Despite the title and the subject of this post, I’m not going to turn this into a stump speech. After all, most of you probably already know or can guess my political leanings. Instead, this post is about civic duty and the exercise of our rights. As an American expatriate living in France, my view of the current election season back home is obviously a bit different. I read the same online news as most Americans and I regularly communicate via Facebook and Skype with my family and friends in America, but I also get to witness the campaigns through the lens of French society. I read election coverage in the French media as well and I often have the honor and — one might say — the burden of discussing it with my family and friends here. That certainly changes the perspective.
“The First Vote”
Looking at it from the outside, it’s easier to see how we Americans take our right to vote for granted and — with our unique Electoral College system — assume that our individual voices just aren’t that important, especially if we live in places where the election results are foregone conclusions (whether that’s Oklahoma or the District of Columbia or any number of states in between). Whether or not an individual vote will change the outcome on November 6 is really beside the point, though, isn’t it? After all, the very fact that we have the right to go to the ballot box (or the voting machine … or the post office with an absentee ballot in hand) is the result of centuries of struggle by generations of Americans: those who risked execution as traitors to their King; those who were lynched as “uppity” for trying to exercise their rights; those who faced down billy clubs, fire hoses, and attack dogs on the Alabama asphalt; yes, even those who risk being turned away from the polls in six and half weeks. Sometimes, you have to exercise the right in order to honor the right. Continue reading I just voted! ✔ How about you?
Putting aside my recent frustration at the post office and the continuing saga of my immigration headache, I’m having a fairly entertaining couple of weeks hanging out in Paris theaters. Tomorrow night, Michel‘s musical theater troupe returns to the stage with their September reprise of Pas de Gondoles pour Denise. I’m obviously partial, but this amateur troupe’s latest production is, quite simply, top-notch fun … and the Paris theater critics agree. A fun and uplifting tale about the search for love, the story of Denise unfolds on stage through powerful vocals and impressive choreography, with a musical score set to the melodies of popular songs. I’ll be there Friday night (with friends) and Saturday night (with Michel’s family) for my third and fourth times seeing the show.
As much as I’d like to encourage you to come out and see Denise, there won’t be any available seats for the September shows by the time you read this. They will go on tour around France, though, in the coming months, so stay tuned. I’ll keep you posted! In the meantime, how about this:
That’s right! Sister Act … the Musical … in French!
So, I just spent half an hour at the post office in La Courneuve so that I could come right back home with my letter STILL in my hand.
As is usual for this particular location of La Poste, there were only two people working (very slowly) and the line seemed to be a kilometer long. But I was patient … sort of. I assumed the requisite mindset of beaten-down resignation. Sometimes that helps. When I finally arrived at the counter after — no exaggeration — twenty-five minutes in line, I placed my fat envelope on the counter and told the postal worker that I wanted to send it by registered mail. She handed me the form for that, but then sympathetically informed me:
“But you can’t do that here. You have to use a machine for that, and it only takes change or debit cards.”
“I can do this at a machine?” I sighed. “So, I didn’t have to wait in that line after all? Okay. Well, I can pay with my debit card. It’s that machine over there?” I pointed in the general direction whence I’d come.
“Yes, I’ll come with you.”
She kindly escorted me back over to the area of lobby with all the machines. On the way, she asked me if I hadn’t seen the “welcome desk” when I came in.
“Why, yes, I did see it. But no one was there half an hour ago when I came in.”
While sitting on the tarmac in Charlotte last Sunday, waiting for my return flight to France to take off, I was flipping through the pages of the duty-free magazine and I happened across an ad for Grey Goose. And I thought to myself, “Now there’s an interesting subject for my blog: the French vodka that French people don’t drink.”
You may know that Grey Goose is the second-best-selling imported vodka in the United States, and the number one super-premium vodka. But what explains Grey Goose’s success against other vodkas, including other super-premiums like the Polish Belvedere? Certainly it has to do with Grey Goose’s exceptionally smooth taste, but it also has to do with its exceptionally smooth marketing. Grey Goose has created a certain cachet that is based almost entirely on its French origins. In short …
It’s appropriate that I’m publishing today’s post from the United States, because September 6 is the birthday of one of the greatest heroes of the American Revolution: the Marquis de Lafayette. It’s also appropriate that I’m publishing from South Carolina, because Lafayette not only was a Franco-American hero, but he had a special connection to my home state.
Joseph-Désiré Court’s portrait of Gilbert du Motier marquis de Lafayette, 1791
You should know by now that I’m a big history nerd. I’ve been one all my life, and the older I get, the more convinced I am that somewhere along the way I got sidetracked from my destiny to become a history professor. The people in my life closest to me can attest to that fact. Just Sunday night, at dinner with Michel and our friends Leigh and Dwight in Columbia, I was heard correcting a Frenchman’s account of the role of the French Revolution in the birth of French laicity. What can I say? It’s a passion. So it came as no surprise when, during my first semester of French classes at the Sorbonne, I chose to do my 15-minute oral report on the life of the Marquis de Lafayette. It also came as no surprise that my 15-minute report ended up lasting half an hour! I’m pretty sure that most of my classmates’ eyes start to glaze over after about 20 minutes because … well, not everyone can be as into Franco-American history as I am. In any case, je parle américain‘s homage to the Marquis on this, the 255th anniversary of his birth, is based on that long oral report … but today, at least, I’ll be telling it in English and not broken French. So, hopefully your eyes won’t glaze over before you get to the bottom of the page.
Well everyone, this is my first post from the American side of the Pond since arriving on Sunday afternoon, and have I got news for you! In fact, as far as I’m concerned, this is a “CNN Breaking News” kind of moment, so I can only apologize for not publishing it as soon as I got to a computer Sunday evening. But I had jetlag, you know, and it took me a couple of days to get back into the right rhythm … plus I had to find the right images online for the blogpost that wouldn’t end up infringing someone’s copyright and, then, WordPress started having formatting issues. Anyway, enough about the jetlag and the bloggers’ headaches, right? You just want to know what this juicy tidbit of information is. Well … <drumroll> …
Despite everything you may have heard or believed up to now, you CAN bring smelly French cheese into the US! *
* Make sure to read the disclaimer at the end of this article.
Okay, so you know how I joke all the time about how U.S. Customs thinks unpasteurized cheese is a chemical weapon? The last time I did that, in fact, was just 9 days ago. I was saying that if I ever wanted my parents to taste a real Camembert, I’d have to smuggle it into the country under the noses of those luggage-sniffing dogs they have. Well, as it turns out, I was wrong … completely and utterly wrong … and I owe my current status of “harbinger of good news for American expats in France and their friends and family back home” to an unexpected encounter with a Customs agent at Charlotte Douglas International Airport Sunday afternoon.
Today, I watched the season one finale of Glee. As you probably all know, Glee is a musical comedy television show about a fictional high school glee club in small-town Ohio. I’ll admit it — I’m a fan. It’s kitschy and the music is almost always top notch — especially when Mercedes is belting it out. Anyway, during the season finale, the glee club ended up choosing a medley of Journey songs for their number at the Midwest regional competition. Here’s how they opened their performance:
Not bad, huh?
They closed with “Don’t Stop Believin'” — of course. It was their anthem, after all. (Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a good YouTube clip of that part of the performance.) Anyway …”What,” I’m sure you’re wondering, “besides being such a Glee fan that I’m paying homage to it on my blog, makes me such a nerd?” Well, as soon as I saw Will Schuester write the word “JOURNEY” on his big flipchart in the rehearsal room at the beginning of that episode, two things immediately came to mind: Continue reading “He took the midnight train goin’ anywhere.”
A few days ago, I wrote about the second anniversary of my departure for France. I described how my life had changed as a result — about what I had left behind and what I had discovered here. Since then, I’ve been ruminating on the various lessons I’ve learned during the last two years as an expat in France. Here are my top ten:
1. When people say that French bureaucrats are paper shufflers extraordinaire, they aren’t exaggerating. In fact, they may be understating the case. I’ve never seen such a paper-centric modern society in my life: a form for this, another form that’s exactly the same (except for two questions) to accompany the first form you already filled out, mail it in or make an appointment to drop it off. By no means may you send it electronically. If you want to survive as an expatriate in France, here’s my advice:
Invest in a good ink-jet printer and several reams of paper. You’ll need two copies of everything, s’il vous plaît … plus an extra one for your files for that moment when you discover that they’ve misplaced the two copies you already gave them. (Take my word for it; this can happen.)
“Louis Pasteur in His Laboratory” by Albert Edelfelt
On the other hand, the French don’t just pasteurize their milk … they ultra-pasteurize it. (I won’t get all scientific on you, but there’s a difference of about 115º in the process.) That allows the French to package and store their super-clean milk in unrefrigerated bottles or cartons for months on end. Why? It apparently has something to do with limitations on refrigeration here … like not having enough room in the fridge for all your Camembert AND your milk at the same time. (See 7, below.)•
3. The Paris Métro is undeniably a marvel of public transportation, but it stinks … literally. Let’s just be brutally honest here for a minute. The Paris Métro has a certain charm with all those green and white 1960s-era trains rolling through its hundreds of art nouveau stations, but being authorized to eat and drink in the Métro does us no favors, folks …
4. Don’t be fooled by what looks like a toll-free number in France. Why, yes, they do have numbers here with prefixes that evoke the 1-800, 1-888, 1-877, 1-866 family of truly free telephone numbers we have back in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean that it always works that way here. The rule of thumb: never trust a number with a prefix any higher than 0809. The vast majority of 08 numbers in France are in fact toll numbers, and the amount you pay can range up to 0.75 euros ($1) a minute. The good thing is that the numbers belong to color-coded families, so always look for GREEN numbers … these numéros verts are always free. The unfortunate thing is that many (perhaps most) customer service numbers aren’t green, which leads us to the next lesson …
“green number … free call from a land line”
5. The French are experts at profanity. They are also, as we all know, the world champions of nonchalance. (That’s why we just use their word for it.) When these two character traits come together, you discover a marvelously nuanced array of how to say, as Rhett Butler so famously put it, “I don’t give a damn.” It takes a bit of practice, but dealing on a regular basis with French bureaucracy (or customer service calls you have to pay for) can put you well on your way to successfully distinguishing the appropriate audience and circumstances for such exclamations as:
Je m’en fiche!(literally, something like “I put myself out of that!”)
Je m’en fous!(literally, something like “I do myself out of that!”)
Je m’en tape!(literally, something like “I tap myself out of that!” … keeping in mind that “tap” can have the same slang meaning in French as it can in English)
Je m’en bats les … ! (literally, something like “I beat my … !” … well, I’ll just stop there and leave to the rest to your imagination.) You probably understand already that this is the last one in the arsenal.
And, simply adding “contre” right before the verb (“Je m’en contrefous!“) just reinforces how much you don’t give a damn! … !!!
You can always find rough equivalents between French and English swear words, too, including the euphemisms we’ve created to replace them in polite company. For instance, “merde” and “mince” are the French equivalents of “sh*t” and its polite cousin “shoot.” It might be an oversimplification, but from what I’ve seen and heard, French profanity is simply a little less profane than English profanity. (That might explain why I have no qualms about publishing “merde” but you don’t see the S-word spelled out.) What I mean is, saying “merde” doesn’t seem nearly as eyebrow-raising in French circles as the S-word is in ours. Another case in point is the word usually translated into English as the F-word: putain. Literally, it means “whore,” but it’s used as both an interjection and an adjective to express … well, almost anything depending on the context. Don’t just take my word for it — check this out:•
By the way, if you don’t want to sound too crass by blurting out “putain,” you can always trot out the polite-company equivalent: “punaise.” After all of that, I realize that I’m actually giving this topic short shrift. I see some real research and a full post on this in the future. Stay tuned …
6. As melodic and enchanting as the French language is (and as colorful, too, given number 5), the French are also experts at nonverbalcommunication. Despite the adage that there are no stupid questions, the truth is that there are, and if you ask one in France, you’re likely to get a look that very efficiently communicates that fact without so much as a sigh from your respondent. The French can also express an entire range of sentiment from sympathetic support to mild annoyance to overt hostility just by puffing air through their lips. It’s all a question of how forcefully it’s done. Take a look at this … (the whole video is great, but there’s a good example of what I’m talking about at about 0:55 – 1:05):
7. Air conditioning is one of the most brilliant inventions in human history. You recognize this undeniable truth when you no longer have it. Here in Paris, summer is usually fairly mild by the standards of the Deep South, but every now and then you wake up in a sweat to a forecast high of 101ºF. That’s when you start cursing France for being a third world country, and you hurry off to the nearest supermarket to hang out in the frozen food section. Let’s face it … that dormitory mini-fridge won’t ever cut it as a make-shift air conditioner.
But it only felt like 99º with the ovenesque breeze. Same forecast for today.
• So, there you have it — my humorous look at the top ten …
okay, okay
… seven things I’ve learned while living in France.
(You have to cut me a break, guys. My laptop was starting to overheat,
and I didn’t have enough battery life to make it to
the ice cream case at Super U.)
I hope you enjoyed it. Come back soon!
Two years ago today, I left the United States with 130 pounds of stuff packed into 3 bags and a one-way ticket to the next chapter of my life.
Sixteen months earlier, I had met a guy in a Paris bar who would end up changing my life forever. I had just left my job as a lawyer in DC, thinking my life was going to go in a certain direction … but then, during a week-long vacation in Paris, I crossed paths with Michel. It was a romantic story worthy of a Hollywood screenplay, and it very quickly set in motion a complete reassessment of my future plans. By the time I left Washington for good on August 15, 2010, I had fallen in love, I had gotten engaged, I had applied to a French language program in Paris, I had gotten a one-year student visa from the French Embassy, I had gotten married, and I had said goodbye to my closest friends in Washington, not sure when or if I’d ever come back there to live.
During the last two years, I’ve lived a life completely different than the one I led before. Instead of living in a 1,100-square-foot apartment in Adams Morgan with the most adorable French bulldog on the planet, I now live in a 205-square-foot studio in La Courneuve with two very furry cats. Instead of working for a prestigious law firm doing securities regulatory work, I now write a blog, I search for that elusive English-teaching position, and I go to school to improve my French. My daily life has changed dramatically … Continue reading Every Beginning is Only a Sequel
The French call it “le syndrome de la page blanche” (“white page syndrome”). In English, we call it writer’s block:
“A usually temporary psychological inability to begin or continue work on a piece of writing.”
— The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language
When the “unconscious self is vetoing the program demanded by the conscious ego.”
— Victoria Nelson
“… stay[ing] a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.”
— Gustave Flaubert
“There may be a stretch of weeks or months when it doesn’t come at all; this is called writer’s block. Some writers in the throes of writer’s block think their muses have died, but I don’t think that happens often; I think what happens is that the writers themselves sow the edges of their clearing with poison bait to keep their muses away, often without knowing they are doing it.”
— Stephen King
“… [W]riter’s block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible.”
— Roy Blount, Jr.
That pretty much sums it up. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not calling myself a WRITERwith a capital “w” …I’ve never even written anything longer than a short story. But writing for je parle américain has become my pastime, my catharsis, and my therapy. The problem is that, lately, I’m just not doing much of it, and I don’t know how to start back. Continue reading It’s Not You … It’s Me.
je parle américain 