Man,” he said, “I’m just a 20-year-old guy. I have no idea what to tell you to go do.” I’m not sure if the fact that he was a 20-year-old-guy meant he thought his experiences limited or just completely unlike anything that could possibly appeal to me. I flatter myself it was the former.

I asked him why he wanted to live aux États-Unis and he was once more unable to express his interest. “Is it the culture?” I asked him, “The people?” “Nooo.....” he answered thoughfully... “It’s that, well...here, in France, we have McDonalds, and we have Quick,” (crappy McDonald’s knock-off) “and in the US, you have McDonalds, and right next to it, you have...what’s it called? Yeah, Wendy’s! And then Jack in the Box, and In and Out... It’s amazing.” I enjoyed basking in his effervescent bliss at the idea of la vie americaine, even if it isn’t the part of being from the US that I’m most proud of or most miss.

I guess I could figure out what that is by looking at what I brag about the most when talking about my patrie. And that would have to be our amazing return policies. The average amount of time you have to return something to a store here? Fifteen days. That is one day over two weeks, and about seventy five days under the three months you get at a place like the GAP... and a bazillion days under the limitless returns at Bed Bath and Beyond, who ALSO TAKE THEIR COMPETITORS COUPONS. Half the time here we can’t even get the in-store specials marked “reduction taken at register.”

But, no, I wanted to talk about French people’s perceptions of the US, not how much I miss American shopping. Actually, two French women I know who are my mom’s age told me about visits to the US made when they were teenagers and how shocked they were by “les grandes surfaces”—basically, our grocery stores, or department stores, or stores like Target. That didn’t exist here 30 years ago—people went from shop to shop to get their groceries, and Josh and I could do that now if we didn’t feel so much more comfortable going to Monoprix where we can get our milk, printer paper and cleaning products in one fell swoop (in fact, I need to finish this and go get milk before they close). One of the women said she was just completely overwhelmed by seeing so many things in one place, with loud music playing, and the other had a much funnier shock (she's the one who wasn’t thrilled with the whole “clothes” thing). She said she didn’t even bother going in while her cousin did her shopping, and instead, she and her sister had plunked themselves down on a bench for two hours and watched everyone coming in and out of the grocery store. Now it was my turn to be shocked...I didn’t think Americans were all that interesting. “We couldn’t get over it,” she said, “Our jaws were just hanging open. In France, if you’re going to go out to the store, you’re careful about what you wear. And there, there were adult women, out in public, wearing shorts...and tank tops.”

Um... I guess when I get back from Monoprix I'm rotating the tank tops to the back of my closet. Or not. Sometimes I just can't let go of my identity as an American, and, you know, people seem to be OK with that--especially when part of that American-ness means bringing in a loaf of Josh's homemade banana bread. As they were passing it around the lunch table in the teachers lounge, someone turned to me and said, "you know, I know an americaine, and once she served a cake made with carrots." My new resolution: make them my mom's zucchini bread. This is gonna BLOW THEIR MINDS.

Sophisticated French Lunch

Josh is away again playing in a frisbee tournament for the weekend. My goal: to do all the laundry (about 5 loads), mop the floor, do my homework, and eat something other than yogurt and nutella, which wouldn't even get the dignity of being a nutella sandwich, since we still haven't found a good baguette anywhere near our new apartment. So far I've succeeded: we had some leftover french onion soup in the fridge....but f.o.s. needs those giant cheese-covered croutons. How do you eat it without baguette?

Answer: goldfish crackers.

I originally just brought goldfish back to France to give to my students (it was one of our vocab words this fall). But I feel like the more we see of the world, the more we can appreciate some previously-overlooked good things from the US. Taking away their context helps us see them "outside the box." Here, goldfish aren't just a kids' snack...they're a delightful cheesy cracker perfect with a sweet muscat wine for a pre-dinner aperitif. And what could better accompany them than a sweet-and-savory tomato dip? Mmmmmmm, goldfish and ketchup.

Actually, I think I'd stick with sundried tomato tapenade for any goldfish dipping, but Josh had ketchup on his pre-tournament scrambled eggs this morning and it was looking pretty delectable.

Alright, I've gotta go to the grocery store and throw all this laundry in a dryer somewhere.... five loads is just WAY to much to hang dry in our apartment. No more blogging and back to work. And by work I may or may not mean trying to make savoury carrot panna cotta, which we got last night at a restaurant in our neighborhood and want to marry. I mean make ourselves some time.

Breakfast for Appetizers and Appetizers for Breakfast

I haven't been blogging because I've been . . . not here. I went back to the US for a couple of months to be with my family for awhile, but now I'm back, in a new apartment (pictures to follow), studying my brains out (well, really procrastinating my brains out) and cooking up a storm. This week I've made three versions of my new favorite recipe: Savoury cake.


Savoury cake!?!? yup, it's a really popular aperitif, or "shnick-shnack," as my mother in law would describe something served at a coffee table with a pre-dinner cocktail. If you're invited over for dinner around here, the pre-dinner spread is likely to include:
salted nuts
olives
thinly sliced sausages
thin crispy breadsticks

we've also been served something called "paté en croûte" which is translated as "paté in crust." That's exactly what it is--basically, a loaf pan with a pie crust tucked inside, filled with paté and baked, and then sliced like bread. SO GOOD. But so bad for you.

There are also French appetizer items that seem to veer into the world of breakfast foods. At one dinner in Paris last week, we were served, as an appetizer, poached eggs over toast and sautéed mushrooms with bordelaise sauce. Breakfast for appetizers? Weird, but delicious.

And then there's the world of appetizer flavors in non-appetizer packages: herbed or cheese crackers that are really the texture of shortbread or chocolate chip cookies and vegetable crumbles, even molten broccoli cake with a center of melted cheese sauce.

And then there's cake salé, savory cake: your basic cake recipe, hold the sugar, and add omelet ingredients. Voilà, a cross between a cracker and an omelet. Perfect for French appetizers or American breakfast.


So, here's my basic recipe:

Preheat oven to 350. Grease loaf pan.

Sift together in a bowl:
2 cups of flour
2 teaspoons baking powder

Add 5 eggs (remember, this is breakfast for a week) and 2 tablespoons olive oil (or canola). Mix until it's a uniform batter.

Add "toppings":
2/3 cup cheese
1 1/2 cups something else (veggies, diced ham, bacon, etc.)

Stir, pour in loaf pan and bake for 45 minutes. Let cool, slice generously, and enjoy as a snack, breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, appetizer. . . it's a pretty versatile dish.

So far I've made ham and green olive (the classic provençal version), bacon and mushroom (the classic hobbit version) and spinach, goat cheese, herbs and tomato. That's my favorite so far. I used tomato concentrate in a tube (try the Italian aisle of the grocery store) and swirled it in for a marbled effect that didn't work as well as I hoped but is still yummy.

I know my love affair with this recipe is too passionate to last very long, but I'm not sure what can take the place of savoury cake in my pantry and fridge. It takes about 10 minutes to prep, needs no supervision while baking. I can throw a piece in a baggie and have breakfast-to-go; I can keep it in my backpack (being careful not to squish it) for an after-school snack before work, we can eat it for a quick no-dishes-necessary lunch... plus, packed full of spinach, or made with 3 eggs and 4 egg whites...it's a pretty healthy way to get some protein (and we'd eat that much cheese anyway). Are you daring enough to try a cake that isn't for dessert? Let me know if you manage to break free of your coffee cake ideals and fall in love with this breakfast bad boy.

More cheese

Hm, I think I will procrastinate cleaning the bathroom and reading El Burlador de Sevilla by writing another blog post.

The lanquetot has stunked up our fridge to the point that anything that was refridgerated for more than 30 minutes smells like lanquetot. This is not bad. It just means, according to the French, that the lanquetot has "character." And character, chez les fromages, is a positive attribute.

So, when I pulled out my lunch at work the other day and someone across the room said, "Wow, I can smell that cheese you're eating," no one was surprised when I told them that there was no cheese in my lunch, this particular cheese had only sat next to my lunch. I told them about our plan to eat our way around the country's dairy products and that started a delightful conversation about everyone's stinky cheese preferences. "Oh, you should try such-and such! I'll bring you a sliver." "Oh, no, don't give her that, it would be mean to give that to a foreigner." And then another teacher, who is a young mother, sighed and confessed that she loves cheese so much that it was the only thing she missed while she was pregnant with her daughter (you can't eat cheese made from raw milk when you're pregnant because of the listeria risk). In fact, she admitted sheepishly, when she had just given birth and they put the squirmy newborn on her chest, she looked at the baby and sighed, "I can eat goat cheese again!"

I am falling in love with this country.

Tour de France

So, since Josh and I were in the States this summer during the Tour de France, we've decided to do our own version. Every week we're going to get a cheese from a different part of l'hexagone (as la France is known, thanks to its shape) and document it. This week's cheese is Lanquetot, a sort of camembert from a town in Normandy with the same name. From what I found on the internet, the town only has about 1,200 inhabitants. And a dog museum.

Not only did it win a medaille d'argent (silver medal) at some kind of cheese contest, but it's appelation d'origine controlée, which is some kind of certification authentic local products get, but I'm not sure what it actually means. I guess I should find that out.

And the cheese itself--it's pretty good. Creamy, slightly thicker than a brie, but sweeter and less earthy. Should go well with the quince I've been poaching all afternoon. I got two quinces at the market to make this recipe, but one turned out to be full of some kind of bug egg. This is the second produce fail this weekend; we got salad from our salad lady at the market and it was full of aphids. I ran it through the salad spinner again and again for about 20 minutes and those little guys were still swimming around in the water every time I washed the lettuce. UGH. I think we find something alive in our salad at least one out of three times that we get it from her. Next time we go to the market, we're going to stand in the middle and yell "OK, Who uses pesticides!?!?!?" and whoever raises their hand is going to get all our business for awhile.

But I digress.

Back to the Tour of France. You may worry about our cholesterol, but don't forget those cool bikes we got. Today Josh took his on the bus, and the bus driver went wild. Turns out he, too, has a folding bike. He talked to Josh about his bike the whole ride (there was only one other person on the bus) and then when Josh got off. . . the bus driver made him pose with his bike, next to the bus, for a picture. We live a magical life.

Lanquetot - Noblesse oblige
envoyé par pubard3. -

Notice

Notice:
If it's possible, it's already done.
If it's impossible, we'll start right away.
If it'll take a miracle, expect a slight delay.

This was on the wall (in French, of course) in an office I had to visit today at the University. I'd filed my fiche pedagogique wrong, which means I wasn't appropriately registered for classes.

Now, this sign may be cute and funny, but if you've been paying attention around here, you know that there's more to it than that. You know that here in the south of France, if it's possible, they'll tell you it's not, just so you leave them alone. If it's possible, it probably won't happen anyway, so you may as well give up and take a pause café. And miracles--we haven't seen those since before the French Revolution. We've got laïcité, remember? No religion involved in the public sphere.

I pondered over the paradox of this sign while the secretary looked hopelessly at my fiche pedagogique, then at her computer screen, and then back at the fiche. "It's not going to let me register you," she sighed. "You need to get a derrogation to be allowed to take this class."

Ah, I pointed out. I know. My derrogation was stapled to my fiche. She shuffled through my papers to find it and sighed again. "It's not the right kind."

And then, the miracle happened. She stapled everything back together and told me, "I'll take care of it."

Well, maybe I should call it a tentative miracle--as the sign says, miracles do take a slight delay, and so maybe I should wait a month to see if this one has really come through or not. In the meantime, it's Friday, which is a small miracle of its own.

Joyeux vendredi!

The Gorges were Gorgeous

NO, SLu, I will NOT put up pictures of my awful haircut, but I will make it up to you by posting pictures of our latest adventure in the Provençal countryside: public restroom hunting around the Gorges du Verdon, the French Grand Canyon.

Good friends came to visit us and Josh explained to them the fundamental paradox of French culture: we will pay a third of our salary in taxes so that everyone can have health care, because we believe in solidarity. But our bathrooms are for customers only.

Most of the other hikers were pretty comfortable using the "green room" as my mom calls it. This was not surprising, since the last time we went hiking (on cliffs over the Mediterranean), we saw a few people decide to cool off with a dip in the sea. . . au naturale. What they say about French beaches? It's all true.

But back to the Gorges--we had a great time driving around the perimeter, and crossing the canyon at one point on a bridge being used for... bungee jumping!

It was a long way down.No, we didn't try it. Instead, we drove into the little medieval village of Trigance... with a public restroom! Yay! Mission accomplished.
Trigance was crowned by the third (and final) castle of the day. The first we had passed somewhere around Allemagne-en-Provence (Germany in Provence--weird name for a town that looked exactly like every other Provençal town).
The second castle was in the town of Aiguines, on a hill overlooking the lake made by the river Verdon after it leaves the canyon.
Yup, that's a soccer field in front of the castle there. After all the driving around, we finally found a good jumping-off point for a hike: "Point Sublime"--the name was promising.
Turned out we were not actually at Point Sublime, but instead about 900 feet below it in the bottom of the canyon.
It was, however, a fortunate mistake. The bottom of the canyon was cool and shadowy and we got to see the rock features close-up.
It was a great way to spend a fall weekend!

Revenge of the Euromullet

Sounds like a bad B-movie, doesn’t it? When I studied abroad in Spain, I made the mistake of going to the hippest, trendiest barrio (neighborhood) to get my hair cut (at the uber trendy salon in the basement of Mercado Fuencarral), and telling the girl “just do something stylish.” I walked out with the same mullet that the girl before me had gotten, and I was pretty sure the girl sitting down in the chair as I paid my bill was also going to leave with those same awful layers. . .

Anyway, my euromullet grew out, and in the meantime, more people than ever stopped me to ask for directions, thinking I was a real madrileña. All in all, the euromullet was a good cultural experience.

And now it’s back.

Quick parenthesis: unlike people I know who have a great unique style—like my rockin’ hipster brother Steve, who will wear pretty much anything as long as no one else is wearing it—I just want to blend in. Not that, if given the choice between the ability to fly and the ability to become invisible, I would pass on flight, but I don’t like to stick out too much. So, to go down to the university here, I’ve stopped wearing colors (unless it’s one colored article of clothing and everything else I’m wearing is black or brown), and majorly upped the beige, black and grey content of my wardrobe, because that's what everyone else does. No joke--one day I sat in a class with about 40 people and counted how many of them were wearing a color other than brown, grey, or black. Seven. Seven people were wearing colors.

So once I had the no-colors thing down, all I needed was a trendy haircut. (And a scarf, but I still haven’t found one that I like.) I realize I sound completely superficial and trend-focused, but I hadn't gotten my hair cut in two years and it was so bad my mom was dropping hints like, "So, how do you like your hair these days?" when we talked on skype. So, when I had last Tuesday off, I meandered around town to choose a salon. I settled on “The New York Salon,” decorated with giant canvases of taxicabs and the Empire State Building (and of course, Marilyn Monroe), since they offer a good student discount. And massage chairs at the hair-washing sinks.

My conversation with the stylist was rather illuminating. Not only did I learn quite a bit about her self esteem as I watched her check herself out in the mirror the entire time she cut my hair, but I discovered one more reason the French have such a reputation for being stylish: it takes FOUR YEARS to get certified to cut hair here. And it showed: I got a gorgeous, trendy haircut. And then I asked her to make the layers an inch shorter. And then, as Marilyn Monroe smirked at me from above, I walked out with another euromullet. But that’s okay. It will grow out. And I really, really liked those massage chairs. . .

Rijstpap, Vanillesmaak

Nope, it's not the refrain of a Regina Spektor song. It's the Dutch food product of the day!

Earlier in the year, Josh and I decided we would learn Old English for something fun to do in the evenings. We found a great online tutorial. . . but we haven't had much time to devote to such luxuries lately.

However, we can always spare a minute over the dinner table to read our food product labels in Dutch. Many big-brand (or off-brand) foods here are labeled in Dutch (which the French call "Neerlandais") and French, I guess because they're marketed in Belgium. So Josh and I get our Germanic-language fix by reading the labels to each other and making the other person guess what the words mean. Want to play? Here you go:

What's in the box of apelsaap?

And what am I eating when I take a spoonful of rijstpap, vanillesmaak?

Answers to follow.

I am once more addicted to caffeine, there is a van blocking the alley, and Philippe wants me to run away with him. It’s been an annoying 48 hours.

I am too tired to do my job, too tired to go to all my classes, too tired to schedule all the tests the doctor ordered to figure out why I am so tired. A major contributor is definitely all the extra brain work required to speak French all day. I had eight hours of class yesterday with a half hour break. I took notes, in languages I don’t speak, for eight hours. I think the caffeine addiction is self-evident.

What is NOT self-evident is why there is a van blocking our alley. There are four or five apartment buildings whose doors open onto our tiny impasse and one of the apartments in one of the buildings is being renovated. Normally the alley is barred off from the street by metal posts, but the artisans (the laudatory French term for what we would call tradesmen) have convinced the owner of the art gallery next door to lend them the key to the locks keeping these posts in place. Their pretext is that they need to unload materials, but it turns out they just don’t want to pay for parking somewhere else. So any time you want to leave the alley or come back, you have to shout until someone hears you and comes and moves the vehicle to let you through.

I came home from my 8 hours of class yesterday, and I was, to put it mildly, not in a good mood. And there was a van in my way. And I shouted and shouted and no one came. And then, to add insult to injury, two very skinny college-aged French boys also living in the impasse managed to squeeze between the van and the alley wall. I did not fit. I was not pleased.

I knew the owner of the art gallery was somehow implicated, but he wasn’t there. He’d left his number on the door so I called and left a message that I thought was both scalding but also appropriately formal, asking him to please do something about the situation with the van. Before he called me back, though, one of the skinny college boys who had managed to squeeze through the breach found me a workman, who moved the van so I could get in, and then put it right back again.

After Josh too had gotten someone to uncork the alley for him and come home, I got a call back from the gallery owner. He suggested I stop by and he could explain the whole thing to me. I felt a bit chagrined. I was safely home again, and my anger had subsided quite a bit once I’d had a chance to visit the bathroom and put down my backpack. But I’ve read too many Anne of Green Gables books, in which leaving a nasty message for an unknown neighbor is always the first step to a beautiful friendship. So I went around the corner (managing to squeeze past the van, which was an inch further away from the wall this time) and met Philippe.

I started by apologizing for yelling at his voice mail. No problem, he said. I like being yelled at by women. This did not bode well. I apologized for being a bad example of American pissed-offedness, and, insisting I sit down and offering me a coffee or a coke, he waltzed me off on a conversation about cultural stereotypes. After about five minutes, for some reason I used the word “we” to refer to Josh and I. Oh, he said, you have a roommate. I’m married, I told him. 79 percent of French women have affairs, he responded. Ah, I said. Did I mention I’m Amish?

It was one of those conversations you just can’t seem to end, even though it’s strewn with suggestions that you leave your husband and run away to the Luberon with a French man who was in a movie playing Burt Lancaster’s younger self before you were even born. This does not happen in Anne of Green Gables books. Finally Josh popped in to see what had happened to me. I’d say the conversation cleaned up from there, but Philippe diverted his energies into trying to sell us a work of art. Any work of art. He seemed to think we’d be most interested in a nude. He also played my message for Josh, and they both laughed at how bad my French was. I thought you were Chinese! Philippe exclaims. I laugh too, but only because I'm really, really embarrassed.

But the van, you say, what about the van? Well, Philippe agreed that they shouldn’t use our alley as their parking lot, but it’s not his key to withhold—he’d borrowed it from the Mairie (town hall). I have to lodge a complaint with them. Considering what happened the last time I lodged a complaint at the Mairie—that is to say, nothing—I think I’ll save my breath. I’m going to need it to yell for the workmen to move the van again.

MacDo

So, apparently France is in world-wide news over a McDonalds going into the food court at the Louvre. This makes me reflect on my own relationship with McDonalds in France (cue harp music and wavy-effect on screen as we go into a flashback). . .

It's the first week of January in 2004, and it's my first time in France (visiting Josh, incidentally, who was studying abroad there at the time and also had no plans to become my husband, which he would at a later date). Josh has sent me off on my own to accomplish something or other while he meets up with me later. I have to find the bathroom while in a shopping mall, and I seize upon a shop girl who speaks English to give me directions. Which are completely comprehensible, except the store she's telling me is next to the bathrooms: MAGdunnelle (emphasis on first syllable). I think she's telling me that the bathrooms are diagonal to something (that's the closest word I can think of to the sounds she's making). When I realized she was talking about my old friend Mickey-D's, where I attended many a birthday party before the age of 5, I experienced one of those "eureka" moments where you can almost see the lightbulb above your own head. This classic piece of Americanism didn't belong to me, an American. It is not an American consulate; it's a business, and by setting up shop in France, McD's now belongs just as much to the French as it does to me. And the French are free to come up with their own weird pronunciations and nicknames for it. The forces of globalization don't just mean my culture is imposed on someone else. They also mean that my culture is taken from me and altered in ways I can't control.

Incidentally, that very same shopping mall was the place where I stepped into the pudding aisle of a grocery store and began my still-passionate love affair with creamy French desserts. (I think coup de foudre--lightning bolt--is how you say "love at first sight" in French.)

But back to the McDonalds at the Louvre controversy. I recommend reading the article if you are interested in France and/or globalization. The article's main point was that the French aren't upset about the Louvre being "desecrated," it's the rest of the world that doesn't see how Ronald and French culture are compatible. Here in France, McD's has done their insidious marketing well. Even the food critic who inspired the "bad guy" in Ratatouille refused to be upset about McD's new home in the Louvre's food court. I can picture him being interviewed about it, smoking, wearing a scarf, and giving the classic French shrug of apathy . . . "Bof. Magdunnelle eez no worse zan ze 'orribul fast food already zere." And, you know, McDonalds does do a pretty good job of coming up with French-appropriate recipes. Alpine-style cheeseburger? Chestnut crumble ice cream sundae? Sounds good to me. If the French want Grimace and the Hamburgler and that red-headed clown, should the rest of us be upset about it? And if we are, will we have to give back fondue? Will the Belgians want their waffles back?

Books and Jackhammers

Right now I’m on winter break, not to be confused with Christmas break or spring break, each 2 weeks long. I took advantage of my free time yesterday to head down to the big public bibliothèque. Josh and I found a glass-encased silent reading room inside the library's spacious main hall. Perfect. After promising the room’s guardian that we were there to study and not to chat, we sat down at a massive old wooden table with a green leather top to get some work done.

We went to the library both for the study-inducing ambiance, and to get away from our neighbors, who are renovating their apartment. Apparently the instrument of choice for construction here is a jackhammer. Not so study-inducing.

While at the library, I picked up a book titled “Aix-en-Provence, hier & aujourd’hui,” yesterday and today. I love old photographs and many of the pictures in the book are from before the American Civil War. How cool! The old pictures were set alongside recent shots of the same places. When we got home, we plunked down on the couch right away and flipped the book open . . . only to discover that in spite of all the jackhammer noises we’ve been hearing, there were only a handful of pictures in which we could see any change from the 1850’s to the present. The only developments were that the roads are now paved and some shop signs are different.  

While in the library, I also swung by the English-language section and found a book called “Perfume from Provence,” written by an English noblewoman who moved here in the 1930’s to escape the collapsing British pound. It’s pretty much the same as reading a book by Peter Mayle, but the author is a little bit ethnocentric and classist. Sorry, Winifred, but your workmen can't possibly be "little more than children." She spends less time than Mayle does in detailing the horrors of having a house renovated in a land where people take two hour lunch breaks, but she complains a bit more. By the second chapter, while still really liking the book, I found myself wanting to say to her, “Stop complaining! You chose to live here! If you want telephone service, go back to Hertfordshire!”

It was a good lesson for me, since I spend a lot of time complaining and exasperated, and if I really don’t like it here, I could always go home. But we chose to move here and we’re glad of our choice. I was glad even this morning, as the next-door destruction (I mean construction) was again going full-swing, and this time, without announcing their intentions, they cut off our water.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President

Nope, it’s not another post about Marilyn—it’s about my President’s Day lesson at the École Primaire where I teach English to kids in levels CP-CM2 (1st-5th grade). Every week I have to come up with a lesson on “Anglophone Culture.” The catch is that I can only introduce a handful of new words or phrases each week, so I mostly need to use what the kids already know.

So how do you celebrate President’s Day with only a beginner’s knowledge of the English language? By serenading Abraham Lincoln and George Washington with Happy Birthday, of course. And what do you do when they’re not there in person? This:

Two kids in each class volunteered to portray our great Presidents so we could sing to them.  Seeing a seven year old's body with George Washington's head was even funnier than this picture of me as Abraham Lincoln (and not creepy, which I can't really say about myself here).   The kids also got to practice saying "Thank you" as we showed our appreciation to Abe and George for being honest and doing good things for our country.  Maybe it's just homesickness, but I actually got a little teary shaking Abraham Lincoln's hand and telling him "Thank you, Mr. President," even if it was just a mask worn by an eight year old girl.  

Berry Crumble

Today's exciting food purchase: frozen raspberries.  Berries were a freezer staple for us in the States, but I pretty much had to quit smoothies cold turkey when we moved here. It's hard to keep smoothie ingredients on hand when your freezer looks like this:

But after a few weeks of battling a craving for frozen raspberries, I broke down and paid 5 euro 5 centimes for a 600 gram bag. Most of them are going into crumble for dessert tonight when our upstairs neighbor comes over for dinner. "Crumble" is really big here. Hoping it will help us substitute some fruit into our dessert rotation, we bought a box of instant crumble topping. It actually says on the side: "CRUMBLE. Son nom vient de l'anglais, 'crumble', qui signifie 'émietter'." It's name comes from the English word "crumble," which means "crumble." My evidence of the fact that the French have a crumble obsession is that there are two crumble dishes on the menu here at McDonalds, which is my food trend barometer. You can get an apple chocolate crumble, or, instead of your chocolate sundae with nuts, a sundae with carmely chestnut goop and crumble topping. Hang on, let me go take a sip of my "red fruit crumble" flavored tea, a product from Twinings especially for the French market, and pull my raspberry crumble out of the oven.

The instant crumble mix was a bit of a flop and this all looks like a dish of baked raspberries covered with cereal dust. Hopefully it will be as good as it smells instead of as bad as it looks.

As for the rest of the raspberries . . . maybe I'll just eat them frozen.