Musings

• I went to the grocery store in our village yesterday and bought two ribs of stalk of celery. (I had to look up the definition to be sure that I had the terms correct.) I don’t think I have ever bought celery by the rib before. I don’t know whether it is a French thing but I am sure that every time I buy celery in the states, the stalk comes in a plastic bag. You don’t slide the stalk out and break off some ribs. You buy the whole stalk in its plastic bag.

• If I wanted to make something with a pumpkin-like squash, I could tell the vendor to cut off as much as I wanted; I wouldn’t have to buy the whole squash.

• When the vendor has cut the piece of squash or I hand over the ribs of celery to be weighed, I put them in a bag which I carry and reuse with regularity. The French have gotten serious about the overabundance of plastic and do not permit merchants to provide plastic bags unless they are made of bio-degradable materials. No one at the checkout counter asks “paper or plastic”. You are expected to bring your own shopping bags. (Grocery stores have not provided shopping bags for purchases for as long as we have been coming to France but eliminating the produce plastic bags is relatively new.)

• The perils of plastic remind me of an Italian cartoon I saw on Facebook in which the fish monger is handing a whole fish to a woman and the woman asks: “No plastic bag?” to which the fish monger replies: “It’s already inside.”

• We recently had a mechanical problem with our French car: the power steering went out. We had to call a towing service to transport our car to a garage. First, I had to learn the term for power steering (direction assistée) so I could begin to explain the problem to the tow truck operator. Then, I didn’t know the term for tow truck (camion de dépannage, dépanneuse). The French terms – repair truck, repairer – are more generic than English which was a good thing in this instance as the truck that arrived was a flat-bed; not a tow truck at all.

• For all of the allegiance to supporting handicappers in France, there are few sidewalks in this village which would accommodate a wheel chair…

• I have written before that Vaison la Romaine is a tourist town because it has the most extensive Roman ruins sites in all of France. Being a tourist town means that the population changes from about 7000 in the winter to 14000 in the summer. Being here in the low season has its challenges. Several restaurants have only eight or nine month schedules. If the restaurants are open all year, it is certain that they close for several weeks in the winter for congé annuel – annual vacation. It is not rare to plan to go to a restaurant only to find a sign on the door saying congé annuel or fermeture exceptionelle (closed due to unforeseen circumstances). Add to that the regular weekly closings of all commerce (closed after noon on Sunday and many places stay closed all of Monday), one learns that it is necessary to have provisions in place because one cannot jump in the car on a Sunday and go to a store to pick up a forgotten item and expect it to be open. And don’t bother thinking about the concept of 24/7.

• Twelve years ago, someone staying at our apartment wanted to find a café or a coffee shop where he could order a take-out coffee. I don’t know whether it is a good thing but there are now a couple of shops that will sell a coffee to go and now there is also MacDo – the term the French use for MacDonald’s – in Vaison : (.

Rolling up the sidewalks

We still get questions from friends who ask about the differences that we note between life in Lansing and life in Vaison la Romaine. We still get questions about how long it takes to readjust to one environment or the other. 

Since we have been living our schizophrenic lives for the last eight years, I usually explain that we now have a routine of how we handle the changes in location and life style. For the most part, once we have put the clothes away and returned things to where they belong, we are pretty much settled. 

Even though our life in France follows the beat of a different drummer than our life here, we have come to enjoy the differences in tempo and thus enjoy wherever we are. After so many years, it is rare that we encounter a situation that surprises us. Sometimes it takes a visitor to the US or a visitor to France to ask a question that surprises us and makes us think about the contrasts. For example, a French person asking about why we permit pharmaceutical companies to advertise on television (not permitted in France) or an American visiting France who asked what stores are open on Sunday afternoon (none!).

Friday evening however, I surprised myself in my incorrect assumptions about our life in Lansing. We had gone to a concert and invited other concert-goers to join us for a drink after the performance. We chose a restaurant in the heart of downtown Lansing and went to wait for our friends there. We walked through the door at 9:36 and the hostess announced that the kitchen had closed at 9:30. We had eaten before the concert so food was not the objective in going there but nonetheless...

• If we had been in France - even in our little village - the dinner service would have continued until 11:00 PM. In Paris, people often arrive at restaurants after 9:00. (In Spain, it seems that the most popular dinner hour is 10:00.)

• The waiter brought our bill shortly after 10:30. To me it was a clear suggestion that we drink up and leave.

To tell the truth, we may have picked the one restaurant in downtown Lansing that closed early. I just never expected that the well-known restaurant that we picked would operate on such a schedule. The restaurant across the street appeared to be open and seemed to have a lot of people in it. I know I am using broad strokes to paint this picture but really... I never expected the restaurant that we chose to have such a roll-up-the-sidewalks schedule. I had believed that Lansing was more cosmopolitan. 

PS: We drove through downtown Lansing again last night and confirmed that I had chosen the only restaurant to close early; every other food-beverage place seemed to be filled with customers. I guess my skill at picking restaurants matches my skill at choosing the slowest line when going through customs. I have a knack at picking the wrong one.

Summertime and the livin is easy… (George Gershwin)

We have been back in the states for two months now. I have stopped interjecting French words into conversations. (I find that most people just look at me strangely when I say “voila” instead of “see” or “there you are”.) I try to remember to say “yoo-hoo” instead of “coucou” when I’m trying to get a neighbor’s attention.

We have acclimated fairly well to our state-side lives. Even though we have been living our schizophrenic lives for seven years now, I find that I still get surprised when we make the transition.

·         I lament the fact that I cannot walk to a grocery from our Lansing home. (The City Market is a little over two miles from here – but there remains only one produce stand (and the good cheese shop). There are neighborhood weekly farmer markets but nothing quite like market day in any village in Provence.

·         Americans dress far more casually than the French. Sweat pants and T-shirts seem closer to the norm than the aberration. We seem to have forgotten Jerry Seinfeld’s comment that ‘people who wear sweats in public are announcing that they have given up’.

·         Dining out in the states usually includes taking home a doggy-bag – more accurately, a styrofoam container – for the second portion that was served as part of your meal. The size of the portion served here is much larger than what we expect in France. (There are now some French restaurants which have begun offering take-away containers.)

·         For a long time, we have thought that food in France was more expensive and wine in France was less expensive than here but my perceptions are changing. Meats, cheeses and local vegetables seem to be equal to or less than American prices. For instance, a log of goat cheese that costs almost $10 in the states sells for about ¼ th that amount in France. ‘Exotic’ meats, e.g., duck, quail, rabbit, even lamb, are far less expensive in France and more often locally produced. Eggs are more expensive but bread – a baguette – is about a third of the US price. (Clothing is more expensive in France.)

·         We are fortunate to have a home with a backyard large enough for my vegetable garden. Many fewer houses in our village have enough land for a garden and at our apartment, we can manage only a few herbs grown on the balcony.

·         It seems easier to find a good craftsman/mason/carpenter in the states. We have heard horror stories about craftsmen and their work here but not nearly as often as we hear the stories of poorly done work in our village. not sure whether Angie’s List covers France…

This past weekend, we went to the christening of our godson’s first child. While the baptism was the main event, driving to North Carolina permitted me to reconnect with a high school friend and to see my sister and beau frère who drove from Wilmington to meet us in Raleigh for lunch. The events and gatherings were all fun: what beats family and friends?

Potty Talk

We went to one of the five cafés on Place Monfort – the square in the center of town  - for lunch and, before we left, I went to the bathroom. The trip is a common occurrence given my age and the elasticity of my bladder. Anyway, it made me think of the differences between restrooms in the States and in France.

The first big difference is that in France, the bathroom is NOT the toilet room. Most of the time, the toilet room is separate and, if you are lucky, has a sink for hand-washing (we don’t). The French explain that the bathroom is for bathing. The toilet room is for toileting but NOT for toiletry which occurs in the bathroom.

So, when you are in a restaurant, you ask: “Où sont les toilettes.” Always asking where the toilets (plural) are, but when you get directions and arrive at the toilettes, there may be only one. But you can never ask : « Où se trouve la toilette? » Because « la toilette » refers to doing your morning time in the bathroom in front of a mirror (faire la toilette).

There is a big difference between toilet rooms in the states and here. In France, most toilets offer a two-button flush: one for light, one for full flush. The second difference is that French restaurants don’t seem to have to comply with ‘handicapper accessible’ to the extent that American restaurants must. I believe that most toilets in French restaurants are NOT handicapper accessible. But then, most restaurants are not handicapper accessible - unless the handicapper/chair user wants to sit outside – assuming that the handicapper/chair user was able to negotiate the lack of curb cuts, narrow sidewalks, etc. Note to self: write something about handicapper accessibility…

Another difference is that the French are much less puritanical than we, so, there might be a toilet room for men but the stand-up options are visible to the women who might be walking by… (It is not very different from the denizens of men who ‘water plants’ along the roadways.)

Whether it is a small café or a big restaurant, the “Dyson” hand drier is the “le top” (new French word). It is so much more efficient than the slow, old air dryers. I don’t know how it compares ecologically with the restaurants that continue to offer hand towels…

Oh, BTW (aka ‘by the way’) I almost forgot that there are many toilets in the restaurants that do not have a toilet seat. I don’t know whether it is because they have decided that one more thing to clean is ‘over the top’ or because they have decided that a toilet seat makes it so comfortable that one might choose to remain there longer than necessary. Whatever the reason, few “toilettes” have seats…