Europe and the US - Odd Ducks

BBC is currently running a poll on "Who do you trust?", in regards to who the public trusts the most to have the best intentions for society. This sort of random data is usually useless but entertaining, and sometimes insightful. After filling out their quiz, I sent in my region, language, etc, and got to look at the final breakdowns of votes split in a variety of ways.

21% of those who selected "Showbiz Personalities" as being the most trustworthy were from North America (second only to North Africa), while Europeans were bottom of the list at 9%. I do see a bit of this in the media over here, where articles regularly blast Bono's crusading for the poor as good for nothing but glorifying Bono. Because he loves it so much, I'll type his name again. Bono.

Moving on...

A little surprise was that marginally more Europeans (10%) trusted business leaders to have the community's best interests at heart than did North Americans (9%). Likely because Americans have been living longer with the results of trusting business leaders to have the community's best interests in heart.

They're about even on religious leaders, with Americans trusting them a bit more, and on their opinions of the national media - again, with Americans trusting it more. The biggest difference (and one which I see every day here) is in their trust of the national government to safeguard the people's interests - Europeans are second from top with 37% of the vote, and Americans are second from the bottom at 21%... trusting our government only marginally better than North Africans at the bottom of the list. I think this is a big part of my astonishment at the thinking of people here that the government should fix everything - if there are no jobs, the government should make jobs, it should provide education, six weeks of vacation per year, etc. Of course, we actually have good encounters with government concepts here, like our state health care, as opposed to in the US, where one's encounters with government are nearly entirely negative (giving you tickets, restricting your rights, passing laws allowing megacorporations to dump toxic waste in your backyard, and so forth). It's really no wonder that so many Americans are just a few MRE's from the survivalist mentality.

Lest the Europeans start to feel superior, however, there is this amusing fact - three times as many Europeans (17%) think TV news is trustworthy compared to North Americans (6%). Of course, they have BBC and we have Bill O'Reilly..... maybe there's reason for this...

Get your French munchies here!

A very, very quick note today for our US friends. I was just browsing through the new Amazon.com listings for food, after learning that they were now moving heavily into dry goods to compete with the big supermarkets. Popcorn, obviously, was my motivation, but I discovered in the process that they have some really interesting sections on ethnic foods, and even a decent selection of French stuff.

(And yes, I know this sounds like a commercial, but unlike with my AdSense ads and book account, I don't get paid jack for this - I just wanted to post it for the interest of our francophile visitors who might not otherwise know that they can buy Brittany caramels from Amazon!)

These caramels, shown in the pic, are terrific. We can find them all over our immediate area but I never expected to encounter such a cardboard-boxed, homemade-looking candy on Ye Internet Megamart. If anyone wants a little taste of Brittany, there you are. Another very local item is this selection of Guérande sea salt, which is harvested by hundreds of salt flat workers not fifteen minutes to the south of our house. I've heard many chefs say it is the best cooking salt on the planet. Our friend Claudie's parents have their own stretch of salt farm in the marshes - I think I even posted a bunch of pics from our visit there sometime in the past, though now I can't remember for sure.

Madeleines have a special place in our hearts because they were our staple food for the first six months that we lived here. We found out early that they were plentiful, inexpensive, and we could eat them without suffering the upset stomach that nearly all French food gave us during our first year of adaptation. I can't say they're especially good snacks, and I don't think I ever want to eat another one myself personally, but they are an integral part of our "French Experience".

I don't eat a lot of foie gras because A) our budget doesn't allow it, and B) it is so rich (the good stuff, anyway) that I simply can't consume a lot of it without rolling into the floor. This foie gras with truffles, however, sounds tempting. I am, however, most likely spoiled forever on eating storebought foie gras because I've had the good fortune to be able to have some homemade by a French master chef. Marie-Blanche, if you're reading this, tell Marcel we want more! :)

Of course, for the genuine French family meal experience, there is Nutella. I read an amusing account on another expat's blog once about her encounter with a scolding French teacher, who told her that she was ruining her child's health by sending him to school with peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. He was supposed to be eating that healthy Nutella instead! The French revulsion for peanut butter is charming and funny - I can only hope they feel the same about my reactions to andouille sausage...

Adventurous souls can try rolling their own crépes using this buckwheat flour. From what I have seen, making crépes at home (of the non-microwave variety) is something akin to conducting a symphony under the duress that, if you miss a note, your orchestra players will begin burning to briquettes.

It is a strange world today, when Americans are ordering Breton caramels from Amazon while I, sitting in Brittany, shop for crates of Orville's Ultimate Butter Popcorn...

They Are Coming, Version 2.0

Today's pic is a nice shot I snapped on the way back from our Sunday at Quimiac. While France is not as experimental in the use of wind power as some other countries, this particular windmill is really operational, though I suspect it's usage is more scenic than practical.

A lot has happened since I last wrote. The government has completely scrapped the CDE employment contract in a humiliating climbdown that proves the current administration really is as toothless as international jokes make it out to be. My own feelings were best summed up in the Expatica article on the hysteria surrounding "Le Précarité" - the total shock evidenced by people's reactions here to a bill that would likely greatly reduce youth unemployment by making it easier to fire poor employees. Heavens above! I might have to survive through a two year period when I could be fired! How can anyone live with such stress??

Ahem, sorry, my sarcasm is showing...

In other news, Em and I are braced for Parental Visit 2.0, or "Emily's Parents Strike Back", or "Parents 2, Electric Boogaloo". In theory, they are coming at the end of this month. I say "in theory" because Emily's parents utilize a planning and traveling style that is so diametrically opposite to my parents as to be impenetrable to me. During the lead-in to my parents' visit, my mother would email me nineteen times a day questioning every tiny aspect of the trip - Is this pre-paid, is this reserved, have these tickets come yet, how do we get from X to X, etc. It was a fully prepared, micromanaged, highly scheduled operation that ran like a tactical military assault (and pretty much left all of us dead from exaustion once their ten days here were up). By contrast, Em's parents don't even seem to have their plane tickets yet, and their date of arrival is supposedly barely two weeks away. We're not sure exactly when they're coming, where we'll be meeting them, or whether they will actually come. Emily seems content with this vagueness, so I assume it is normal operating procedure and simply float along making pipes, expecting at any moment for them to turn up without notice on the doorstep.

The nice thing about this more-relaxed approach is that I expect their visit to be the same - a peaceful couple of weeks of casual walking about and birdwatching, instead of the hardcore Griswold's European Vacation experience of my parents' visit. ("C'mon kids, we've got nine thousand three hundred works of art to see, and the Louvre closes in fifteen minutes!") So, if people wonder why the website goes quiet for a few weeks of early May and there aren't frequent new pipe updates, it will be because we're all sitting in an outdoor café somewhere in a tiny rural village finishing up our lunchtime crépes and trying to figure out what European bird variant is nesting in the steeples of the gothic church tower.

Sunday at Quimiac

While, from the news reports I read, it seems that half of France is rioting or striking or burning things, it's pretty quiet out here in Brittany. I've been following the growing chaos surrounding the government's CPE law with lots of amusement and absolutely zero sympathy for the protestors (My own thoughts on this were well-represented in this Expatica article). Hearing people with a 25% unemployment rate screeching over a law that would allow employers to fire them at will for two whole years before job entrenchment sets in is like.....well, a lot like hearing my American friends complaining about their "high cost of gas". One nods in polite sympathy and struggles to hide one's giggles. It's really difficult to take someone's complaints seriously when they're sawing their own feet off as they protest, though.

Em and I took off for the coast this Sunday afternoon, with the sun bright and the weather warm. One of our favorite little hidden spots is the Baie of Carbonais, a fantastic rocky beach with some fascinating stratification and erosion patterns to the stone. We had to get out of the house - Non-stop work lately has pretty much made mushrooms of the both of us. It was really odd to see that big blazing bright thing in the sky again, whatever it was called. Not much more to say for the moment, though here's a classic photo of Em clambering around on the rocks, and those interested can also download a brief 16 meg video of what this beach looks like (Supply your own salt spray):