If you think he can’t talk, you never met a beagle
The proper spelling is parlez-vous, in case you wondered. I do mean speak French, of course. Do you? I’ve been able to speak French for a while, now. What is relatively recent for me is the ability to understand French when it is spoken to me. There were scattered bits of comprehension for a year or more, then last October I made a call and got somebody’s voice mail, in French. I was amazed to hear, in French, The person you are trying to reach is unavailable. Please leave a message after the beep. Yep, beep. Bip, I suppose. It went on to say how I could leave a number if I wanted to. If that message sounds familiar, that means that you’ve heard people’s voicemail before. Voicemail is messagerie vocale, by the way. Since that day, I have had moments of temporary lucidity in my comprehension, and generally, I am finding it easier as time passes. I wonder if this is because I’m getting used to the Poitou accent, or just have practiced enough that it is starting to sink in. Whatever, I like it. I was able to translate something for Tami a couple of days ago. No one was more surprised than I was.
So, if you plan on spending more than a week or two in France, here’s my advice. Learn more French than you need to just be a tourist. You may need to ask for a jump start when leave the lights on in your rental car. You may want to look for brown sugar in a supermarket. You may need to know where the bank is. All sorts of things can come up, and you’ll need to know how to ask for help with them. Several years ago I had to ask a French gentleman to use his credit card for us at a gas station and I’d reimburse him in cash. My French was pretty weak, but he was great, and we were saved, so to speak. Weak, but not entirely lacking in the useful words needed to ask for that sort of help. I highly recommend that you get to at least that level of French if you’re going to be here longer than a casual tourist. (In Europe, that would probably be known as level A2. A1 being tourist French.) And, I can’t stress this enough, practice listening to French being spoken. It is a musical language, where rhythm and cadence are important. Quite a few syllables are not important, so it can be confusing. So listen, listen, listen.
There are French language movies available on Netflix and Amazon Prime that can be configured to display French subtitles. Why French? Why not English? Simple. I learned recently that when you know two languages, both are active all the time. The trick is to suppress the one you are not using, which can’t be done in this case if you’re reading English words. In fact, reading the English words tends to suppress your French. French subtitles (les soutitres français) reinforce your French, allowing you to keep your English down to, well, maybe a mild roar? Whatever, it helps a lot, and I write from experience.
Well, that’s this week’s French lesson, the first of 2024. Hope you enjoyed it, and remember, practice, practice, pratique!
We live in the sticks, really. It’s ten kilometers to the nearest town with any normal facilities, such as supermarkets, hospitals, movie theaters, etc, and both towns at that distance are still very small. But, the bakery pictured is two blocks from our house in a commune of 400 people. Bakeries are, I’m saying, common in France, and the bread is very good. The food you buy in France to take home and prepare is all good, actually, so it’s really just a matter of deciding what you’re hungry for this week, or today. You can buy most familiar things in a supermarket in France, if you know what to call them. Most things. However, Molasses is iffy, truly hot sauce can be tricky, refried beans are mostly unheard of, although there are places to get them because some restaurants use them. Without salsa, but still. Powdered sugar, eh, you may need to make your own. Tami did find brown sugar, which is sugar and molasses mixed together. There may be other things that are harder to find (Fritos Original!) but that mostly covers it. Besides those things, which can be worked around, you can buy whatever you need to use at home. And, it will be better than what you buy in the US.
I’ll use wine for a quick example. All French wine for sale is at least good. Maybe not top shelf, but good. This is generally true of anything you find for sale in France. The butter is all good, and some of it is excellent indeed. Meats are fresh and tasty, never having been dosed with antibiotics to fatten them up, yet still fatty good. (French people don’t worry about fats. A quick rule of thumb, if you’re not sure of something you’re cooking, add butter.) There are no factory farms in France, so the chances of contamination with e-coli or other bacteria are considerably lower. Another rule of thumb is that a person weighs ten pounds less in France than in the United States, and this without excessive worry about weight. Hmmm. Legumes (all vegetables) are fresh and seasonal. Right now, for example, cauliflower is over eight Euros per kilogram, which would be outrageous during the harvest season. This is different from the US, although thanks to our Southern neighbors in Spain and Italy one can get pretty much anything pretty much any time.
So, in sum, there are a few frustrations to cooking at home in France, but whatever you cook will be made with high quality ingredients. Not so bad, really.
Joke aside, French Fries are just called “fries” and anyway they’re originally Belgian. This week I’m writing about restaurants. Nothing specific, just in general. You can get fast food here. within an hour of where I sit, ten minutes in the case of McDonalds, you can find McDo (as it’s called locally), Burger King, and KFC. Unfortunately, it’s not a great McDo, as they rarely do the fries right. But I want to discuss “real” restaurants, which are anything but fast.
One thing an American will notice about a French restaurant is that they do not play background music. I believe that originally this was supposed to calm customers, but I think that these days it may serve to help in turnover. That is, it raises the noise level and makes it less pleasant to sit in the dining room. This is true even in upscale restaurants. In France, restaurants are supposed to be quiet enough for a table to converse without raising their voices. With nobody raising voices, this actually works. However, the noisiest restaurant I’ve been to in Paris was made noisy by a table full of drunken Parisians. So, I’m talking general guidelines here, not hard fast rules. As an American visiting France, be aware that we Americans do talk loudly when dining out and, you know, don’t.
There is a rule to remember: Keep Your Hands Visible above the table. This runs counter to American etiquette, so beware. You can even rest on your elbows, but avoid hiding your hands. If your hands aren’t visible, people will wonder what you’re up to. (Insert joke here.)
Nobody will ever hover around making a fuss and asking you if everything is okay. In fact, if you want service, you have to wave down your server. I’ll be honest, I prefer the French method, although it can be frustrating if your server is out of the room, which they sometimes are, of course. You will be seated normally and given menus, and likely asked what you’d like to drink. There’s nothing unusual about the drinks selection, except there aren’t free refills, which has never been a problem for me, but worth remembering. Your server will bring the drinks and ask if you’re ready to order. (So far the same, huh?) Often the Plat du Jour is worth looking at. We’ve had some great meals with the dish of the day. But, order whatever you want. In touristy areas you’ll probably get a menu in English that you may not even have to ask for. Once you’ve ordered, your server will disappear, maybe dropping off some bread. You may get an entree (starter) then other pre-main course items, depending on what you order. But, it may take a while between courses. We had lunch in a nearby village last week and were there almost two hours. But the food was delicious.
Delicious, but not spicy hot. French people prefer subtle flavors to spicy dishes. We had amazingly bland Mexican one time in Paris. Excellent otherwise, but begging for some Pace Picante. (There are some places to get authentic Indian, Mexican (Qudoba no less), and Middle Eastern food.)
Take your time eating. You’ll be left alone to enjoy your meal. Servers in France are considered professionals and paid a living wage. They have no need to grovel for tips. They’re off doing their job serving others at different phases of their meals, and are available to you any time you call them over. Traditionally, a cheese course follows the main course and precedes dessert. It’s a free country, you don’t have to take the cheese, but there are some excellent ones around and, as a tourist, you might want to try a few. For me, I go straight to dessert, which is usually excellent. Most recently I had a créme brulé, which is custard with sugar sprinkled on top which is then scorched with a small blowtorch. You think I’m kidding? Ask your server. They will have pastry, custards, maybe tartes (pies) all in smaller portions than you may be used to, but usually very good.
Speaking of those smaller portions, you will rarely be given too much food. In the US it’s common to have portions dripping off of the plate, which doesn’t happen in France, in my experience. But the food will be delicious. I’ve had excellent steaks, what are scalloped potatoes, vegetables of various sorts, some wonderful desserts, top-notch entrées (appetizers) and, sad to say, occasionally some lousy food, but that’s rare.
The big difference between eating out in the US and in France is that in France, even in a crowded restaurant, one can usually have a conversation using ones “inside” voice. In fact, that’s generally expected. And, the meal is never rushed. You can, of course, eat in a hurry and rush off, but that will surprise everybody. (If perchance you do have to eat in a hurry, tell your server as you’re seated, and you will be accommodated, at least in my experience.) And the portions will be what you can eat, not set up to appear as massive as possible. Contrary to what I’ve read elsewhere, boxes are provided if you can’t finish it all anyway. So, allow a couple of hours (French people do), use a quiet voice, remember to call your server over if you need service (even to get the bill, or addition.) In tourist-frequented areas (Paris for sure) you can probably get a menu in British English (close enough) and the server will probably know at least enough English to do their job in that language.
And, above all, enjoy the food! If you liked the service, leave a Euro or two on the table. Forget 20%!
Really. What happened is that our stuff (most of it) arrived and I’ve been busy unpacking and sorting and putting away. Which means France has been looking pretty much like our old place, except that we’re taking things out of boxes instead of putting things into boxes. But, on to something topical.
It’s the holidays in France, and it’s looking a lot like Christmas. In fact, the word Christmas comes up surprisingly often, considering that here the occasion is known as NOEL. As in Joyeaux Noel et bonne année. To top it off, I found a display of Reeses’ Peanut Butter Cup Xmas Trees, the real thing, made in the US of A, in a store that’s a little hard to describe. It carries things like a Big Lots, sort of. Anyway, we also bought some decor there, and the Xmas trees were delicious as always.
France is different, no doubt about it. “Bacon” means cured meat, probably pork porc, which includes smoked pork belly poitrine fumée which, when I have the butcher slice it thin, turns out to be what an American would call bacon. Mmmmmm! Bacon! Homer could maybe survive here. Food differences certainly exist. At a restaurant you have to call for service. Nobody comes around to interrupt your meal and ask if everything is okay. If everything isn’t okay, any French person would complain to their server, so “okay” may be assumed. Also, servers do not live on tips. You can put a Euro or two on the table if you really liked the service, but it’s neither required, nor even expected. It’s just a bonus, and a lot of servers deserve it. But they can live on their salary, and service at a restaurant is considered an honorable profession. How’s that for a difference? On the other hand, while brands may differ, and you need to know what to ask the butcher to do if you want, say, a strip steak, you can generally get the ingredients to make whatever you want to make, including Mexican style food with actual spice in it. (The French don’t believe in spicy food, but prefer delicately prepared, subtly flavored fare.)
In other food news, France consumes more pizza per capita than any country other than the US. They have McDonalds (even in Tahiti, I recently learned.) There is a KFC near Angouleme. It’s different, but it’s not that different. Myself, I make diner style eggs, hash browns, toast, and bacon on Sunday mornings. It isn’t difficult, and I really like that stuff. So, even though it’s different here, I still get to eat my favorite foods, and drink my favorite drinks, and, this may be sad, as my wife pointed out recently, they’re “becoming more like the United States all the time.”
Hmmm. Hopefully not in terms of political discourse. Until next time, Au revoir!
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!
