I wrote this review a while back. I don’t say anything about my French these days, for the record. I just try to use it so long as it’s working. Anyway, here’s a review of a good place to get a foundation in the language.
Learn French with Paul Noble Reviewed
This review is of the entire series, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Here’s a story. Recently, our rental car was very low on fuel when we pulled into Angouleme. We found a station, but as we had lost our credit card on the first day of vacation, we had no way to pay. (The pumps didn’t take debit cards.) There was a kiosk where one could in theory deposit money and retrieve a ticket with which to buy fuel, but it was not working. It was raining hard to boot. I looked around and saw only French people. So, I asked a man at the next pump, “Comprendez-vous anglais?” To which he replied “non.” Then, I dug deep, deep within myself to find all of Paul’s French lessons and advice, and, much to my amazement, I was able to explain our situation, and ask him if he could use his card for us, and I’d reimburse him in cash. He said “Oui,” and even didn’t stop the pump short of the fifty Euros I’d given him, which I told him to do. He actually put in Euros 50.01. I called him every nice thing I could think of in French and shook his hand. Amazingly, that amount exactly filled our tank.
I have two take-aways from the experience. One is that the French reputation for being nasty is pretty stupid and wrong (I do say “bonjour” to everyone, hint hint.) The second is that Paul French’s audiobooks (on CD or Audible, I believe) are extremely effective in teaching French. He loves language. Not any particular language, but language itself, as do I. My French is still pretty crude, although as I say, “tour le jour, un peu meilleur.” I like the rhyme. It’s French! Ahem. Anyway, if this story doesn’t convince you, try the first book in the series and see how useful it is. You’ll be glad you did!
This is a view of the village where my grandfather was born. It’s called Bitche, which is from the Latin for “fort on a hill” and not about dogs. I still haven’t gotten my copy of WordPress to upload new photos, so I can’t do a picture of my own village, which is smaller.
This is just about a few more differences that I’ve noted. Not social ones this time, rather physical differences between France and the US. First, although I’m sorry I can’t use a photo of my own street, you will note the materials used in the houses in that picture. Stone, tile, and concrete are the usual building materials employed for residential construction. This has implications for how long your house is going to last. For example, portions of our house are over a century old, and aside from a few cracks in plaster from a recent earthquake (nothing serious) is still completely intact. We do, of course, want to upgrade all of the windows, but some of them already are double paned and reasonably good at keeping the outside out.
Something you would notice if I could post a better picture is that the houses sometimes are not up to what you might call “Homeowners’ Association standards.” That’s because there are no such associations. In fact, there is no zoning, and each case for a business is decided by the commune’s council, chaired by the Maire (surely you can translate that word.) Part of our house used to be a Fish and Chips shop, for example. We plan to make it into an en suite bedroom, but the approval for it being a shop came from the commune, not a zoning board. Basically, one can put a business anywhere if one can build a case for it. The local bar is connected to the owners’ house.
Sidewalks. This is an odd one, because while they exist, the sidewalks are mostly narrow and sometimes have light poles right in the middle of them. What to do? Walk in the street, of course! It seems there are also no laws about jaywalking. In fact, in the US, such laws were first promulgated at the urging of the automobile industry. In France, anyone needing to use the street has the right to do so. If someone is walking there, drivers are expected to respect that person’s right to the street and drive accordingly. It is illegal to block a street, though, which makes sense. One thing that is illegal nationwide is parking on the sidewalk. I read that described as the least enforced law in France. I hope so, because I’m parked on the sidewalk out front, as are a number of my neighbors. You can walk past the cars on the building side, usually, so nobody is forced into the street. Usually.
And, of course, those old buildings look old. There is moss and mold growing on them, vines too. In as many as nine centuries a place can accumulate a lot of growth. And the corners don’t stay sharp for the better part of a millennium, either. Add the common roman tile roof, and you get that quaint, sometimes medieval looking, village that tourists like to rave about. Just remember, we do have electricity, high speed Internet, computers, phones, and all that other modern stuff. Mostly inside, of course.
No, I didn’t take this one, but it’s public domain
I tried to upload a picture I took of a baseball game, but apparently WordPress is remaining obstinate. Anyway, I was in the supermarche yesterday when I realized that the way they kept everything made sense to me. Same with the brocolage (DIY) store. Nothing they did made sense when I first got here, or at all until recently. Now, what the heck, I’d find the organization of a US grocery store to be odd. Which got me to thinking about what constitutes “normal” situations.
It appears that “normal” has more to do with what you’re used to than anything else. When I was shopping at a Kroger outlet (Smith’s) I could figure out fairly well where they would put any given item. Of course, in France, some of the items are different, but even if they’d been the same (as some, such as Heinz Ketchup, are) I didn’t find them in the expected place. Dairy and eggs, in particular are stored in a manner that seems entirely wrong to an American. They both are simply put out on the shelf like pasta or soup in a can, where you pick them up, take them home, and don’t need to refrigerate them (unless it’s one of those really hot hot spells we seem to get these days.) I even know why this is so.
Eggs emerge from the chicken covered with slime. The FDA decided some years ago that the slime should be removed for sanitary reasons. Without the slime, the eggs will absorb oxygen and rot forthwith. You may have smelled the result? With the slime, the pores in the eggshell are sealed, which is why the European agency equivalent to the FDA decided that the slime should remain on for sanitary reasons. I don’t advocate anything, I just report stuff. You can refrigerate your eggs if you want to, but then you have to keep them cold or face the smelly consequences.
Milk is pasteurized in the US. In Europe it is irradiated and sterile. This means that it is probably immortal in the bottle, and needs refrigeration only after the bottle is opened. There are some brands of milk in the US that are ultra pasteurized, but some say that they taste off. The milk in France is not pasteurized at all, but irradiated, which kills anything alive in it (the stuff that makes it curdle and spoil) but so far as I can tell leaves the milk as it was formed. This is handy, as I buy six-packs of liter bottles, put them in the cupboard, and only refrigerate whichever one I’m going to open next. I’ve never had milk turn, although it is certainly possible once you crack the seal on the bottle. Also, I drink it up fairly quickly. Sealed up, milk has a use by date of four months from the day it was bottled. I’ve never had any around that long, but I imagine it would last even longer than that.
But, is that better? Heck, I don’t know, but all of a sudden that seems normal. I’ve thought for years that a good idea to prevent salmonella and similar infections would be to irradiate meat. France doesn’t do that, either, but then France also doesn’t have huge industrial sized feedlots, so maybe they don’t need to.
It’s odd when I think that, after three months here last year, and five months now living here full-time, my normal has shifted. I’m fine with it, just as I’d be fine with normal in the US if I moved back. After a few months, at least. Let me know in the comments if you’ve ever had your “normal” shift on you.
Due to something I haven’t yet been able to correct, no pictures for a while. Hope that’s okay with everyone!
I want to say some more about food. French, and American. There are plenty of fat people in France, but it’s not the norm, as it is in the US. And, I believe, the American obsession with low fat foods is largely to blame. (I’m stealing ideas left and right here, but they are public domain ideas.) Sometime, I think in the current century even, researchers experimenting with dogs demonstrated that fat has a flavor. If that sounds gross, well, don’t eat this post and you should be fine. I’m pretty sure that is true, and furthermore, fat is a good flavor. And, I suppose that all fat isn’t created equal, I’ll have to grant that. Milkfat (butterfat) buffers the effects of sugar ingestion. At the University of Minnesota in the 80s they were experimenting with foods that cause a sugar rush. Honey was, they said at the time, the best (or worst, if you don’t like sugar rushes.) The food that they could never get anyone’s blood sugar to spike with was ice cream. This was good news for Minnesota’s dairy industry. The reason was good old milkfat. Other fats don’t do that. Crisco and sugar is about as good as sugar for making a sugar rush happen. And, yummy, huh?
Recently (within a few years) it has come out that the US sugar industry paid researchers to find things that made fat bad for us. Some of it may have been real, some of it they actually did make up. But, fat tastes good, and if you take it out of food you lose a lot of good flavor. So, to make the stuff palatable, you add, what else? Sugar! Sugar does taste good. I eat the stuff, but not in the amounts in which I was eating it in the US. Because in France, fat is okay. The main base underneath a lot of French cooking is butter. Not margarine, but butter. Fatty, slippery, gooey, tasty butter! And butter contains what? Contains? It mostly is milkfat. Which is, in fact good for you and tastes good too. French people eat a lot of butter, but they aren’t as frequently obese as Americans, who tend to use low-fat alternatives. Think about that. Whole milk and butter taste really good, they help you stay thinner, and they reduce the need to add sugar to everything.
And added sugar in everything is the problem. Read the ingredients label on the food you buy. Most of it has sugar in it. It can be very difficult to avoid sugar in the US, unless you’re rich enough to afford Whole Foods! In France, the sort of thing Whole Foods sells is just what they sell in most supermarkets. And it isn’t expensive, either.
I’m not trying to preach; I’m just trying to lay out some reality. The rule of thumb is that you weigh ten pounds less in Europe than you do in America. I think I know why that is. Sweets, anyone?
One could write a book about the similarities and differences between the two.
I have been asked if I ever wrote an article specifically about our move to France, which is, after months, still in process. Our worldly goods are stuck in Rotterdam since the 6th of September, and I hope to see them soon. Also, Tami is in France only as a visitor until she retires or finds a job that will let her work remotely from here. Meanwhile, I paint. The downstairs is finished except for the laundry room. Right now I’m working on Tami’s office. It’s nice paint. I have no plans to paint my studio/office, but I’ll most likely be buying another tub of paint. It’s good paint, but we have a lot of walls.
So, maybe as much as ten years ago, maybe not quite so long, but certainly more than six years ago, we decided that we’d like to be able to see Europe without paying $2k a pop each to visit annually. Well, I can see Europe by opening my eyes in the morning, and for 5€ I can get to Bordeaux or Poitiers plus most points in between on a regional train. It’s cheap because I’m older than dirt, thus showing that there are advantages to everything. For a bit more money I can take a train or plane to almost anywhere in Europe. The train will probably require me to get to Paris, but there are several regional international airports closer than the big city. I’d love to return to Barcelona and eat some more arroz negro con mariscos at Restaurante Ferran, for example. And that really was it, originally. We did not want to get away from the United States, we wanted to see Europe. But Europe is a big place (a bigger market than the USA, in fact) and just where should we go?
Germany? We both have ancestors there. My grandfather Nick was born in Germany (before and now his birthplace is in France) but that doesn’t help. The United Kingdom is nice, really, but it’s very expensive to move to and we can’t afford it. Ditto for Ireland, although my McDaniels ancestors from County Kerry might be happy to see me. We have visited Italy and Portugal and Spain, all lovely countries, but given the way climate is going, liable to be too hot for us to want to live in. We don’t know enough about Eastern Europe, and it costs more to get there from the US. Switzerland is where 48% of my DNA is from (Bern, since you asked) but since neither of us is a billionaire, no way we could afford to move there.
France has one distinct advantage, and that is tax reciprocity with the US. That means that each country credits whatever tax you paid the other one against what you owe it. Income tax is higher in France at the moment, but that’s all we’ll pay. In the UK, and most countries, we’d have to pay our entire tax bill to each country. Ouch! And in the end, that settled it. Six years ago I began studying French every day, and so did Tami. According to a couple of online tests I’ve taken, I’m apparently at a B1 level, which means that I can function okay in day-to-day interactions, so long as the conversation isn’t too advanced. This actually seems true. Six years, folks! French seemed easy at first, because the vocabulary is deceptively easy. That’s because we use so much of it in English. But, watch out. Attend means to wait. To attend is assister, which can also be taken to mean “assist” although I’d probably use “aider” which means, oh, aid.
We took our first property searching trip in the fall of 2019, looked at a few things but mostly did tourist stuff, but we did orient ourselves to where we wanted to buy. We had already checked out Brittany earlier that year, and now we checked out Charente, a “department”, (think US County) in the Southwest of France. Charente is, in fact about a mile south of our house in the department of Vienne. We decided to return in the spring of 2020, burdened only by the knowledge that it can be difficult for an American to get a mortgage in France, for which we can thank IRS reporting rules, apparently. Well, 2020, let’s see, something big came up. Huh. Anyway, while we waited for that to resolve itself, and managed not to die from Covid, we sold a couple of properties we owned in Arizona not too far from the Grand Canyon. We bought them for a song, one could have been put on a credit card (no kidding) and sold them for enough that we’ve had to pay capital gains tax for a couple of years. Lots of capital gains, which meant that we could just buy something, up to a certain value.
So, in the fall of 2021 we got our passes sanitaires, proofs of vaccination in Euro style, and spent three weeks in a very nice B&B in Agudel, outside of Jonzac, again in Charente. Weekdays we looked at houses (but not on Toussaints, 1 Novembre, or Jour d’armisiste, 11 Novembre, because those are national holidays and France is serious about national holidays. And not much on weekends because French Estate Agents don’t work then. For a couple of weeks nothing moved us. Then we saw the house in which I now sit. A candidate! A few days later, we saw another one, and put in an offer on it. Tami called around to tell the other agents non. Imagine her surprise when the response from this seller was “So how much would you pay?” She lowballed them. They took it. And here I sit, as it were. It took four months, one of which is probably our fault, to close the sale. I came here in April of 2022, and was able to stop wearing a mask before I left at the end of June. (You can stay 90 days without a visa, no more.)
Back in Vegas we began getting serious about the move. When I first returned it seemed odd not to say bonjour to everyone, but in fact I don’t think that would go over well with everyone. Last Winter we started packing, ultimately filling 99 boxes (I think, it’s been a while.) And applying for Visas. For that we had to fill in forms online and go for an interview in Los Angeles, which we did. A week or so later our passports came back with visas attached, which is why I am now living in France legally, although an alien. I arrived last May 10th, and haven’t left the country since. I could, of course, go almost anywhere in Europe using my French visa, but, heck, why tour when I can paint? Tami’s employer decided they didn’t want to risk having to pay French taxes, but she now plans to leave them sometime before or right at the end of the year. And then she can come home to all this bright new paint! Yay!
Maybe why the French are so particular about manners, that is. I’ve mentioned before that using “bonjour,” “s’il vous plait,” “merci” and “au revoir” are requirements to be polite in France. Failure to use bonjour in particular can result, in some cases, of you not even being acknowledged as being in the room. In the United States, one can skip politeness to an extent and still be thought fine, polite even. This doesn’t happen in France, and I think I have discovered why this is so.
Looking back a few centuries, France was an absolute monarchy, with nobility running around trying to stay that way, a well-entrenched church taking up the middle tier, and everybody else, whatever their profession or station, mucking about on the bottom. Then came the revolution of 1789, which you’ve probably read about. It got pretty ugly, and not just because of the terror. The revolutionaries invented a new calendar, ran the nobility out of the country (the lucky ones, that is) and also came up with new ways to greet each other. This reminds me of the way the Communists in the Soviet Union were all “comrades.” Sure, they were. Anyway, what with Napoleon, a second republic, a restoration, a second Napoleon (III?) and then into a third republic, a lot of the more nonsensical revolutionary ideas were discarded. For instance, France uses the same calendar as everybody else. But, this still left an open question: if we believe in egalité, (we’re all equal), how do we address one another? Good one, when you think about it.
Well, consider how one would address a noble, should one not be of that class. First, you would wish them “good day.” That was, originally, bon jour. Bon jour still means, technically, “good day,” but nobody uses it for that, because bonjour has meant “hello” for so long that a new term, bon journée, was adapted to mean “have a nice day” or words to that effect. A journée was originally a day trip, such as one might take to a neighboring village to visit the market there. Now French people get to wrestle with the difference between jour and journée. Lucky them. Next, if you want anything from that noble, you say please, which is written s’il vous plait. It sounds more like see voo play, because, well, that’s for another time. When they’ve helped, you say thank you, or merci. And before you part ways, you politely tell them, one way or another, how happy you are to have interacted with a noble, and that is au revoir, which literally means ‘until we see each other again!” You can just say it like “oh vwah” and nobody will complain.
And, there’s more! The word monsieur, taken to mean “mister,” is a compound of mon sieur, which literally means “my lord.” Similarly, madame, or ma’am in the US, is a compound of ma dame, or “my lady.” So when you say Bonjour, madame, you are saying, and this is true, “Good day, my lady!” How’s that for respect?
In short, whereas in the US we decided in favor of everyone being a commoner, in France, they opted for everyone being nobility. It’s as simple as that. If the President of France wants to talk to some poor beggar on the street, they’ll start with a bonjour. That poor beggar is, in spite of appearances, a noble, and deserving of respect. Therefore, one must deliver, and may expect, respectful terms of address in any interaction. If a French person doesn’t receive respect, they won’t be very polite in return.
And there it is. There are exceptions, of course, especially in heavily touristed areas, but in a nutshell, that’s why you always must be respectful of a French person, even a pimply-faced ice-cream vendor. The upside is, that, if you are, you will be respected in return, and undoubtedly enjoy your French vacation a great deal more than you would have other wise.
Yesterday I had my first experience with French health care. Also, a comment on some French prejudices. Read on.
I have a not especially dangerous (as I take aspirin) heart thing called A-fib. It started in my 30s, and has been off and on ever since, but for the last few months, it’s just here. Sometimes worse than others. So, even though I’m not on French insurance yet (I’ve applied, but this is France, so I’m hoping by May, when my current insurance expires) I checked around and found a doctor taking new patients. Her name looks Spanish, but she’s native French. She’s not far away, down some amazingly rural roads, so it takes over half an hour to get to her. Once there, her office, in a medical complex that looks a lot like 1950s tourist cabins, is modest, but modern and nice. Right on time, she called me into her exam room.
She asked about insurance, and for a while was pretty adamant about why I needed to have some. I told her I did, but she didn’t seem to believe me, until that is I gave her my passport as ID, and she said, “Oh, you are American?” in her good English (one reason I chose her). I said yes and suddenly we were good friends. This is the French prejudice part. Brit? Pouffe! American? Do come in! I do not exaggerate. So anyway, she took down my information, listened to my story, and I was there for a full 1/2 hour. She set me up with an appointment with a cardiologist (in another town, but one down better roads) and gave me some forms for both the cardiologist and to get blood drawn (fasting of course.) None of that is unusual. What came next is, to an American.
She charged me 25€. That was the price, not a copay. In fact, I don’t think my insurance will cover that low a charge, which is okay, because 25€! I don’t know what the cardiologist will charge, but I’ll find out as soon as I get the official appointment (rendez vous) confirmation. Half an hour of a doctor’s time, being listened to, and sent to the appropriate help, for 25€. That is the difference between US healthcare and, I guess, anyplace else. Seriously, the US has some catching up to do in matters pertaining to serving citizens’ needs, doesn’t it?
Either you can’t see the label, or the numbers are upside-down. The manufacturer was obviously not thinking of photograpy!
That’s my tape measure. 8 meters is roughly 26-1/4 feet. I have it because I bought a barn door to install in an upstairs suite (in Las Vegas) and the instructions were only in centimeters (!). Converting makes for some really odd fractions, so I ordered that device from Amazon and used it to install the door. And, it was so much easier than fractional measurements that in all future home projects, I kept right on using my metric tape measure, which I brought with me to France in my luggage. Just landed (I hope) in Rotterdam are our household goods, which include some more tape measures with both scales on them. I haven’t rejected US Customary measure (not the same as Imperial, but similar) and even in France not everything is metric. For instance, socket wrench sockets come in 1/2, 1/4, and 1/8 drive. Yes, folks, your ratchet or breaker bar will be compatible with any sockets you buy here. My biggest project using centimeters was to build a base for a new shed. I followed the directions carefully and, boy howdy, the shed fit perfectly. No messing up how many eights in a half or that sort of thing. 235 is 235 (unspecified it always means centimeters) to use a quick example. So, yes, folks, metric is easier to use for construction.
And for distance, honestly, how far is a mile? Don’t give me any other measure to answer because that’s just putting off the inevitable. How long is a foot? How wide is an inch? What’s 3/8 inch plus 5/16th? It always gets messy. And I’m not saying that kilometers are superior to miles. But, honestly, it takes maybe a day or two driving using metric and you figure out how far a kilometer is the same way you figured out how far a mile it. You just know it. I can’t tell you how long a kilometer is without referring to another measure,* the same problem as I’d have with a mile. Honestly, it’s not worth worrying about. Ask a Canadian, you just do it.
Weight? Well, I still say that I weight 192. That’s 87 kilos, or kilograms, but somehow 87 doesn’t mean as much to me. But for buying stuff, half a kilo is a tad over a pound, so that’s how much butter I buy at once. I have a kitchen scale that does grams, and a bathroom scale that would give me kilos or stone if I set it to, so it doesn’t matter. I’ll no doubt flip my scale to kilos at some point, but I haven’t done it yet.
Volume is easier than you’d think. 5 ml to the teaspoon, and you can run that right up if you’re cooking. It varies some with larger amounts, but how much buttermilk are you putting in those biscuits anyway? The trouble in cooking is that in Europe everything is by weight, which some say is more precise, and they may be right, but cooking isn’t a precise art because one must allow for ambient temperature and humidity in many cases. I have standard US measuring cups and spoons, and a scale in grams, so I’m good either way.
The one thing that I am reluctant about, for some reason, is temperature. Fahrenheit, with narrower degrees, gives a closer look at the temperature. Mid-80s says more than Mid 20s, and I like that. I’m okay with hearing Celsius because I’ve lived with it long enough to get it, but, really, I prefer Fahrenheit for determining comfort levels. Pauvre moi, huh?
You might be interested to know that, as of 2021, about one-third of US manufacturers were fully metric, one-third were partially metric, and one-third used no metric measures. If you want to sell at export, you have to be, it’s as simple as that. Also things like lumber dimensions are metric even though they rarely say so on their labels. Sneaky, those decimals!
The truth about metric is that you’re most comfortable with what you’re most used to, and it takes very little time to get used to a different system of measurement. Honestly, it doesn’t bother me a bit. For building something, I highly recommend it. For driving, so long as your speedometer and the speed limit signs use the same system, who cares? For cooking, well, whatever works for you. Now I’m gonna take my 87 kilos and move on. Later, Gator!
*Well, I kind of can, because originally a meter was one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the north pole along a line passing through Paris, France. Okay, I had to use the size of the planet for a reference. Ignore me!
Taken in Spring of 2019. You must know what this is, right? (La Tour Eifel) In case you missed it, all photos are by the author unless noted otherwise.)
French people speak French. That may be their worst quality, but there it is. Many don’t know more English than what they maybe gather from watching a few American movies. Which is less than you might think, buckaroo! So I’ve been studying French for a spell, and I know most of the common words, but there are specialty words that I’ve never seen. Like, for instance, where do I get Drywall Mud?
Drywall mud, properly called in the US Drywall Joint Compound, and in Canada simply Joint Compound, is called mud by professionals mainly because that’s what it closely resembles. Other than being plaster white, it could be clay scooped out of a mudpuddle. I’ve used lots of it in Nevada, especially. I even successfully replaced a kitchen wall in a small place we once owned in Arizona. Seriously, you could not tell it was a new wall, with no seams showing and all. (That may give you an idea of how much practice circumstance has forced me to take.) So, when we had the living room door moved over a few feet, I wasn’t worried. In fact, when we had the old radiators and associated pipes removed, I wasn’t worried. I simply looked up “Drywall Joint Compound” in a couple of translation apps (I always like confirmation, and they don’t always agree) I found the word remboulage. Well, remboulage is what you use to patch cracks and holes in walls. So, I headed for the Bricolage, meaning DIY, store, went to the paint department, and found some stuff called, ahem, remboulage It was soft, sort of grey, but it filled holes and so on pretty well so I filled quite a few holes in several walls with it. (The radiator project left some rather large holes.)
That stuff turns into concrete! Have you ever tried sanding concrete? There has to be something better, right? I mean, French houses do use gypsum drywall, and lots of it. Well, the man who moved the door (sounds easy, doesn’t it?) had some white stuff that stirred up just like mud. I asked him and he gave me the brand name. Cool. Back to the same brico for some of that! What they had in that brand name, in the drywall department, was plaster of Paris (Plâtre fin de Paris,to be exact.) Nothing else. Now, Plaster of Paris works as joint compound, except that it sets up in ten minutes. I ended up mixing many batches, which meant climbing up and down a ladder a lot. Good exercise, but . . . And then I ran out of plaster of Paris! So, today I went to the biggest brico in the area, looked in the paint department first, and eh, voila! there was the brand again, but this time with a box of stuff that promised to mix just like plaster of paris, give one half an hour to apply it, and be sandable after 24 hours. If you’ve ever used Mud, that looks familiar. I found MUD! As a bonus, they had some seuil, or threshold, that the other bricos didn’t seem to carry.
But, this is a post about language. The title, spelled correctly, is Parlez-vous français? You see what being unfamiliar with the language and common terms and uses for things gets you? Unnaturally rough looking spots on your wall (still a lot better than radiators and pipes) and quite a bit of bother. Of course, now, I know where to get what I need and what to call it. But I do wonder what else I’m going to have to mess up before I’m familiar enough to stop making stupid mistakes like that. Anybody? Hello?
This was a restaurant in western Germany in 2016. Maybe it’s still there?
The Canicule has lifted!
And that’s my first peculiarity about France. A heatwave is called a canicule. But, before you give up on that, we (sort of) use the same term in the US. It is the 2000-years later version of caniculare, which is Classicical Latin for “Puppy Days.” Or, I guess, Dog Days. The Romans, most likely of Greek origin themselves according to many sources, took from the Greeks the idea that the reappearance of the Dog Star, Sirius, was responsible for the miserable hot weather common from mid-July through August. In Gaul, it just got to mean any hot miserable weather, and I’m glad it’s over.
Now, for more along the lines of what I had in mind when conceiving this post. France has what they call Hypermarchés. That is, a huge supermarket within a store that sometimes can make a Wal-Mart Superstore look tiny. In those, and other, smaller, supermarkets, when you shop, you will always (always!) have to work your way around employees stocking shelves, or worse, hauling warehouse trucks around piled high with stuff they need to shelve, or empty because they’re going back for more. These stores tend to open at 8 or 9 in the morning, so, naturally, you’d expect that a crew would be coming in at, say, 5 or 6 in the morning to get the place stocked and ready, so that shoppers can find what they’re looking for without fighting employees. Hah! You see, in France, the Customer is Not Always Right! In fact, many times, The Customer is Just In Your Way! Seriously, and this is why you must say bonjour when entering a store, or, in the case of the larger more impersonal ones, to anyone you need to interact with, and certainly to the person who checks you out.
While I’m on stores, you will almost never get anything bagged up for you. If you want it in a bag, you bag it yourself. I’m okay with this, as one can simply put everything back in the cart and wheel it all out to your car, but it can be off-putting at first. If you don’t have any reusable bags, they sell them. I like them. I took one with me to Las Vegas for a year and used it every time I went to the supermarket. I even got a few cents credit for every one of their bags that I didn’t use. The reusable bags can be tough as heck, too, made of jute or hemp, and they last for years. Unless somebody steals one, of course, which is why I now bag as I load the car.
Pharmacies! If it is by any conception some sort of drug, you must buy it at the pharmacy. That goes for Aspirin, Aleve, laxatives, athlete’s foot treatment, and of course prescribed drugs. There are “parapharmacies” that sell vitamins, nutritional supplements, plasters (band-aids) and other non-drug items that you’d normally expect from a supermarket, but if you have a headache, you must go to the pharmacie. They display lit green crosses, so they’re easy to find, and they are everywhere, but to have to go to a pharmacy (spelling deliberate) for ibuprofen? Weird.
Food is food, and in a lot of cases you can buy the same things in France as you can in the US. Except some tasty stuff like good hot sauce, packages of sliced bacon, Heinz Baked Beans (sorry, Who), and pepperoni. In fact, French cooking, while deservedly famous for being well prepared, is remarkably bland for someone used to Southwestern cuisine. If you like some heat in your eggs, bring some sauce with you. I like Cholula.
Primature à droite, that is priority to the right. Many moons ago this was the case in Ohio where I learned to drive, but I doubt that there any intersections left there where it applies. (There could be.) That is, in an unmarked intersection, that is, one with no signage, the vehicle approaching from the right has the right-of-way. This is true even if the intersection is a T-shape. There is a sign in France used to warn you if you’re approaching one. It’s a white triangle, point up, outlined in red (like an inverted Yield sign) with a black X on it. If you’re driving here and see one, be careful, slow down, be ready to stop. Unless you’re on a real road and can see that nobody is coming, but officially do as I say. This is a great way to confuse someone from the UK, where, I’ll admit, there isn’t much call for priority to the right.
There’s more stuff, and I’ll try to list it in the future. There’s more stuff about the US that French people (and Brits*) find strange, too. I sort of make these things up during the preceding week, so I can’t promise exactly when, but keep coming back and you’ll see them in all good time.
* about 5.6 percent of the population of our Commune are from the UK, so I get exposed to British customs and language as a sort of side bonus.
