Lessons from France
6:32 AM
I'd like to say that this post was delayed because we just learned so much in France, but maybe it had more to do with the amount of wine we drank there and fuzzy memories. Either way, here's what we've learned during our month and a half spent wearing berets and eating baguettes.
Some Stereotypes are True
You thought that was a joke about eating baguettes? Proving that some stereotypes are really based on reality, we often saw people walking along with baguettes in hand. Not just people on their way to picnics either. The French like their bread fresh, and who can blame them, so that means stopping by their local shop once every few days to pick up a fresh loaf. What goes for bread seems to go for the rest of the groceries as well, as the idea is to pop in the shop and only grab what you need for tonight's dinner and maybe tomorrows lunch. Definitely a different mentality than America's "buy everything at once because there might be a tornado next week." Maybe grocery shopping wouldn't be so terrible if we shopped like the French? Mom, you'll have to get back to me on that one.
As for berets, that stereotype may have to be put to rest. The only time we saw a girl wearing one was in the south of France in a store we can only compare to Home Depot.
All Hail Camembert
The French love cheese. That's something I already knew from when I visited Alice back in high school. We had all just finished dinner and Alice's mom delightfully announced the next course would be dessert. Nutella croissants dancing around in my head, I was a little confused when an array of cheese was placed in front of me. Cheese as dessert definitely hadn't changed in the time I've been gone (though we tested our fair share of sweets in our stays!) but I found that now I had a bit more of a taste for it than I did in high school. Thankfully my tastes have matured since then. The French really care about good cheese and with so many varieties and especially when smeared on a bit of baguette, cheese as dessert really isn't so bad.
No Really It's All About Cheese
Since they're so busy with their cheese, the French havent had much time to explore other ethnic food. Coming from the US, where we love ethnic food and especially Mexican fare, the choices were quite poor. We organized a Taco Night when cooking for a family down in Pouzolles and drove to the grocery store to find our ingredients. After searching the store, we found a small little section with some box kits for fajitas, a few packages of tortillas and a handful of odd-colored salsa. Even more disappointing was the one option for tortilla chips after we had walked down a whole aisle of potato chips. So we ended up making almost everything from scratch and Taco Night turned out to be a success.
Our friend Shelly told us a story of a long journey to a restaurant near Paris claiming to serve quality Mexican food. When you travel you start to miss the food you eat at home and after living in France for a few years, she was absolutely craving a burrito. Things were looking promising until there was only one burrito option on the menu and then got worse when the dish was set down in front of her. The tortilla was right but it was filled with duck meat, a creamy gravy, and carrot salsa among other things masquerading as 'authentic'. Even though she said it tasted fine, it was definitely no burrito. So if you're looking for Mexican food in France, make it yourself.
Trains are Expensive
No fancy title for this section, because this is serious business. Coming from Italy, which we later found out has some of the cheapest ran line tickets in Europe, the cost of the trains we're quite a shock. Suddenly we were spending double or triple the amount on transportation and weekend trips to other cities were out of the question. We managed to scrape by and be able to get to the places we had planned, but if we had known these tickets were going to be so expensive we might have looked into a railway pass. However, if you don't mind speaking a little French try using the carshare service BlaBlacar. Alice recommended it to me and we actually used it to get a ride from Lyon to Grenoble when we stayed with her. People post their car journeys and then you pay a fee to ride along with them, making it essentially a fancy way of hitchhiking.
Lost in Translation
If you're going to be chatting with your driver during the car share, know now that some things don't translate very well from English to French. This perhaps the clearest when we were in Grenoble with Alice and trying to decide what the "eggs" were called (actually gondolas) and eventually just went with eggs. Pop culture translations also produced a few laughs, like how the movie series "The Hangover" was translated in French to essentially read as "A Very Bad Trip". At least they caught the essence of it.
Introducing Winry always provided a bit of confusion as well. The "-ry" part of Winry's name is a bit hard for native French speakers to pronounce (have your nearest Frenchman try to pronounce Squirrel if you need a laugh), so we often ended up announcing her as "Winnie". Which then brought its own confusion as they exclaimed "Winnie l'ours!" We easily understood that it translates to Winnie the bear, but it was another few moments before we realized it was the French version of Winnie the Pooh. Apparently Pooh didn't translate well either.
"We're on French Time now"
The French definitely have a work to live mentality, completely opposite from America's live to work intense work weeks. Everyone likes to go at their own pace, especially freelancers who seem to especially show up only when it strikes their fancy. Shops also have curious working hours that are often times completely different from what's posted on their windows (if you can find it posted at all) and are closed for days at a time with seemingly no reason at all. This mentality can be lovely, and I'm sure if you were used to it, very relaxing, but when you're stuck in Dieppe trying to find something to eat at 5pm on a Tuesday it's surprisingly harder than it should be.
But through these differences, France brought us some beautiful countryside walks and amazing meals that have raised our standards. For all the wonderful people we've met and hope to see again in the future, until then bonne journée!
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