Sometimes I ...

Since moving back to the states, there are some things I do now, just because I can. Sometimes I ...

... Go buy groceries at 11pm at night. Because the stores are open. Not only are they open, but the crowds are gone.

... Stare in wonder at the selection of biscuits and waffles and pancakes and sausages and breakfast burritos on the breakfast foods aisle.

... Get slightly choked up that the grocery store book and magazine section has more English language reading than I saw in the biggest bookstores in France.

... Can't help but laugh at the insanely huge and bloated vehicles that Americans drive. V8 hot rods I can understand, but why would anyone want to have to struggle around town in something as ungainly as a Hummer?

... Want to just lie flat and stretched out on the cool, air-conditioned floors everywhere. Last night a store manager came and apologized to us, and gave us free cinnamon twists, because the AC wasn't doing a very good job in his Taco Bell. He hasn't been in a movie theater in Nantes in the summer.

... Go to mega-bookstores like Barnes & Noble, and just sit in the magazine section and absorb the mass of English-language media, and revel in the sheer presence of it all. Can't do this for long, because people think you're weird if you just sit there, so I have to grab something off the shelf and pretend to read it while I sit being thankful. It is an odd world when you can have an entire magazine devoted to collectors of classic Datsuns from the '70's.

... Wish the USA had more political parties. I like the Libertarians and vote for them often, but no one is ever going to take them seriously enough to give them media coverage or put their candidates on stage for presidential debates. Why can't we have Greens and Tories and Socialistes and UMPs and a Centre Nationale des Independents et Paysans (a party for independents and peasants, literally - that's me on both counts). Europe can keep their National Fronts, though. We have enough of those nuts already.

... Am absolutely stunned by the variety of stuff on the frozen food aisle. Super U had eight kinds of frozen pizza. The Wal-Mart grocery has a whole aisle devoted to pizzas. And another for chicken wings.

... Reflexively point in delight every time I see an entire restaurant devoted to hot wings. Or Cajun food. Or Japanese, or Indian, or Jamaican.

... Am amazed by customer service. When you don't have it for a long time, it's a pleasant but bizarre shock. The guy at Woodcraft exchanged a power carving collet for us, without a receipt, just because he recognized us. And when a replacement wasn't in stock, he took one out of a packaged box from a carving kit and gave it to us, and took the box off the shelf until he could replace the collet on his own. In France it would have been a month before we got our replacement, if ever.

... Go out driving in the evening just to see the night life. Traffic is everywhere, people are out shopping and dining and seeing movies and generally running about. After 7pm, Herbignac was as dead and empty as the abandoned movie set of a 1940's Frankenstein movie. The only nightly sound was the creaking of the metal Super U sign as it dolefully clicked through its time and temperature displays.

... Wonder constantly what various friends in France and Europe would think of things. In the parking lots, "Gosh, what would Claudie think if she could see all these giant vehicles?" At the Fresh Market, "I wonder what Marcel would think of the selection of international spices and ingredients?" At the mall, "I wonder what Camille would think of all the odd fashions?" Out for dinner, "I wonder if we could ever get Beate into a Cajun restaurant?" One thing I do not have to wonder about is Pipe & Pint, because our French pipe collecting friends would love it. Guillaume, you need to fly over here just so you can enjoy open humidors of tobacco, cigars, good pipes, great beers, and wine and lambic all in the same shop...!

The Good Side of Brittany

Emily thought my last post was quite hard on Brittany. I have little sympathy for the place - Brittany was quite hard on us, and I do not intend to sugarcoat my reflections on the difficulty of our lives there. But it wasn't all a horror, and I thought I'd put together another post to share the lighter side of seven years of hell...

(Click for larger versions)

The Heart Attack Grill

People ask me what I miss about the states.

Insanity, that's what I miss...

France seems to me to be a very self-conscious country, very concerned to be taken seriously and where no one wants to risk looking foolish. Ergo, there is a distinct deficit in over-the-top lunacy of this particular American variety:







Gigantic quadruple-decker hamburgers served by "Naughty Nurses" with cigarettes and beer.

God bless America!

(Note - I did not believe these pics at first, figuring they must be Photoshop fakes. Oh, the burgers I could easily believe, but not the cigs ,not in today's world of inane anti-smoking freakout. Then I learned the place was in Arizona, and it all made sense. Go Midwest!)

How Sarko got his groove back

The news is so odd these days. While most of the EU is now officially in recession, France continues to show positive growth - the only EU country that still is, IIRC. Today I just read that Sarkozy is taking advantage of this to press his case for a more controlled form of global capitalism, in this interesting NPR article. They have a lot of good ideas to take to the table, but can you spot the key problem that will make sure no serious changes are ever actually implemented?

Sarkozy and the Europeans want to change the rules of the financial game. They speak of more regulation, lower corporate salaries, global governance and binding multilateral measures enforced by international organizations — the kind of talk that makes American free-marketeers shiver.

Call me cynical.....

Super U has gone American on me

Wonder of wonders... I stopped by Super U to load up on junk food today and not only are they carrying Pepperidge Farm chocolate chip cookies now, but they've got Oreos! This was the first time I've seen Oreos on a grocery shelf for six years. As you can see, I bought them all. :D They even had microwave popcorn, albeit salted only, no buttered.

(BTW, the selection of beer in front was some random experimentation with Breton microbreweries, plus Chimay. I'm curious to try this MorBraz beer and see if it's any good...)

Elections improve US image abroad

Here's me waving hello from the beach at La Turballe. I love Brittany in June - perfect weather and empty coastline. I'm posting to share a good story I ran across on Digg the other day:

Democratic Primary Boosts U.S. Image Around the World


I can confirm the gist of the article. We've been somewhat startled and amused by the sheer intensity of the British and European fascination with the events of this election - Every tiny event has been headline news across France and the UK. There's a sense of hope and optimism that is positively tangible - No great surprise after the global disaster that the Bush presidency has been. On a personal level, I probably speak for a lot of US expats when I say what a huge relief it will be to no longer have to introduce ourselves at parties with, "Hi, I'm American, but please don't hate me, I didn't vote for Bush". It makes me a bit warm and sentimental to watch the sheer enthusiasm abroad over the possibility that the US may turn itself around on some of the policies that have made us international pariahs these past years. And I love the quotes from the article:

"The primaries showed that the U.S. is actually the nation we had believed it to be, a place that is open-minded enough to have a woman or an African American as its president," said Minoru Morita, a Tokyo political analyst.

"I think it will be put down as a shining, historical moment in the history of America," said Fumiaki Kubo, a professor at Tokyo University.

"Obama is the exciting image of what we always hoped America was," said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a London think tank. (Of course, he's probably also the presidential candidate most likely to be assassinated since Kennedy....)

"Germany is Obama country," said Karsten Voight, the German government's coordinator for German-North American cooperation. "He seems to strike a chord with average Germans," who see him as a transformational figure like John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. (*Cough*, see comment above)

For my own part, I'm pretty much happy with all three nominees, though it now seems Hillary may be out for good. I do believe that come November, regardless of who ends up in the oval office, the US may find the rest of the world is a much more welcoming place.

The French never forget

Summertime in Herbignac! The weather is a balmy 70 degrees today, with blue skies all around, on this very pleasant July 21st.

I get the Digg headline feed on my iGoogle homepage, so I keep up to date on the various bits of weird news that float through there, and today a headline grabbed my attention. "France will never forget" is a pretty neat tribute event for the Omaha Beach landing, and worth mentioning for the exact reason given by the Digg submitter - That any time one idiot Frenchman breaks a McDonald's sign, it hits the news as "anti-American sentiment in France", yet when 2,500 French people get together for a huge and meaningful tribute, it is totally ignored by the mainstream media. Even the Digg article comments make interesting and insightful reading, for once!

Making Happy-Happy

The election of Sarkozy has sparked off plenty of press on the other side of the ocean, most of it positive, from what I can tell from here. I ran across two very good articles on the gradually-improving relations:

The France-America Honeymoon
Charles Bremner's blog on life in France is always excellent reading, and this dissection of the improving relationship situation makes for a good read.

Hillary equals France
Bill Maher's frequently hilarious article kicks off with, "I don't want to be French, I just want to steal what's best from the French".

Indoor Rain

Sometimes it's easy to forget just how much we've managed to get accomplished in the past four years. The pics today are the before and after shots of our upstairs library/office/study/studio, first as it was when we bought it, and then after we repainted & totally re-vamped it. We continue to have 'adventures' with the roof, however.

Our roof is rather mangy - an old, slate-tiled thing covered in moss (one can easily guess the age of a roof in Brittany by how many pads of moss have sprouted on it, and how thick they are). When we bought the house, the owner assured us that, "No, never, it had never given any problems!" so you can imagine our surprise a few months later when the first hard rain of October created a miniature waterfall down the stone wall of the spiral staircase.

Insert displeased face here.

What we've found over the past few years is that the brief periods of hard wind we have almost reliably take off a shingle or three, leading immediately to odd adventures in indoor rain. The day before yesterday, it blew so hard the trees were bending, and after this we were taken back four years by seeing a familiar thing, a nice stream of water running down the stone staircase wall again, stemming from an open hole about the size of my hand. So, we installed our giant bucket and wailed for the roofer, and today all is well. Odd, though - no call or advance warning or doorbell ring. I simply heard this mystery thunking from outside and opened the window to see a ladder coming at me, and roofing guys scrambling all over. They had the whole thing sorted in two hours, with numerous little holes and problem areas patched up. And I was amused, because it led me to another cultural observation - contractors are different in France, but they all seem to look like each other in the same way that US contractors do.

Call an electrician, or a roofer, or an HVAC guy in North Carolina, and what you'll get will almost always be: a great big guy, lots of gut and exposed butt crack, talking at full-blast volume, driving a huge pickup with a logo on the side and bumper stickers for NASCAR and Bush on the back. In France, the standard seems to be: a little short guy about 5' tall who looks like a Slim Jim meat stick come to life, with a weathered and wrinkled face like a saddlebag with eyes, smoking a Gaulloise. It's these things that make our cultures special ;)

Grocery Wars

Yeah, that's me, from a photo taken in 2000 while I waited at our old house for Halloween trick-or-treaters. Sad that I can't pull this stuff on French children, but I'd probably leave them scarred for life...

I posted a quick article on BlueVicar.com over the weekend and thought it was worth copying over here too, just for entertainment value. The discussion topic was grocery stores, and how the shopping experience differs here from everyone's various homelands. For once this was an easy question to answer, because hordes of French people in big stores can just be astoundingly rude until you learn to play the game their way. And so:


Trever Talbert Says:
September 25th, 2006 at 8:14 pm

I relish grocery store trips as an anger release. Seriously!

On arrival here four years ago, my wife and I were both terribly put off by the sheer rudeness of French behavior in grocery stores, especially as they got more crowded. The people walking right into you, standing two inches behind you, squeezing directly in between you and the shelf you are obviously staring at just to stand there and stare themselves…. the whole American “body bubble” was terribly lacking and basic manners nonexistent. My wife still finds such trips annoying and frustrating, and gets easily offended by the rudeness of others.

I, however, have accepted that this lack of manners isn’t deliberate rudeness, it’s simply culturally-ingrained that it’s perfectly OK to shove, push, etc, and isn’t personal….. so I take a delightfully malicious thrill in shoving right back. Yes, I’ll stand there in the middle of the aisle blocking the carts. When the old lady behind me in line shoves against me, I shove her right back and give her my best, “I am a psycho foreigner, do you want me to gnaw your arms off?”-glare. If someone steps in front of me when I’m looking at something, I’ll reach over their head and knock off their cap to get what I want, or just shove around them. I don’t step aside when walking down the aisles, as my American politeness would dictate.

I love it. There’s a wonderfully vicious thrill in just going, “To hell with polite behavior. GRAGHH!!” I think my ultimate dream now would be to go shopping at Super-U during the holidays, carrying something like a really long rake or shovel around the aisles, just for the fun of ‘accidentally’ whacking annoying people with it as I turn this way and that.

The secret of adaptation - making your fun where you can find it

Beware the Murky Frogpits

This is me up near the river dam at Arzal. For once I have a lot to write - yesterday we visited the dam for the first time and got a lot of good pics, and last night we went to Luna Parc, a traveling fair that stops here in the summers. It's a lot like a US county fair, but it's actually better in a few key ways.

That isn't today's post, though! :D

I thought this was worth an article after talking with our friend Marie-Blanche about the lack of fast food outlets in France. We often find ourselves missing easy fast food - There are only three McDonald's joints scattered across our entire region, and only one alternative chicken place. Ergo, when we find ourselves out running errands and we're hungry on the road, it isn't possible to just pull over somewhere for a quick bite. Everyone turns their noses up at fast food, but the lack of it can be a real nuisance on a very busy day.

Except that, according to our friend, it isn't lacking..... We just aren't seeing it. In France, she says, fast food is at cafés, not glittery McDo's, and if we want a quick bite we can just stop at any café for a sandwich. Unfortunately, trying to drag Emily to these places is like trying to get an iguana untangled from a fishing net - ever time you get one claw unstuck, another one hooks in, and when all is said and done, you've just wasted a lot of time and energy annoying the iguana.

Why the resistance? French cafés are scary. Emily is a lot more bothered by them than I am (bolstered by years of male restroom conditioning, where one often sees bacteria the size of Border Collies loping around). I'll try to relate our typical experiences so far.

Imagine if you will.....

You've just run errands to several different places and spent the afternoon driving through roughly thirty-five idyllic little stone towns filled with thatched roofs and all named 'Ker-something'. You're starving, and you spot a sign saying, "BAR - CAFE - SANDWICHES" (There are places like this in virtually every little village). You think, "Ahh, food!" and pull over. But the horror begins to set in quickly...

The creaking wooden front door hasn't been painted since the 70's, and when you open it, you're rewarded with several popping sounds as various bar tenants explode into dust from their first exposure to sunlight in years. The interior is dank, musty, shadowy, and no matter where you go, there are always at least four or five half-sodden locals lurking at the bar looking unshaven and disreputable. If you've ever wanted the "Cowboy enters the saloon" experience, this is the place, because all conversation will inevitably stop dead as these sullen characters all turn to inspect you. Except, of course, the owner/barkeep, to whom you do not exist, as his family has not known yours for generations.

Dare to pursue the experience further, and find a wooden chair. Your table is decorated with an unemptied ashtray containing the fuminous remnants of eighty-seven Gaulloises, and you are the center of attention for the room. France doesn't seem to have the, "It's rude to stare" code of conduct that the US has, as the locals will simply sit and openly goggle at you for as long as you're there. You may as well be wearing a motorized neon beanie for the attention you'll get. No smiles, no welcomes, nothing to suggest friendliness, just sulky glowering.

Of course, you don't know what to expect... Do you sit and wait for a waiter? Do you go to the bar and ask for a menu? Do you actually want to eat anything that is cooked here? Regardless of what you do, you're stuck, because a good thirty minutes will pass before the barkeep peels himself away from deep conversations on village incest to come and ask what you want. The choice is pretty limited, typically... You're not getting curly fries and BBQ roast beef sandwiches here, your options are more like: Sandwich. Beer. Fries.

If you haven't run shrieking by this point, you'll eventually (roughly 45 minutes later, after enough time for all the regulars to spit in your food) be served some sort of mystery meat in a foot-long bun of the most durable bread you've ever encountered. Chewing doesn't work, biting doesn't work - you're eventually forced to hold the thing in both hands and saw your incisors into it, really using your neck muscles to tear loose rough chunks, which you then chew for the next ten minutes.

And after a couple of these experiences, you'll never, ever want to go back to one of these joints again, and if you even start considering another try, your wife will threaten to set fire to you in your sleep because she is so repulsed.

So, that's been our experience with using cafés as "fast food". Why do I love American fast food places? Let me count the ways:

*Reliability. I can go to a Wendy's in North Carolina or Michigan, and know I'll get the same food.

*Variety! Hey, some of us like sourdoughbread hamburgers...

*Cleanliness. I've been in some dingy fast food joints, but no McDo I've ever seen even begins to compare to the Innsmouth-esque quality of some of the small-village cafés I've visited.

*Prices. Hamburger, fries, and a coke - $6. Mystery meat sandwich, frites, and..... Ugh.... "Zee Coka, monsieur?? You would not prefer un whisky wizh your lunch?" - 9 euros

*Speed. Go in, stand in line five minutes, get your food, eat. At café, go in, sit, wait fifteen to thirty minutes before your existence is acknowledged (if you're lucky, that is, and you don't look too British, in which case you may truly Never Be Served....), then another thirty minutes while they kill the animal in the back room, add the "foreigner's exxtra spice", and finally bring it to you. Tack on an extra fifteen minutes when you're done for trying to get the bill.


Maybe I'm being paranoid, but there's just something about having five unshaven, obviously drunken guys at a bar (at noon!!) watching you eat with all the rapt fascination you'd give to assembling a $3K home stereo system, that just puts me off a bit...

This has run a little long, so I'll wrap up here, with another part soon. We have found a couple of cafés that are....well, OK...even pretty nice... and they'll get their due in the next post!

SuperFrenchie

A photo taken while Emily's parents were here visiting - Em tries a French specialty, intense lemon liqueor. Very intense. As in, "Fall backwards from the table and crawl across the floor gasping and groaning for oxygen"-intense. Everything that our friend Marcel makes is so rich that it's in a class unto itself. The man could probably make a cheese sandwich jazzy.

I found a funny blog the other day that offers the opposite perspective from mine - SuperFrenchie, the online ramblings of a French fellow living in the US and coping with American culture. His blog is a LOT more popular than this one, but then he gets into all the controversial issues that people love to log on and argue about, like politics, religion, and the best pizza toppings. I tend to avoid that sort of stuff just because I don't want my comments threads to become long strings of ad hominem attacks from both the right (I believe in personal rights and responsibility) and the left (I believe in personal rights and responsibility. Plus, I smoke). I try to be apolitical, or perhaps "realistic", exotic as that term may be in application to politics. I'd describe myself as a left-leaning centrist, but a little world travel quickly illustrates how wildly one's position changes based on local attitudes, since by US standards I'm probably a pinko America-basher (to the O'Reilly's of the world) while in France I seem to be a capitalistic greedmonger (I'd like slightly less stifling regulation of private industry).

I will say, however, that there was a loud cheer in Brittany today when I read that the NSA's illegal wiretapping was just ruled unconstitutional (Well, duh...).

Another, considerably less contentious site that I found recently was Culture Breizh, a tourist-focused site all about Brittany and its culture and history, with a lot of fun photos too. It isn't exactly a deep look at Brittany, but it provides some nice info on the various aspects of Breton culture, from the traditional dress to the modern wackiness of groups like Tri-Yann. A good thing, since Breton musical culture in the US is extraordinarily rare.

In closing, another bit of good news... We've now accumulated enough points from shopping at Super-U for Emily to get a free bicycle!

Who's Better?, Round Deux

After stubbornly refusing to upload any photos last night, Blogger is once more working perfectly today, now that I've forgotten what I was going to write. C'est la vie! We encountered this fellow in the picture while driving out to visit a local dolmen - Someone had discarded a broken flip-flop (Yes, people are just as trashy in France as in the states), and the local fauna had decided it would make a great tanning bed. Now that it's summer, we have hundreds of these little guys all over the walls of our house. They pop out from between the stones and sit on the outer edges of each stone, soaking up the sun.

For a quick continuation of the "France vs. USA" posts that I started a while back, I thought I'd run through some interesting news links and add my comments. If I recall correctly, the current score is France:2, USA:1.

Getting Things Done
USA, No question
I recently read this fascinating and funny article which attempted to explain how anything ever gets done in this country of 35 hour work weeks and constant vacations. I still don't get it, though I have come to accept the reality of a country that moves on "Island Time". The biggest problem is explaining this to outsiders, such as my customers in the states, who don't understand why a package tracking number won't be any more specific than "In our system" for four solid weeks....

Innovating
USA
This, admittedly, is drawn from limited experience of observing tech developments in France, but I am perpetually frustrated that the current French government seems to A) regard every new US technological advance as a personal affront, and at the same time, B) be unable to do better than simply produce second-rate copies of the leading US innovations. This rather pointed article addresses this issue nicely. WHY they would waste billions developing a "French" alternative to Google (when there is already a Google.France en français) is stunning - I would much rather see that money going into new projects that would lead and expand the field, rather than simply following. The writer mentions online translation, and if ever there was a need for a genre-defining app, that is it. A conquest there would put France back on the internet map as a leader, not a follower. French Google copy, French CNN copy... Why?

Bread
France!
We just had a new bakery open up within walking distance. Freshly-baked bread and croissants, yum!

Varied Cultures
Tie
French people say, "You americans! You are all...". Americans say, "The French, they are all...". I say, "Well, which part of each country are we talking about?" North Carolinians aren't Californians (We burn books, they burn smokers), and Bretons aren't Parisiens. Yet, both countries insist on looking on each other as one unified lump, despite the sometimes-vast divisions in culture and attitudes that exist in each. Americans tend to assume all French must be the same because it's a small country; how can the people vary much from one side to the other? (They should hear the bickering from the UK sometime, where accents and mentalities change from one town to another..) I don't really know why French people assume all Americans are alike, especially after the bloodletting of the last presidential election, but they often seem to. For a funny take on our shared regional differences AND consistencies, read this.

Note - I did not have sweet tea in my bottle as a baby. At least, not that I know of...

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Here is definitive proof that not everyone in France is stylish and elegant :)

Emily salvaged this fellow from our yard. Birds nest under the eaves of our house, and chicks often fall the two story drop to the paved yard. This critter survived by miracle, probably by bouncing off a nearby bush. Emily the bird expert is now once again enmeshed in chick-rearing. The little fellow is already capable of eating on his own, and we're taking pains (despite the pics) not to over-acclimate him to humans. With luck, he'll be off and away in a matter of days.

I'd meant to post another list of France vs. USA babble, but that's got a bit derailed by the number of side projects we've had. At times of much distraction like this, my wobbly French suffers the worst. I had been taking private lessons here in town, but my professeur had to break them off because her final exams are this month, and she has to spend all month studying to get her English teaching degree. Then, there will be summer vacations, we'll be outside, it will be too hot for sitting indoors at lessons, other projects will pop up demanding attention (The long-delayed FDP Pipe of the Year is seriously beginning to lurk...) and what little progress I've made in French will fade away completely. Aside from buying groceries, I don't think I've spoken French in a month now.

The gap to conversational-level French seems larger than ever. Worse, we've actually, finally met a few people here in town that we share a lot of interests with, but can't talk to... or at least I can't, and that successfully cramps our entire socializing. But, I realize how long and how much hard study would be needed to reach the point of actually being able to participate in after-dinner chatter, and just don't see myself having the time (or money!) to invest in such education when so many other, more-pressing issues are at hand. Grrr...

On a tangent, socializing here is still something we can't quite get a grip on anyway. We can't invite French people over for dinner because they'll hate the food we make, so they invite us over and probably wonder why we can't return the fun. In the US, dinner wasn't the point of a gathering, usually - we might go for dinner but that was just a marker on the road to everyone ending up in the den laughing. Also, there was movie watching, which I'm not sure is even done here (Friends would phone us up, we'd go over for dinner and a rented movie afterwards). Meal times seem to prohibit this, with the French eating so much later that by the time dinner and dessert is finished and everyone has talked for a while, it's often midnight! I can't imagine inviting any of our French friends over for movies and popcorn - I suspect they would find it weird. Or perhaps not, I don't know - Like my lingual abilities, my window into French casual life remains extremely small, very tight, and very focused.

But in the meantime, there is plenty to keep us busy!

Who's Better?

I came across this wonderful cartoon on this entertaining page about France and the US, and it inspired me for a blog post. What an accurate picture, eh? ;)

People are always asking me which I like better, France or the US, and this is an impossible question to answer with a Yes or No because there are so many nuances to both, and I find various bits of each more or less desirable than others. So, in the interest of cross-channel debate and a bit of fun, here is the start of my 100% biased (but observed through direct personal experience) observations on who is better at various topics:

Movie Theaters
France wins, hands-down. I stopped going to the movies in the US because I always seemed to be spending my $6 to sit next to some fat, loud mouthbreather who spent the entire film describing it blow-by-blow to his buddies on his cellphone, while cybersex-texting his girlfriend with his other cellphone. The last movie I saw in the US was Fellowship of the Ring, just before moving, during which I had to walk back and threaten the spinal cord health of a pack of teens who somehow couldn't resist talking in full volume about their friends and their date scene throughout the film. IMAX may be nice, but I don't think I could put up with an American theater audience just to see it. Over here, theaters are lower-tech (Our favorite just has two vending machines instead of a concession stand, for instance) and they thankfully haven't discovered the concept of selling chicken wings and steak dinners to moviegoers. Instead, you buy your little bag of malted milk balls and then go in and try your absolute damnedest to not rustle the plastic as you munch, because if you do, it will be the only sound in the theater. We went to see V for Vendetta a few months back, and there wasn't a cellphone buzz through the whole movie.

Cheese Variety
This one is closer but I'll have to go with USA, simply because you can get all the French cheeses there also, and you can actually buy cheeses from other countries as well. I don't know if it's economic protectionism or simple snobbery, but it's hell trying to find cheese from anywhere outside France here - Where do I get my Stinking Bishop? Doesn't seem to be an issue of taste, as every French person we've had over who has tried our imported Nacho cheese & chips has loved the stuff (Unlike their consistently horrified reactions to peanut butter). I'm prone to guess that there's a regulation out there somewhere spurred by the French cheesemakers to keep out all those dangerous imports that might actually compete with them. Who knows?

The Child Factor
Sorry to all my American friends, but France just has better-behaved kids. The old saying, "Better seen and not heard" is still in force here, and I am often amazed at how polite and deferential French children are. Our friend Claudie's teenage son breaks off from street soccer games with his friends just to come over and shake my hand when we visit, whereas it seems US kids have to be forcibly pried from their Playstations just to elicit a grunt. I've forgotten what it's like to go out for a nice dinner and have to contend with the undisciplined sprogs of mass breeders stampeding unchecked through restaurants. Between this and the movie theaters, it's like heaven.

More to come....

More Medieval, and the Brits still hate France

I ws very happy with this nice shot of an old Tabac sign at the Guérande Medieval Fair. Too cool! I still have a lot of photos to post, and a new selection of shots of the Dolmen of Kerbourg to upload some time in the distant future. For now, here are some more pictures from the fair:



The tents stretched around the walled city along the tree-lined path, and made for some nice photos in combination with the walls and the moat. I don't actually know the size of the walled city in square miles or kilometers - It is hard to guess at, because it isn't very large but the interior is such a maze of tiny twisting streets that it is difficult to get an idea of the overall scale of the place.

A fun open-air sausage vendor's stall. Complete with swarms of insects lighting on all the displayed sausages. Did it make a good picture? Yes. Did we buy any sausage to eat? No. I remain too deathly afraid of most French sausages to sample them - One look at the insides of andouille is enough to put anyone off - though I've grown to love chorizo. Also, our village butcher makes a yearly mountain of something he calls "Mexican sausage" which is fantastic. Where the "Mexican" part comes from is anyone's guess, but it is the only sausage I've had here which is really similar to what Southerners think of as sausage.

It was a blustery day, and we took many big blows of buffeting from the magnificent multitude of billowing blue and black dresses.

In other news, it seems the British still hate the French. Granted, I read just as much anti-anglo gibberish in the French press, but I really don't understand this poll. The French are the rudest people on the planet? I did get a laugh out of the Frenchman's defense that they were a nation of sulking romantics, but really... I've lived here for four years now and can categorically say that French people aren't any ruder than people back in the US (and at least they're polite enough to never walk right up to you and start talking about their religion!). Neither of our sets of visiting parents seemed to see much French rudeness, especially in such experiences as the big family dinners, the nice English-speaking locals who helped us evacuate the TGV disaster, the Fresnis and their bodacious breakfasts, the hotel staff, and on and on. I don't get it. Granted, Paris is a hell-pit of savage assholes, but that can be said for most really big cities on the planet. I'm sure Beate will be thrilled to know that the Germans ranked #2 for rudest, as well as Most Boring and Most Ungenerous. How anyone can call a 6' tall pipesmoking woman with purple hair "boring" is beyond me...

Oh, and one other thing - Do any of you techie readers know of any freeware utility which can batch-modify multiple JPGs to smaller dimensions? I have roughly six folders filled with photos taken during Emily's parents' visit, but each photo is 1600x1200, and quite a bear for them to download on their 56K modem connection. With 200+ photos, individual resizing and compressing is out of the question. I do most of my photo work in Paintshop Pro, which can do batch format conversion but not batch resizing, so if anyone can point me to a freeware utility that can handle this task, thanks in advance!

Batman is French?

Having either set of parents come to visit is fun for many reasons, one of which is that we get to see this country with new eyes all over again. The in-laws stayed here in town at the local hotel, a place within easy walking distance of the bakery, shops, and our house. Needless to say, it was not an American hotel. The place is really very nice - for those who may be interested, they have a website. It appears to be several houses purchased and connected together, with the result that, instead of identical uniform corridors, the interior is a maze of tiny hallways, unexpected steps, side corridors, and hidden rooms. Great fun!

While the room itself was pretty much like hotel rooms everywhere except for its camper-sized bath and shower, it did give us one surprise - the bizarre coathangers pictured above. I've traveled all over the east coast of the US and have never encountered such a thing, and it left us wondering just what one is supposed to do with them. They wouldn't hang shirts properly, and the bizarre clips at the ends seemed intended more for mountainclimbing use than clothes storage. I've never personally thought it would be useful to hang a dinner jacket in such a way that it had permanent Dracula shoulders, with the bonus of being able to hang a tie from the clips down the inside of each sleeve. We concluded that it must be meant for some bizarre garb with which we were unfamiliar... and this despite the fact that Emily's mother has traveled to Israel, Brazil, the Galapagos, and all over the US. I can only guess that Batman must be French, and spend a lot of time on layover in Herbignac. I had to suppress a strong urge to grab one of the things, yell, "Batarang!", and hurl it weapon-like at an invading British tourist...

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...

Representing America

Now that the Olympics are winding up, maybe I'll have a chance to reflect on some murky bits that have been stirred to the top of my puddled brain. One of these is the sheer oddness of being a walking representative of your home country. Out here in the French countryside, a lot of people have never even seen an American outside of TV, so we are the country. Constantly in the back of the mind is the worry, "Am I going to make my whole country look bad if I do this or that?" I can't begin to know what impressions about the US we must give to the locals, though my guesses would be:

"She's really nice and polite, but isn't it odd how she doesn't wear makeup or take pains to dress stylishly?"

"That American fellow seems very reserved. He's polite when he talks, but he doesn't talk much, and he always looks kind of unshaven and scruffy."

"They have good manners but they really keep to themselves." (Of course, when you can't communicate well enough for casual socializing, this is the unavoidable byproduct.)

At this point the reality behind the impressions diverges sharply based on one's cultural predispositions. In the US, one could read these descriptions and hear that Em and I both have a strong sense of identity, are confident enough not to bother with supercilious "dressing up", and are probably decent characters because we have good manners. I suspect that French folks put a lot more weight on appearances than we do - especially regarding proper dress and grooming - so I doubt we would rate so well in their eyes. However, I hope we make a better show for our country than some of our other US exports.....

....Such as, for instance, Tonya Harding. The Olympics this year brought back memories of that utterly revolting experience, and Em and I were very happy that we were not living in Europe during her Olympics. Seeing this classic example of redneck trailer trash (Pardon my crude directness, but, well, you know it, I know it, everyone knows it..) representing the United States to the world would have had both of us refusing to show our faces in town for months! I still think back on her blubbering performance at the skating events and mentally cringe. This year's crop of athletes made us proud, though - at least with the exception of Bode Miller, who came off in BBC interviews like a bored frat boy "too cool for his shirt". For me, the most incredible Olympic moment belonged to the Chinese skater who suffered that terrible crash, then paused, rested a moment, and carried on her couples exhibition to such extraordinary results. I doubt I will ever do anything that would cause our local friends to be equally impressed with American resolve, but her determination really gives everyone else something to shoot for.

Sloths

Here's another photo of downtown Herbignac in the snow. I think I've taken at least a dozen pictures of this view, but I still like it - This is what one sees after one hikes up a tree-lined dirt road to emerge into the village center. Someday I'm going to have to ask someone about the missing chunk off the top of the church, though I suspect it probably has something to do with either Axis or Allies doing target practice.

Though it is sunny outside today, the weather is still bitterly cold. 33 degrees may not seem so bad, but coupled with a stinging wind whistling down stone streets, it becomes a constant companion on any trip outside - fingers burn with pain, ears go reddened and sore, eyes go Clint Eastwood-squinty, and more and more, we stay in. At the moment this is essential, as we are still struggling to catch up with our work and our money after the disastrous start of the year. But the problem is, it does become a state of mind. I'm sure any self-employed work-at-home person experiences the same sort of cocooned ennui - Get up, work all day without leaving the house, relax afterwards in the house, sleep, and wake to the same thing. With our energy levels suffering the usual grey Breton winter drop, it's tough just crawling out from under the piles of warm blankets in the morning. When the days start compacting inwards like this, I sometimes get stung by a weird sense of loneliness - I will realize with a start that it has been 25 days since I've spoken to another person besides my wife. It isn't so much that I miss the contact with others (I am a non-social surly bastard, at best summation), it is more a sense of dislocated surprise, a sort of, "Wait a second, there is a world out there after all."

I've gotten a bit of comfort from an unexpected source, though. I've just recently launched into "reading" (via unabridged audiobook) Spider Robinson's "Callahan Chronicles", and it has been a breath of fresh air into a calcified week. In the introduction, Spider writes that once a fan tracked him to his unlisted phone number just to call and announce that he was about to commit suicide... unless Spider could tell him that Callahan's Saloon was real, and where it could be found. While I would hate to have been in Spider's shoes at that moment, after reading the moving and warm tales of Callahan's, I can understand the caller's mentality. For those who've never read the stories and didn't go look up the above link, Callahan's Saloon is a nightly gathering spot for all sorts of odd types (including time travelers and aliens) that share one thing in common - a deep sense of humanity and sympathy. I can well understand some of the reviews on Amazon, especially one poster's comment that, "To be honest, I use this book to weed out new people. If they really like the book, then they can become friends. If they dislike this book, or if it's "just okay", then I really don't want to know them. That's how good Callahan is.."

On another topic, for an amusing dose of French/American silliness, check out this article. I never quite know what to make of stuff like this - While it's true that a lot of the French perceptions of what American life must be like are pretty far off, sometimes they are true from angles that I don't immediately see. For instance, the idea that all Americans lived in huge houses with deluxe kitchens (drawn from movies and TV) just seemed goofy.... until I got to know a number of French folks and found that their lodgings and especially their kitchens were often unusually small (at least to my perception). When someone tells you that, "All Americans are rich!", you (US folks, anyway) just want to laugh, and then you start noticing how many houses here are 2/3 the size of their typical US counterparts... how many families own one car instead of two (or three or four).. not to mention the glaring comparisons of each country's GNI per capita (The US GNI per person stands at an average of $41,400 compared to France's $30,090, according to BBC's Facts & Figures).

Some stereotypes are right on the money, though. Words cannot describe how happy Emily and I were to finally get our couch unpacked and set up when we moved here, so we could stop eating dinner at the damned table and return to cheerfully munching our hot wings lying on the couch watching TV.............