French culture

 

I think I have spotted an element of French culture. And I'll admit that I have may have had help on this from a YouTuber who does little skits where she plays both a English Woman and a French Woman. They are very funny. 

What I have discovered is that the French enjoy gossip!

This is brilliant for me as I am quite fond of gossip as well, and I think it would be nice to have more things in common with the French, like a love of cheese, and apertifs, and cafes, and old architecture, and complaining, and cheese, and, eventually, speaking French.

Hypothetically. Theoretically.

The thing that threw me off concerning the French enjoying gossip is that they are rather private. Unlike me, for instance, they are quite dignified and disinclined to freely share personal details and experiences. But yesterday we were at a Fed Ex drop off site involved in sending insanely expensive and pointless paperwork that is also now essential to my healthcare coverage here. While we were conducting this rather elaborate business with a typically reserved but pleasant enough French Woman, I noticed two giant towers of boxes sitting around waiting to be shipped. These were all packed in banana boxes. So I said (in English I confess) "That seems like an expensive way to ship bananas!"

I got a small laugh or two, which was nice.

Then after a little while the counter person said "Those are from an Austrian woman who is shipping all of that because she is leaving and moving back home."

This wasn't the first time something like that had happened, but it was the first time I realized:

Oh, the French don't like to talk personally about themselves, but they absolutely love to talk about everyone else!

French adjacent comedy

 

Here's some French adjacent comedy pulled from real life discussions:

"I have to go to the bathroom and I don't even know how to say "pee" in French!"

"That would be a useful thing to know."

"Oui."

Your guide to Saorge France

 

Humming along on my six day festival of photographs of Saorge, France, which is a heralded member of the Beaux Villages de France, it did occur to me that I don't know very much about Saorge. Yes, it is one of the 100 most beautiful villages of France. Yes, it is up the mountains from the Cote d'Azur, getting pretty close there to crossing into Italy. And yes it is picturesquely built on the steep hillsides as they climb off into the mountains above. In the end of May we could still see some patches of ice lingering on the mountaintops above us.

But what else is there about Saorge?

So I looked it up.

And...

I didn't find anything of note. I mean, Wikipedia is nice but I think it peaked circa 2015. Now it just gets wider, but no deeper.

So...

Saorge is old.

It has a church.

It has a monastery. And something something Italy then France.

Er. So, maybe we'll just continue with my impressions and I'll make stuff up as needed. How's that?

Saorge was founded in 1182. It grew quickly due to its success in producing honey, which it provided to the sugar craving people living in the valleys below. It has its own dialect of French which people say is slower, more measured, and easier to understand, though I was still pretty confused by it. I did understand "miel" and "reina" and "abeille" which mean honey, queen, and bee, which just goes to show these people are still into the same stuff they were into 850 years ago.

That's cool.

So we bought tons of honey.

The town has a fantastic church, a baroque one, and I don't say this lightly, but in this wee mountain town was the prettiest church I have seen so far on all of the Cote D'Azur! I am a big fan of churches but after a baptism (so to speak) in Rome, a lot of the rest of Europe has been a slight let down. Like, if you don't have Caravaggio and Bernini and Michelangelo to do your church decorating what's your plan instead? So many places just went for the same kind of thing, only not as good. The church in Saorge took a different route, high as they were on bee pollen and mountain flowers. They went gaudy instead, and it works way better. They used crazy colors, purples particularly, that I have rarely seen anywhere. And instead of impressive moralism, they, for once, seemed to have some fun with it. 

It's great. Among our 42 pictures there are at least a couple church pictures.

At the edge of town they also have a monastery, where we spent a lot of our time, both hanging out on its parklike grounds, waiting for it to reopen after lunch, and also inside among its more Renaissance delights and beautiful gardens. Even more of my pictures are from here. It should be noted that this is no longer a Monastery, but is owned by The State now, and cost fourteen euros because Capitalism.

Have I mentioned that France is secretly just America under a more tasty pastry shell? 

No? 

Well let's not get into all that now. 

Here are some pictures of the delicious pastry shell then:

Not going it alone in France

 

I do keep an eye on the French immigrant experience as people write about it on the Internet. Apparently it is very hard to make French friends! Sometimes people get very lonely trying to make a life here in France.

Though I guess people get lonely everywhere. Loneliness is sweeping the world.

If I ever decide to try and make a French friend maybe I will see how hard it all is.

So if you want to move to France, you might want to bring a friend with. That's what I did. 

We alone can understand each other's French.

The Goat cheese

 

Has there ever been a greater cheese than this goat cheese?

I guess not, I mean it's in the name: goat cheese.

If I were a fluent, speaking member of this culture, and I stopped at the goat cheese stand in the Liberation Market, I almost certainly would have joked with the cheese purveyor by asking "And what makes this cheese the "Greatest Of All Time?"

But all I could manage here in France was to point at the exquisitely plain looking round white cheese and say "Je voudrais..." and then point with my finger. And then add politely "S'il vous plait."

The French person, to be sure she understood, said something. I understood the word "frais", which means "fresh".

"Oui, Frais!" I mumbled excitedly. But I was too late and mumbly to communicate anything as she was already taking it from the case and wrapping it, so I might have just started murmuring "cheese" excitedly at that point for all it did.

She packed up my nice large fresh round cheese. Four euros.

If this had happened in the country I come from, where I speak the language very well, and I joked: "And what makes this cheese the "Greatest Of All Time?" I probably wouldn't have been understood anyway.

But it wouldn't have happened because they seriously do not have cheese like that where I come from, as simple as it was.

My god that cheese was good!

"Was it the "GOAT cheese?" You might like to ask, trying out the fun joke.

Oh.

Perhaps fortunately, how good it was cannot be said in the words of any language.

Cheese

 

I did champagne yesterday, though there's always more to say about that.

So what about the cheese?

Oooh la la.

We live just around the corner from the best fromagerie in the city. It is a pretty and neat shop with an austere proprieter. I think he possibly does not have a sense of humor. He also speaks English, which is a nice reminder that being able to communicate is not a panacea for the challenges of life in the city.

Don't reach into any of the cases!

Wait politely!

One thing at a time!

Sometimes there are other people working in the small shop, cutting things, setting things up. They are nice and friendly looking minions, but I don't think they help people. Only the master helps people. He wraps your cheese carefully. He uses a lot of tape when he does. 

It is his one weakness; slightly too much tape.

Even with communication technically possible, choosing cheese can be pretty challenging. Oh, not for your more known and universal goudas and comtes and ossau iratys, though even the choice of one of those engenders an eye-test-like series of choices:

"Older or younger?"

"Stonger or smoother?"

I don't know. You're the one who knows every single thing about cheese! You tell me what to get and I'll get it. 

But cheese is hard to talk about. Look at me struggle now.

And then when you get into the singular display cheeses, the 15 styles of individual goat cheeses in various shapes and forms and colors, well, it is hopeless. So you just pick one.

That one! The nine euro one!

I like it because it doesn't have alot of mold on it. And it has a pretty... shape.

Then come the questions:

"The pale one, or the light caramel one?"

"Would you like a firmer or softer one?"

What's the difference?

Well, the firmer one is still willing to sit there quietly. The softer one is starting to inch its way towards the exit.

I take the firmer.

It is wrapped up really well!

Very secure.

Later we eat our prize goat cheese with some amazing lemon bergamont marmelade my darling wife made. The cheese has woken up now and is inching its way off the plate. Don't let this bother you. It is the best cheese you have ever tasted!

"This is the best cheese I have ever tasted" has already been said a fair few times in our little attic apartment. We might have to choose a new phrase for it.

How about:

Oooh la la?

Speaking French

 

Let us address the elephant in the room.

I don't speak French.

Yes, I have studied it for maybe a half hour to an hour everyday for the past six months, even in Japan. And actually, I really can almost read it. But listening? Oh la la. And speaking even worse. When we walk into stores, markets, shops, and cafes we always endeavor to speak French. Simple things don't go terribly, usually. But often there will be a long string of French issued at me whereupon I freeze up like a block of granite, unable to move, speak, or respond. Sometimes, with no other option, we carry on. Sometimes they ask if we speak French. Sometimes they ask where we're from or what we speak. For awhile there people asked us if we were visiting and, full of pride, we told them all about how we were living here now!

At which point we would get a little lecture where we were told we need to speak French.

Which is what we were trying to do in the first place!

Now we just say we're visiting. Why not? We are. Maybe for a year, maybe for the rest of our lives, I don't know, but having been born in and lived in the USA for 60 years I'm not sure I ever managed to become an American. Becoming French seems considerably more out of the question. And what is retirement other than, if one can manage it, permanent vacation? 

So we're going for that.

I'm still trying to learn French. We do, really, live here now. And if the lady in the ceramics shop starts telling us about how to pack up our purchases for the plane I do say "Oh, no. Yes, we're here on vacation, but for a very, very, very long time."

No lecture.

The sidewalk problem

I may have suggested here yesterday a problem involving shit on the sidewalks. It is no secret that France has something of a problem when it comes to shit on its sidewalks. It is way too unpleasant to imagine any of these people or their dogs could be responsible for it. Surely these people are too civilised for such rude and barbaric behavior?

So I think I have figured it out.

It falls from the skies above.

Voila

Nothing is coming out quite right tonight for clerkmanifesto, but that doesn't mean I don't have anything to show you. Sometimes too many things come out right and I sock them away for another day and forget about them. So all I have to do is wander into one of my vast repositories of photographs and grab a few fancy ones that catch my attention and voila.

Did you know that "voila" is a French word? I mean, of course you knew. I knew it was french, I guess, sort of. But in french it's just a regular word to use. It means "There it is". Which in English is "Voila". In learning French I especially love any free pass word, things like "impossible" which you have to say with your best Frenchified imitation to make work, but nevertheless it's right there, spelled the same, but spoken: im po see blay. The whole of learning French is so full of words like this (restaurant, grand, petite, film) that learning the language almost feels like one is cheating one's way through it.

I mean, up until you have to speak or understand it, at which point one realizes that all those free passes don't really do very much.

Anyway,  here are some pictures I took around here recently, where I currently live, and where everyone speaks French.

 

We speak French!

 

The rhetoric, at least as I encountered it all my life, is that the French are horrible and cruel about people speaking their language, or trying to. 

They are, but they are everything else as well: kind, patient, irritated, confused, and really nice about it. They vary. And if I had to give an overall accounting, despite some bitter experiences with that famous French disdain, they are like people everywhere else we've travelled: touched and complimentary about our speaking their language, in this case, the awesome and mysterious French one.

And though one is supposed to hold tourists in general contempt in order to feel better about being a tourist (I'm an Emigre, dammit!), all these English speaking tourists flocking to the Cote D' Azur and speaking English like it's a divine right have set the stage for our flailing, toddler level, utterly confused French to look like graciousness itself to the beleaguered local inhabitants.

Going in I was inclined to think that many tourists have better French than we do, but I suspect now it is only the tiniest percentage that do. A couple days ago in a beach restaurant (that we can see from the window of where we're currently living), we got a slightly absurd compliment from the waiter we were chatting with that brought it all home.

"How did you come to learn French!" The waiter marvelled. "It is very unusual for Americans to know French." 

It should be noted this was spoken in English.

Although it is possible someone else has paid us this compliment in French in the past, but it would have blown by us by as we only understand maybe a quarter of what anyone says to us, and then only when it is slow, has a lot of context, and is being said the second time around.