Paris at my Feet

Bastille: the coolest Place in Paris

2012-01-30T18:38:00.003+01:00

There aren't many place names in Paris that sound tough. Rivoli, Saint-Michel, and (my personal favourite), Michel-Ange-Molitor ... reading a metro map sounds like romantic poetry and conjures up more images of holiness than of war and even the troubled suburbs have deceptively gentle sounding names. But step off the train at Bastille, take a walk over the Pont de l'Arsenal, and you know you're in a place that's a little rough around the edges. In a very Parisian way, of course.

Place de la Bastille is where all aspects of Paris meet. The site of the famous prison is still a prime spot for demonstrations and you'll usually at least be accosted by a few petitioners even if there isn't and outright manif. It's where the teenagers are neither entirely dressed from The Kooples nor clad head to toe in shell suits, but are a bit goth instead. It's home to the modern opera house and endless independent bars and music venues. The edges are a bit grimy, but on a sunny day, the golden Spirit of Liberty statue glints as it appears to take off into the blue sky.

For me, though, the best bit is the port, which lies on the canal between the Place and the Seine. You can stroll through the park and along the quay next to all kinds of interesting boats and even watch the lock in operation before you pass under a grimy bridge and arrive at the river.

After that, if you walk along the river promenade, the towers of Notre-Dame will appear in the distance, and soon enough you will be back in chic, touristy Paris once again.

Au Pied du Cochon

2012-01-20T18:10:00.002+01:00

I was out for drinks with friends last weekend. As often happens on a Friday night, what started out as after-work drinks turned into several hours in the pub putting the world to rights and next thing we knew it was nearly ten o'clock and we still hadn't had dinner.

As we were a large group, our options for eating were a bit limited. We were about to go for a 15 euro tourist menu in at St Michel when someone suggested we try Au Pied du Cochon instead.

Au Pied du Cochon is an enormous brasserie next to the Les Halles shopping centre and one of its big advantages is that it's open until 5am and you can turn up with a group of ten people and they won't bat an eyelid. It also has very nice decor and comfy seats. And another one of its selling points is that you can actually eat pigs feet there.

I personally wasn't up for trying this particular delicacy at 11 o'clock at night, and had some very nice onion soup instead but my friend did, and was presented with a magnificent plate of chips, vegetables and, resting in pride of place, an enormous pig's trotter.

Unfortunately, I don't think my friend enjoyed his dinner as much as he had hoped. According to the one genuine Frenchman of the group, the only way to appreciate its finer flavours is to bite directly into the marrow and suck out the juice, so maybe he just wasn't quite brave enough. For those of us who were too cowardly to join him in his gastronomic escapades, there were small meringue pigs served with the coffee at the end of the meal and, to be honest, that was enough for me.

Apart from that, we mostly enjoyed our food and our one major criticism of the place was our first waiter who, when asked for a recommendation for wine from the genuine Frenchman, shrugged his shoulders and said, "Drink what you like." Now everybody knows that no Parisian dining experience is complete without a certain degree of disrespect for the customer but disrespect for the wine? That's pretty shocking.

Festive Celebrations in Rennes

2012-01-08T22:01:00.003+01:00

I spent Christmas in the UK with my parents but was back in France in time to spend a few days in Bretagne with Understanding Frenchman and his relatives before new year. A family birthday in the middle of the week meant that we spent a lot of time drinking champagne and eating cake, meaning that, by the time I had also eaten an 8-hour, 7 course meal at new year, I was ready for some gastronomic austerity when the time came to go back to work.

Another "highlight" (of sorts) of the trip was the opportunity to see the festive light show in the main square in Rennes. They projected lights onto the facade of the town hall, accompanied by a voiceover story and music. I've seen this kind of show before in France and the special effects have always been impressive. The mairie at one point did actually look as if it were covered in gold. And yes, that is a giant teddy bear you can see:

The story, on the other hand, was a little strange. It told the story of a little boy who had a dream about the economic crisis where at one point a triple A rating was projected on the walls of the building as, in all their gilded glory, they crumbled into dust. The show ended with falling white feathers and Socialist red roses. Guess which party the mayor is from?

La Butte aux Cailles

2011-12-22T17:34:00.004+01:00

Having a virtual rummage this afternoon through my ridiculously large photo archive, I came across these photos, which I took a couple of months ago on a grey Sunday afternoon in Paris and which I meant to share but then completely forgot about.

With nothing better to do, Understanding Frenchman and I decided that it was time for me to discover a new corner of Paris and, as I have something of a penchant for climbing hills, we took the metro to La Butte aux Cailles in the 13th.

La Butte aux Cailles has a bit of a Montmartresque feel to it, but without the tourists, the bracelet sellers and the Amelie Poulain overkill. It's an arty area which looks a bit scruffy and rough around the edges but, like everywhere in Paris, it's an expensive kind of rough around the edges. (Out of sheer curiosity, I was browsing the Parisian property websites the other night. 180 000 euros for a 17-square metre studio anyone?)If you like altitude, the Butte itself is also a little disappointing - unlike the Butte de Montmartre and the Buttes Chaumont, it has almost no view.

Before I start sounding too negative though, there was one thing about the Butte aux Cailles that I found very cool, and that was the street art that was peeling in an expensively scruffy way off many of the walls. Because a picture is worth a thousand words, here are the photos:

The writing on this one translates as, "With love, time passes by quickly. With time, love passes by less often."

And finally, there was this surrealist optician's sign with shades of The Great Gatsby:

Someone is watching you!

Brussels (but not Sprouts)

2011-12-11T20:58:00.002+01:00

When I first lived in France (9 years ago!), waiting for a train to somewhere or other, I used to look up at the departures board in the stations in wonder, amazed at the fact that it was possible to travel across international borders by rail. Coming from the northern part of an island nation, going abroad for me almost automatically implied taking an aeroplane and the idea of speeding across Europe on a train seemed to belong to another era, one where the carriages had compartments and porters loaded one's trunk into the guard's wagon. And in an age when Ryanair and Easyjet have increasingly taken over the skies, international train travel has retained a mystique for me that flying never had.

It's even better if you can go first class, of course. And better still if your first class ticket is free.

This weekend, Understanding Frenchman and I decided to go and visit friends of his in Brussels. We were able to buy tickets with our railcard loyalty points and, as it happened, only first class seats were available. And first class on the Thalys is indeed first class. Uniformed staff welcome you on board. Every seat has free WiFi and a power socket. If you travel at dinner time, you get a meal brought to your seat, along with drinks and a small bar of Belgian chocolate. And so we arrived in Brussels in good spirits and good style.

Every time I'd ever been to Belgium before, it rained. This time, though, the skies were blue and the temperatures bitingly cold. We had lunch in town, then went to see an exhibition of watercolours of the city. There was a Christmas light show on the Grande Place which we caught some of, then we attempted to brave the Christmas market but it was to cold and too crowded, so we decided to go home, stopping off for Nutella waffles on the way. (Belgium is definitely a country it would be easy to get fat in.)

I liked Brussels more this time round than I have before, partly because of the weather, but also because it's a great place to visit at Christmas time. The Belgians have already celebrated Saint Nicholas' Day and there are beautiful decorations everywhere (far more than in Paris, which seems to think itself largely above such friviolities). Definitely worth the trip, and not only if you can go for free!

The Sorry Secret of the Champs Elysees

2011-12-07T20:07:00.002+01:00

In cash-strapped times, and not long after Paris lost out to London for the 2012 Olympic Games, can it really be a coincidence that what was once the Ville des Lumieres now has Christmas decorations that look like this?

Going Out in Paris, Day and Night

2011-11-27T22:01:00.002+01:00

Two interesting new places I've discovered in the last couple of weeks:

La Bellevilloise is a bar/cafe/restaurant and concert venue in the 20th arondissement, which used to be the working class distict of the city but has come up in the world and now sells its brand of shabby chic at expensive Parisian prices. It's an interesting area, though, with lots of hidden treasures and secret places to walk. We went for the Bellevilloise everything- you- can- eat brunch, a cosy way to spend a Sunday afternoon in December, especially if you never want to feel like eating again, but it would also be a fun place for a night out, as it has different areas with concerts and exhibitions as well as the restaurant part.

Le Bataclan is another concert venue, where I went to see the Irish-American trad/punk band Flogging Molly on Saturday night. It's a good size for a concert, with enough space for a large audience but not so big that you end up being too far away from the band. There were seats available on the balcony, then down in the stalls was the standing room/dancefloor section. I didn't know much about the music before I went but the concert was a lot of fun and there was a real atmostphere, with lots of audience participation, dancing, crowd-surfing and pogo-ing going on. Sometimes there's so much on in Paris that it's hard to choose what to see, but this is a venue I'll definitely be adding to my list of places worth checking out again.

Deutschlandreise 2011: No Borders

2011-11-16T21:16:00.005+01:00

Along with analysing international motoring rules, another one of my geeky hobbies is collecting walking European borders that I've walked across. I get a particular thrill out of this experience if I can collect a naff photograph on the way.

I've done Germany to Poland (tight passport control in both directions), Italy to Slovenia (indecipherable signposts and strange food) and France to Switzerland (literally just a step over an imaginary line if you choose the right place):

But in Germany, I was destined to be disappointed. We drove south-west of Munich to the small and picturesque town of Fuessen (where the streets are lined with shops selling Lederhosen and you suspect there is probably a genuine market for them) and, at my request, our host agreed to drive us a couple of kilometres up the road to Austria.

An EU sign with the ring of golden stars proudly told us that we were heading in the right direction, but at the border itself, the best sign we could find was on this old building:

If you look really carefully, you can see the lettering telling travellers that this used to be the customs house.

But in the days of Schengen, the only legible indication that you are crossing a frontier is the sign a little bit further back that reminds you that on Austrian motorways, unlike on those of their neighbours, there's a speed limit.

Deutschlandreise 2011: Die Baeckerei

2011-11-14T19:59:00.002+01:00

In the past, I've been surprised a couple of times when German friends living in France have said that one of the things they miss most about home is the bread. Isn't Germany famous for its beer and sausages and France for its baguettes and croissants? Isn't German bread that weird black stuff that looks as though it would send all but the strongest teutonic intestines into spasms for days?

But now, having been a house guest in 3 different German homes, I understand.

(Are three German friends enough to keep me safe if the euro actually does end up going down the tubes?)

German bread is awesome. They have bakeries on every corner where the shelves groan with doughy delicacies. There are granary breads and sesame breads and poppy breads. There are breads with cheese and breads with bacon and breads with cheese and bacon. And there are pretzels, gorgeously browned on the outside, soft and white on the inside and sprinkled with chunky salt crystals.

If the wine and the cheese were up to the same standard, I'd seriously be thinking about moving over the border.

Deutschlandreise 2011: Die Autobahn

2011-11-10T18:56:00.003+01:00

There are two public holidays in France in November. Both are somewhat sombre in their origins: one, the 1st, is All Saints Day and the other, the 11th, is Armistice Day.

Not being particularly bothered about going to the cemetery to visit our dead relatives at the beginning of the month, Understanding Frenchman and I took a four day weekend and went to Germany instead.

We flew into Munich airport and a friend picked us up to drive us to his house near Augsburg and it was time for our first famously German experience: travelling at 180km per hour down the motorway. I've been to Germany several times, but this was the first time I had been on the open road in a car, and it was an excellent opportunity to gather further food to fuel my obsession with cross-cultural driving comparisons. (And yes, I understand that not everybody shares this particular interest. Hold out for the next post if you want to know about something less nerdy.)

My first impression was that it didn't actually feel that fast. Perhaps it's the design of the roads, or perhaps it's because German drivers don't sit up backside the of the car in front nearly as much as their Gallic neighbours, but it all seemed pretty safe. Also, unlimited is only the de-restricted speed-limit and their are lots of places where you have to stick to 120 or less. Finally, they have electronic signs which vary the speed limit according to the traffic, so you would never be able to do 200km/h if it was really busy or there was a traffic jam up ahead.

I wasn't totally convinced, however, that being able to travel at such high speeds was a massive benefit. The combination of stretches with speed limits, the fact you have to give way to a person who is pulling out in front of you means that you have to be able to accelerate pretty fast to take full advantage or the rule. My little Clio and all the similar cars I see on the roads in France would just never make it.

Which I guess explains why the Germans have a thriving automobile industry and tend to drive really big cars.

Out of the Comfort Zone

2011-11-10T00:34:00.001+01:00

As the cold weather sets in and the nights grow darker, I have been buying carpets for my chilly flat, digging out my warm pyjamas, resurrecting a herbal tea habit and thinking a lot about French attitudes to comfort. I'm starting to notice that they're different.

It began with comfort food. The concept doesn't really exist here. Food is for fuel, food is for socialising, food is for pleasure, but it won't cheer you up on a dark night as you snuggle up on your lonely sofa.

And then coffee shops. When I was in my teens, Starbucks and Costa were booming in the UK precisely because you could spend your whole afternoon sprawled over a comfy armchair, chatting to your friends. In a Parisian coffee shop, you are nose to nose with your companions and elbow to elbow with strangers, sitting on a hard chair. It's great for intense intellectual conversation or people watching, but not exactly like the comfort of your living room with better beverages and no washing up. But then in France, the coffee is small, dark and energising and the women seem to have far fewer friends to catch up with.

And that made me think, perhaps the concept of comfort just isn't that valued here. The wordconfort exists, but it isn't often used with a spiritual connotation. I had to look up the translation for "cosy", perhaps because it's not a very common word. (It's douillet, in case you're wondering.)

Today, in search of some good old Anglo-Saxon mollycoddling, I abandoned my consumer and gastronomic principles and went to Starbucks for a caramel latte. But guess what?

Starbucks in Paris doesn't have any sofas.

Why the Urban Jungle is Greener

2011-11-03T21:22:00.004+01:00

I recently read an article about how, for the first time in decades, the amount of material "stuff" consumed per capita in Great Britain has fallen over the past ten years. One of the reasons which was suggested for this was that more and more people are living in towns and cities.

While at first it might be counter-intuitive to say that urban living is more environmentally friendly than a rural idyll, it actually makes sense. Living in close contact means that you can share resources with more people. An obvious example would be public transport. Unpleasant as it may be for those involved, cramming a hundred people shoulder to shoulder in a train carriage is far more economical than each of these people driving their own car. Another is living in an apartment block. In terms of heating, postal deliveries and refuse collection (to name but a few), having everyone close together makes whole systems vastly more efficient.

The downside, of course, is that when personal space can be measured in millimetres rather than kilometres, a much higher degree of patience, tolerance and consideration is required. Country people often have the reputation of being friendlier than city-dwellers, but I suspect this is only because human contact is a luxury for them and not an imposition. While in the country reaching out to others is not only polite, but can be essential, in a large, cramped city, the best courtesy you can offer your neighbour is not to wake him up too early in the morning or jostle him on the metro.

This evening, as I queued patiently for the privilege of walking up the stairs to the exit of the RER station*, I reflected on all of the above and glowed with a sense of economical and environmental virtue.

* Incidentally, what is it with all these people who stand still on the escalators in the metro and the RER? Are they really so lazy that, even with an enormous queue behind them and a perfectly functional pair of legs, they actually prefer to spend a larger part of their day than is strictly necessary in the corridors of the Paris public transport system? And as for the people that stand on the left and stop everyone else from walking up, perhaps I can now accuse them of social and environmental misdemeanour, as opposed to just driving me nuts...

Autumn in The Mountains

2011-11-01T20:44:00.006+01:00

One of the things I love about France is the changing seasons. Unlike in my beloved homeland, and despite the best efforts of global climate change, French seasons largely behave in the way they're supposed to, with warmth and sunshine for at least a reasonable part of the summer and, in the past few years at least, even a proper fall of snow at some point during the winter. One of the best things about this is that there are at least a few weeks when you can appreciate a proper autumn before the worst of the winter chills and rains set in, and there is no better place to do so than in the French Alps. The following photos were taken a couple of weeks ago, when the trees were golden, red and brown, the low sun was shining through the leaves and the first snow had just started to fall.

It was cold enough for tartiflette and a wood fire in the hearth at night (and for a slightly hairy incident involving black ice on a mountain road, which was nevertheless less hairy than seeing an old couple drive the wrong way round a roundabout, provoking me to panic that my British instincts had taken over and that it was me that was going in the wrong direction), but warm enough to soak up the last of the sunshine during the day.

Now, as November kicks in and the mists of northern France smother Paris in a grey blanket, the beautiful French October weather seems a very long way away already!

Why the Good Thing About France Might be the French

2011-10-10T22:16:00.003+02:00

Often, in expat blogs, interviews and conversations, foreigners living in France are asked what they like about the country. Generally, the replies include food, wine and some combination of the weather, the fashion or the scenery.

I think I have yet to see in writing an example of a foreigner mentioning the French.

Read or listen to expat rants, however, and you will soon lose track of how often the judgement "that's so French"is made in relation to bad manners, bad customer service, bad administration and pretty much any other bad thing you can think of. Given that many of the ranters are people who have expressly chosen to live here, it makes you wonder why we don't all just head back home.

It's as if we all believe that oft-quoted saying about how France would be a lovely country if it wasn't for the French.

(I don't have an awful lot of experience to go on, but I suspect this is less true for foreigners in other countries. Italians are friendly and hospitable, Americans are endlessly positive and even the British get praised in a wry kind of way for their sense of humour.)

I've been pondering the reasons for this for quite a while now and the only explanation I can come to is that it's precisely because so many of us choose to live here, as opposed to being forced by circumstances, that we are so critical: we're continually asking ourselves if we've made the right choice.

Anyway, it seems to me that this situation is very sad, that we whiners are being very rude to our hosts in our endless criticisms, and that it's time to start giving the French credit where credit is due. So here's a challenge: what are the best things you can think of about living among the French, with no buts, althoughs or if only-s allowed? (I know that this will be highly over-generalised and potentially patronising, but at least it's in a positive way!)

Here are some of mine:

The French value intellect: in this country, reading, going to museums, speaking foreign languages and watching Arte instead of reality TV are activities to be admired and will not have you exiled from the society around you for being a snob.

The French know how to drink enough to lubricate the machinery of social interaction without binge-drinking. (And yes, the wine is pretty good too!)

The French love their language. Ask them to explain a grammatical point to you and this is one moment when you are very unlikely to witness a Gallic shrug. When you can understand their wordplay, it gets even better.

The French value peace and quiet. And if people are disturbing that, they won't hesitate to tell them so.

Those are a few to start with. What are yours?

Finally!

2011-10-02T19:50:00.005+02:00

The other day, I was introduced by an English-speaking friend to a French couple that she knew. We chatted for a while and, at some point in the conversation, I must have mentioned something about Scotland. The French man looked at me a little quizzically.

"So, are both your parents Scottish, then?" he asked. "Tu es arrivée en France à quel âge?"

And he looked somewhat surprised when I told him that yes, both my parents are anglophone, and I first lived here at the ripe old age of 21.

It might not sound like much, but while people are often impressed by my written French, I don't really learn well by listening and find it hard to pick up an accent. The result is that I can see feminine plural agreements in my head even when they're not there in speech and conjugate written verbs better than many French people but have only recently learned to hear the difference between antérieur and intérieur and that the r at the end of Monsieur is not pronounced, ever. After 4 years of feeling like I'm screaming "I'm a foreigner" every time I open my mouth, being able to surprise someone with my 100% non-French origins and upbringing felt like a major milestone!

Sunshine!

2011-10-02T19:40:00.003+02:00

The weather gods have been capricious this year. The spring was gorgeous, but almost as soon as the school holidays started, the rain began to fall and in July I spent a week in the south-west wishing I'd packed more fleece jumpers and less sunscreen. The past ten days, though, have more than made up for that, with maximum temperatures of 25 - 30 degrees every single day.

This weekend, we were lucky enough to be once again in Brittany, where we explored new sections of the Sentier des Douaniers, which goes all the way around the Breton coastline, and swam in the sea both days. The water wasn't warm, but it was warm enough and, with it being just after the autumn equinox, the big waves more than made up for the bracing temperatures. It reminded me a lot of swimming in the sea as a child in Scotland, where the water is always chilly but we always had too much fun to care.

Phare Breton

(Not the same as Far Breton, which is a kind of cake)

Swimming Beach

Last weekend was more sedate: we had lunch on a barge on the Seine (nice but somewhat expensive) on Saturday, followed by a picnic in the park on Sunday. I love the sun!

2011-09-27T20:11:00.005+02:00

Le Figaro published an article yesterday about this map, which shows the stations and lines on the Paris metro and RER with the highest incidences of theft and violent theft.

Anyone who knows Paris is unlikely to be surprised by the statistics. Suburban lines in the north an east are significantly more dangerous than those in the south and west, Paris Nord is the most dangerous mainline station and Chatelet-les-Halles tops the list for metro and RER interchanges.

There are some oddities, however. Paris-Est has a higher total of thefts than Paris-Nord but those at the Gare du Nord are far more often violent. Nation and the Gare de Lyon both show high levels of violent thefts but don't figure on the list for non-violent thefts and bag snatching. (Nation is the only station where I've ever caught anyone trying to pick my pockets, but when I turned around and caught the guy in the act he just apologised for "bumping into"me.) Meanwhile, at Montparnasse and Saint-Michel, you might lose your wallet but are unlikely to get hurt in the process.

The figures for Chatelet-les-Halles, with 409 violent thefts and 1245 non-violent, particularly stand out. That's an average of more than one violent and almost 4 non-violent robberies per day. On the other hand, they need to be put in perspective. The metro carries more than 4 million people per day, while the RER has 2.7 million passengers. Even standing in one of the city centre stations at rush hour, with trains with a capacity of over 1000 passengers going by every one or two minutes, that's hard to imagine. I haven't done the exact maths, but a rough estimate suggests that in fact the chances of being victim of a crime at any of Paris's stations, or at least of a crime serious enough to report, is actually extremely low. Here's hoping I'm right!

Journées du Patrimoine

2011-09-21T18:32:00.004+02:00

Saturday and Sunday were the Journées du Patrimoine here in France, meaning that hundreds of important buildings and institutions across the country opened their doors to the public. One of the joys of living in a capital city on occasions like this is that you get to see the really important stuff and we chose one of the most important places of all: the Assemblée Nationale, which is the French version of the House of Commons.

We went at lunchtime, meaning that the queue was a not too ridiculous 45 minutes long, including the security check. You had to shuffle round in a prescribed order, essentially going at the speed of everybody else who was visiting, although it was possible to stop to take photos.

What was a little bit disappointing was that, while the actual debating chamber is quite large, only a bit of it was opened to the public, and although you could see all the rest, there was only time to snap a quick picture before they hurried you on to let more people in.

Cool things included the Assembly Post Office, where you can send mail with themed stamps and a special postmark, and these little caricature sculptures of famous people linked with the Assembly. Jean-Marie Fruchard was clearly not too popular!

There were also busts of Marianne, whose official face used to change every year until that became too complicated and they settled on the version that is used today.

I took the opportunity to revise my (very limited) knowledge of French government and elections. The deputies at the Assembly are directly elected. Cabinet ministers do not have to be voted in as deputies but are appointed by the President, who is elected separately in a presidential election. It is not impossible, or even uncommon, to have ministers with important portfolios who have never won a public election.

The Assembly can have a vote of no confidence in the executive (the president and the government ministers), but this is generally a symbolic way of demonstrating opposition and the executive is rarely actually overthrown. The president, on the other hand, has the power to dissolve the Assembly. Jacques Chirac did this in 1997, but unfortunately for him, the majority of the newly elected Assembly that followed was in opposition to him. A large part of the agenda for debate is set by the government, meaning that the executive has a lot of power.

The Upper House in France is the Sénat, whose members are indirectly elected by locally elected officials. Like the Assembly, the Senate can submit bills to the government and also amend them, although if the Senate disagrees with the Assembly, the government can decided to give the power to decide solely to the Assembly. As a foreigner living in France, however, the process for electing the senators was interesting to me because, as I have the right to vote locally but not nationally, it offers the only opportunity (albeit indirectly) to have a say in national politics. Looks like I might have to develop an interest in local elections after all!

Inefficiency or In Efficiency?

2011-09-12T17:55:00.003+02:00

The other day, I had a terrible realisation. I needed an official document in order to attend an important appointment on Monday morning. To obtain the document, I needed to make an appointment with another agency and provide some personal data. The data would need to be processed before the document could be supplied. It was Thursday, the second appointment was on Monday morning and there was no way I could take time off work, so I essentially needed the initial appointment to take place within 24 hours, outside the normal working day, and for the information to be processed within 48 hours of me supplying it.

What were the chances?

Within ten minutes I had an appointment with the first agency to take place at 7am the next day. The information would be processed by 7am the next morning and I could pick it up any time up until 9pm in the evening. When I attended the appointment, the people at the agency were friendly, caring, efficient and did exactly what I needed them to do. The document was ready at the time they said it would be, neatly stored in an envelope with the other papers that I had requested.

"In which parallel version of France did these miraculous events occur?" I hear the frustrated foreigners cry.

Well, the data I needed to supply was a blood sample and the document was the results of the tests. When it comes to the French health service here, there's no messing around.

Brittany: The Big Sea and the Little Sea

2011-09-08T20:50:00.004+02:00

One of the things I was most looking forward to doing during our trip to Brittany (the other being eating galettes!) was going to the seaside. And so we did. Multiple times. (We ate galettes multiple times too.)

We went to the beach in the south, on the Côte Sauvage on the Quiberon peninsula ...

And in the north, at Val André.

We walked to Cap Fréhel one evening and watched the sun go down...

But best of all, we fulfilled my long-held dream and visited the Golfe du Morbihan. (Mor bihan means “little sea” in Breton.)

Almost entirely enclosed by the arms of two peninsulae which curve protectively around it, the Golfe du Morbihan is home to dozens of tiny islands dotted around in a sparkling sea. It was frustratingly difficult to take photographs of, because the land is so flat and the vistas so wide, but it was every bit as beautiful as I had hoped. We took a ferry to the Ile d'Arz, one of the smaller of the non-private islands and hired bikes for the afternoon. 5 hours was just enough to cycle around, eat lunch, admire some prehistoric remains and have a dip in the sea before catching the boat back to Vannes.

Brittany: The (Really) Old Stuff

2011-08-31T21:49:00.002+02:00

Another interesting thing about Brittany is the number of prehistoric megaliths, many of which you can just stumble across on an ordinary hike. A dolmen is made of slabs of stone, some standing up vertically to form the walls, with others laid horizontally on top to make the roof. (Dol men means "stone table" in Breton.) They would often be covered by mounds of stone (a cairn), earth and stone (a tumulus) or just earth (a tertre - presumbaly the origin of the name of the Place du Tertre in Montmartre). Dolmens were burial sites and often have long, low access corridors leading to the main burial chamber.

There are also standing stones. The most famous are at Carnac, but we also discovered a smaller, but very well looked-after site at Monteneuf, where there's also a reconstruction of a neolithic village. My camera batteries had run out that day but you can see photos here.

What the French Can REALLY Teach Us About Food

2011-08-28T19:10:00.005+02:00

Yesterday I was reading, both on the BBC website and in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, about a recent study which has shown that obesity is set to rise from 25% to 40% of the UK population by 2030, and from one third to one half in the USA. In both articles, one of the main solutions proposed was to tax junk food to make it more expensive.

In my opinion, that's not going to work. It certainly hasn't worked with cigarettes and smoking. People will continue to buy their daily Mars, they just won't be able to afford the apple-a-day as well.

France, on the other hand, is right down at the bottom of the obesity tables for OECD countries. Some people like to argue that that's all down to a Mediterranean diet consisting of lots of veg and olive oil, but I don't buy that. France is the country with over 350 different types of cheese, remember? The country where people eat croissants for breakfast and where the most common type of regional speciality is a sausage. This is not to say that French people don't eat a healthy diet, but merely to point out that if they do, it's not purely down to the natural bounty or culinary traditions of their homeland.

What I believe makes the difference is that in France, people aspire to eat good food. Not healthy food, or diet food, but food that tastes good. Quality matters, and quality means food that is produced slowly, in the right place and the right season, by people who know what they are doing. And when you eat high quality food that tastes good and satisfies your body as well as your appetite, you don't want to eat too much. Try eating yourself sick on dark chocolate instead of a Mars bar. But in France, you might not even want the chocolate, because the fresh fruit is so delicious. And that rich, cheesy Tartiflette might be packed with calories, but when you've eaten it, you'll feel full and you'll be ready to stop, because your hunger and your appetite both agree that you've had enough. That's not really true of a Big Mac. French people respect their food, and when you respect something, you don't abuse it.

To solve the obesity crisis, governments need to make good food both aspirational and affordable. Telling people peaches are healthy isn't going to make them buy them if they're expensive and taste like water. Saying that chicken nuggets are unhealthy won't stop people eating them, but making sure that actual chicken has more flavour will make them choose that instead.

The developed world is in the process of proving that awareness of health risks doesn't stop people trying to satisfy their appetites. The French have proven that when your appetite is truly satisfied, the health risks aren't there.

An Up- to- the- Minute Chat-Up Line

2011-08-26T10:03:00.005+02:00

Yesterday, I was on my way to the supermarket when I heard a voice behind me saying, "Pardon, Pardon." In central Paris, I would have upped my pace and kept straight on, but being in Perfect Suburbia, I turned round to look at the man who was speaking.

He paused and took a couple of breaths, as if hesitating, then said, "Mademoiselle, you should be very careful not to come across DSK in the street. You are so charming that he would certainly rape you."

While thinking to myself that this was basically the French equivalent of Berlusconi saying the rape figures in Italy are high because the girls are pretty (the guy was so unsure of himself that there was certainly no threat of him actually attacking me), I decided to take it in the spirit that it was intended and smiled (charmingly, of course) before walking on.

Brittany: The Stuff of Legends

2011-08-25T10:30:00.007+02:00

Most people associate Brittany with the seaside, and it's true that, with its endless jagged shores, peninsulas and little islands, the region must have a spectacularly long coastline relative to its size. But there are secrets to be discovered in the interior too, and especially in the ancient forest of Paimpont or Brocéliande, home of Merlin and the fairies of the Arthurian legends.

Up until recently local people, believing that the legendary sites should be accessible only to those who truly deserved to find them, would hide the signposts to confuse visitors. Nowadays though, tourism has taken over and most of the places are easy to find, although luckily still not overrun with hoards of people.

The Chêne à Guillotin is a 1000 year old oak tree. Its name comes from the Abbot Guillotin, a resistor of the Revolution who hid in its hollow when he was chased by soldiers. The story goes that an intact spider's web covered the entrance to the tree when the revolutionary fighters passed, leading them to believe that nobody could be inside.

The Fontaine de Barenton is known for its magical ability to summon up storms even in times of drought and was where the knight Yvan defeated the terrible Chevalier Noir or Black knight, as well as being the place where Merlin first met the fairy Viviane. Unfortunately, it didn't have much water in it when we went by.

The Val sans Retour, or Valley of no Return, was put under a spell by the fairy Morgane so that unfaithful knights would find themselves lost in the forest and unable to make their way out. As well as the Miroir aux Fées, you can visit the Arbre d'Or.

This golden tree has nothing to do with the Arthurian legends but was planted after a terrible fire in 1991 to symbolise the fragility of nature and attract visitors to the area. The pointed rocks which surround it are there to protect it from people who fail to understand the message and try to take home pieces of its gold-leaf coating as a souvenir.

A l'aise Breizh!*

2011-08-24T23:35:00.003+02:00

After a week spent reconnecting with my Scottish roots, I went to Brittany with Understanding Frenchman to do the same with his origins. His family live in a small village south-west of Rennes, not far from the middle of the region, making it the perfect base for exploring, especially as his parents very kindly lent us a car for the week. Like most (pseudo) Parisians, my experience of Brittany was limited to St-Malo and Mont-Saint-Michel (which is actually in Normandy these days, much to the disgust of the Bretons) and, while both are beautiful places, they didn't exactly correspond to the image of a remote and weatherbeaten landscape that I had in my head, and exploring the region further had long been on my to-do list. Having a gorgeous local guide to do it with was an added bonus!

Many of the places we visited deserve a post of their own, so for now I'll just say that I liked Brittany a lot. Like the rest of France, it has beautiful landscapes, nice weather (at least in summer, most of the time!), interesting history and good food. But it also has a down-to-earth feel about it: the architecture is more about pretty stone houses and medieval town centres than gothic or baroque splendour, they drink cider instead of wine, and the local patisserie delicacies are butter- laden and heavy as opposed to, well, butter- laden and light.

My desire to get out of the Ile-de-France before living there turns me into a horrible person means that every time I visit a new place, I wonder what it would be like to live there. While the countryside is beautiful, I wouldn't want to live out in the sticks (even if a 5 bedroom house with a swimming pool costs about the same as a Parisian studio), apart from anything else because I suspect that unless you're a farmer or have lived there all your life, it would be very difficult to integrate, but Rennes is a pretty city with a thriving university and cultural scene . Unfortunately though, as Understanding Frenchman explained, there's a reason why there are so many Bretons in Paris: Brittany's universities are of a high standard and produce plenty of well-educated graduates, but outside of agriculture and the highly competitive public sector, there are very few jobs there. Local people leave their hometowns for the big city to find work, then struggle for years to get back again. And if the Bretons can't find a job in their home region, what chance would there be for a foreigner like me?

Ah well ... it's a wee bit too far from the mountains for my taste anyway!

*This is actually a Breton clothing brand that sells stuff with the logo of the little dancing people that people have on their car stickers. The pronunciation of Breizh rhymes with a l'aise.

Why the Roads are Free in Brittany

2011-08-22T22:03:00.002+02:00

A long, long, time ago, in 1491, when Anne de Bretagne (described in Wikipedia as "un personnage soucieux de défendre le duché face à l'appétit de ses voisins") married Charles VIII, uniting Brittany with the rest of France, one of the conditions of her marriage was that France was not allowed to levy road tolls in her homeland. Elsewhere in France, many of the motorways have been privatised and companies such as Vinci and Cofiroutes charge hefty fees for their use. While the tolls are expensive, they do pay for a high level of improvement and maintenance, meaning that many of them have 6 lanes and speed limits of 130km/h. In Brittany, on the other hand, the motorways are free to use, with no more than 4 lanes and 110km/h speed limits.

While I generally appreciate the fact that the private motorways allow me to get far away from Paris in a relatively short period of time, driving at 70 miles per hour instead of 85 (add ten for the average French driver!) and only having to worry about checking one wing mirror at a time is definitely a de-stress factor in Bretagne for me!

Big Mountain Trip 2011: The Pyrenees

2011-08-17T00:39:00.004+02:00

While my friends and I had a great time laughing at funny place names during our trip to the Pyrenees in July, we did plenty of other things as well.

Understanding Frenchman and I spent a night en route at the Hotel l'Oustal in Vezac in the Perigord. It had a gorgeous (and empty!) swimming pool with a view of two different chateaux and was surrounded by fields of sunflowers. In the evening, we had dinner followed by an evening stroll in La Roque-Gageac and were really quite sad when we had to leave first thing the next morning.

We picked up some more friends in Toulouse and drove to the gite de Miquelet in the mountains behind the town of St Girons. We were pretty excited by the prettiness of the location as well as the fact that the gite, while being charmingly rustic on the outside, was actually very well equipped on the inside. The fact that the electricity had cut out just before we arrived only added to the sense of adventure, although we were quite relieved that we had planned a barbecue for that evening and that the owner offered to refrigerate our food and lend us candles. When the light was gone outside, we lit a fire in the hearth, setting a trend which carried on for the rest of the week.

The next morning it was raining and the electricity was still off but we set out for a hike in the afternoon and were very pleased to come across an EDF lorry and discover that they had found the source of the problem and were getting ready to fix it. We came across EDF vans on four of the seven days of our trip - a lot of electricity is generated in the area but they also have their work cut out providing a service in an area that can be hostile to things like overhead wires.

On our second day we hiked most of the way to the Etang d'Araing, which was a fabulous walk but bad weather and the steepness of the mountain stopped us going all the way down to the lake (which we couldn't see anyway) and we stopped at the highest point, a cool 2221m above sea level. We learned that day that in the Pyrenees, horizontal kilometres are almost irrelevant - it's the vertical ones you have to worry about!

Day three was our walk to the beautiful Cascade d'Ars and turned out to be the only really sunny day of the whole week.

Afterwards we went to the spa at Aulus-les-Bains in the hope of soothing our tired muscles but unfortunately their crummy customer service left us suffering more from high blood pressure and rage.

Wednesday was supposed to be a rest day, but we still managed to drive for a couple of hours over a hairy but spectacular mountain pass to Vicdessos for a three hour hike to the castle of Montreal de Sos and the little village of Olbier before driving back through the medieval town of Foix, where I learned that it's Troyes Foix Sept fait vingt-et-un.

On our last two days, we hiked up to the Refuge d'Estragnous to climb Mont Vallier, which for a long time was thought to be the highest peak in the Pyrenees. It's not, but at 2838m, it was spectacular and high enough to give some of us the beginnings of altitude sickness. The weather on the hike up was miserable but we were rewarded with a friendly reception, warm, comfortable beds and genepy on the house for our efforts. Because of the rain, not many people were staying there and in the evening, all ten or so of us got involved in a game of Jenga which was almost as breathtaking as the climb itself.

All in all, it was an amazing trip and even with the prospect of more holidays before the end of the summer, it was hard to come back to Paris!

How to Choose Your Next Country

2011-08-04T12:58:00.002+02:00

It's pretty much impossible to move to a new country and not make comparisons with the old. For me, this process is plays a huge part in how I learn from travelling - figuring out what's important in different places and why, looking at how some countries deal with certain things better than others, and seeing what could change to make people's lives better. (Actually bringing about change, is, of course a whole lot harder, and this is one of the biggest frustrations of international living!)

Expat blogs and expat books are full of these observations, but how do you know if they are factually correct? How much difference does that French diet actually make to people's health? How much more dangerous is Italian driving really? Is a chalk-and-talk-read-learn-and- regurgiate education system more rigorous or is it numbing children's minds?

This website has many of the answers. Using its collection of studies, which appear to be from reliable sources, expats and expat wannabes can compare countries around the world on everything from population density to quality of death (and yes, I did choose that one because the UK tops the list for end-of-life care services!).

What's important to you when you move abroad?

A Short Trip Away

2011-08-03T20:42:00.003+02:00

I'm just back home from a short, unplanned and highly educational 3 day trip. Not to Italy, the south of France or anywhere exotic, but down the road to my local hospital.

It all started on Friday night, when I began to experience stomach pains. Had I been French, I might well have gone to the doctor straight away, or at least first thing on Saturday morning, but being British, I swallowed as many paracetamol as I could and hoped it would pass.

By 5 am on Sunday morning, the pain definitely hadn't passed and in fact had got much worse. Unable to ignore it any longer, I woke up Understanding Frenchman and told him I needed to go to the doctor. With even the nearest open pharmacy being several suburbs away and no on-call doctor in town, our only option was to go to A&E at the local hospital, which last time I needed it was a 5 minute walk from my house but has moved and is now a 20 minute drive away. (It's worth knowing that in France it's the norm for A&E to be your only option out of hours, as very few places now have a medecin de garde.)

As it turned out, A&E was the right place for me anyway, as by ten o'clock (when there were actually some senior doctors on duty), they had decided that I needed surgery. Fairly minor surgery, but requiring a stay in hospital nonetheless.

Lying on the hospital trolley with a drip in my arm, I joked to Understanding Frenchman that this was perhaps my comeuppance for complaining about how ridiculously poor-value my mutuelle has been over the past few years. Not that I have a problem with paying for good healthcare, but my current mutuelle combines spectacularly high charges with spectacularly low benefits and some of the most incompetent administration I have ever seen, for which reasons I'm very glad it will be changing soon!

Anyway, the whole experience turned out to be exactly what one would expect of the French healthcare system: fantastic care combined with some totally risible paperwork. I suspect that had I gone in with a similar complaint in the UK, especially if I had gone on the Friday instead of waiting until Sunday, I would have been sent away to take more paracetamol and see if it got better. In France, within about half an hour of arriving, I had seen a doctor and was hooked up to an IV that was dripping delightful painkillers directly into my bloodstream. They operated the same day and throughout my whole stay, the doctors and nurses were highly competent, helpful and extremely friendly. I stayed in 3 days for an operation that, according to the internet, is often done as an out-patient procedure.

The bureaucratic laughs came at the end. To check out of the hospital, I had to collect my prescriptions and details of follow-up visits from the staff nurse. I even got a prescription for my taxi home! But then, all by myself and with a bag slightly heavier than I really wanted to carry, I had to make my way to another office where there was a queue of about ten people waiting to hand over their papers to collect another piece of paper that would actually allow them to leave the hospital with all the documents they needed and finally, to have a long discussion with the man at the reception about why my taxi prescription said "aller" when I was actually going home.

So, full marks to French healthcare for the actual treatment, but surely "medically excellent" and "free at point of delivery and with minimal bureaucratic hassle" are not completely incompatible ideals?

When is a Fruit not a Fruit?

2011-08-03T20:26:00.003+02:00

The other day, Understanding Frenchman had reason to borrow my car and drove it into the city centre. Having heard on the radio that on-street parking in Paris was free for the month of August, he found himself a space, checked with a traffic warden who happened to be working nearby that he was indeed allowed to park there and went to work...

Only to come out at 6pm to find a parking ticket (worth 17 euros since the start of August) on the windscreen.

That evening, he told me how, to his disgust, he had been given "une prune". I'm not normally a fan of civil disobedience, but his experience just goes to show how, even with the best of intentions, getting the odd parking ticket is pretty much unavoidable, so even though the ticket will be in my name, I laughed and asked him to repeat the word that he had used.

The reason parking tickets are called prunes? Because, like the fruit, ils font chier!

Very Punny

2011-07-27T15:14:00.003+02:00

After my trip to Italy (which I have finally finished writing about on my Italian blog!) I was back in Paris for all of around 36 hours before Understanding Frenchman and I set off for the south-west of France, home of glorious scenery, glorious food and, to our delight, glorious puns.

Our first hilarious destination was the small town of

in the Limousin region. We went looking for a petrol station and came back with a still-empty tank and a belly full of laughs.

When we arrived in the Pyrenees, some members of our group stopped off to enjoy Seix in the sunshine, while the rest of us wondered if we had missed an exciting opportunity.

We also visited the Cascade d'Ars - not a poetic name for diarrhoea, but in fact this beautiful waterfall.

And finally, having visited the prefecture of the Ariege department, we were able to answer the question "What three French towns make 21?".

Can you?

Another Happy Experience with French Bureaucracy

2011-07-27T10:27:00.002+02:00

(or "Things that Really Shouldn't be Worth Writing About but have Nevertheless Filled Me with Great Joy")

This morning, I paid a visit to my Caisse Primaire d'Assurance Maladie, the office that deals with the paperwork surrounding the French national health service. I needed an Attestation de Carte Vitale, a document testifying to my right to access the healthcare system, one of the many documents which one receives in the post one day in France and must conserve for the rest of one's life and which I had promptly lost among all the other such documents I have which, after 4 years in France now fill two large files and take up far too much space on my bookshelf.

I had been informed (wrongly as it turned out) that this document needed one of the dreaded tampons (not a feminine hygiene product but an official stamp) and as my last visit to this office lasted almost 4 hours, I went prepared. I got up early to beat the queue and made sure I ate a good breakfast. In my bag I packed not only as many official documents as I could think of but also a book to read and, fearing that the 20 pages I had left would not be enough, a second book, as well as my new Smartphone (yes, I'm very excited about that too!) to keep me entertained.

When I arrived at the office, I discovered that the machine to print the document I needed was no longer out of order and my mood lifted several degrees. I inserted my card and was presented with a range of choices, including the option to print out the Attestation. I touched the screen. The document appeared. A surge of happy adrenaline coursed through my veins. I printed a second copy. Nowhere did it say I needed the fearsome tampon. I returned to the initial screen. So many choices! High on the ease of the operation, I requested a European Health Card and a Declaration de Medecin Traitant (another two pieces of paperwork that I've been putting off dealing with for about 18 months now too.) Before removing my card, I clicked another couple of options just to see what was available to me and was ever so slightly disappointed that none of the documents on the list were things that I needed.

I collected my papers and turned around. The office was empty except for the lady at reception, who smiled at me and asked if I needed anything. Feeling that my experiences had been in the fairytale-on-cloud-nine realm of too-good-to-be-true, I double-checked about the tampon. Nope, none needed.

"Votre systeme avec la machine est vraiment efficace," I said.

"Tant mieux," she replied, with a beatific smile.

5 Days in the Boot

2011-07-14T18:21:00.001+02:00

I've been in Italy for the past 5 days so I've been posting details of my adventures over on my Italian blog.

Staying Put

2011-07-08T01:05:00.003+02:00

This month is the second anniversary of my 3rd move to France and, for the first time in my adult life, I'll be spending it not expecting to move anywhere any time soon. Spending more than two years in one place is normal for most people but to me it feels a bit strange. I will be starting a new job in a couple of months but no international move is involved, just a bit of commuting in the opposite direction from I'm used to.

Staying (nearly) in Paris was a conscious decision and I'm content with my choice. I have a great life here: a career that makes me happy, a lovely flat, great friends from all over the world, Understanding Frenchman ... the list of things I wouldn't want to leave goes on and on. I also (despite my occasional rantings) find France an easy country to live in. While there are endless fascinating cultural differences, in relation to the rest of the world, it's not that different from the UK, and in terms of standard of living, any bad points (for me, at the moment) are easily cancelled out by the good.

But although the glass is definitely well over half-full, I'm a bit of a life-perfectionist and in my more neurotic moments, I wonder if I'm becoming too settled too soon. What about all the other places I haven't seen yet? What about all those other languages I haven't learned?

But in my old-age, I fear that I'm becoming too wise. Changing countries would almost inevitably involve giving up at least some out of the fabulous food, the fabulous scenery, the fabulous health service, the strict employment laws, the (relative) freedom from corruption, the possibility of speaking the language fluently and the opportunity to pay national insurance contributions that will actually pay towards my pension.

How do you weigh up the value of these things compared to the possibility of a wonderful but unknown adventure?

Life is Good

2011-07-05T01:01:00.004+02:00

As I may have confessed here before, I have an awkward relationship in my life. It should be all beautiful and romantic, full of lights and flowers, seduction and sophistication. And yet, too often, it's not like that. Too often, the busy-ness and the rudeness, the rushing and the endless, pressing presence of other people bring it down and I don't feel the loving emotions that seem to be expected of me.

Yes, my relationship with Paris is a difficult one.

But sometimes it has its high points. Like last weekend.

Saturday started off with some happy shopping buying presents and spending gift vouchers in the delightfully disorganised bookshop of perfect suburbia. Then I celebrated a friend's 30th birthday with champagne and a picnic in the park.

After that, I headed into the big metropolis, where an American friend was having a 4th July (or Lose a Colony Day) celebration. (It was only the 2nd and closer to Canada Day, so I figured I could justify it.)

In the evening, it was on to the last picnic of the day, with my lovely, laid-back Italian friends in the 15th. We sat on the grass admiring Les Invalides as it was lit up in the growing darkness, then slipped quickly back home on metro line 6 (my personal favourite) when it got too cold.

Sunday was another gorgeous day and I walked along the Promenade Plantee, which was gloriously green and cool, to meet friends at Chatelet. After a couple of hours of putting the world to rights over ice-cream, we walked along the banks of the Seine admiring the way the blue sky reflected turquoise in the normally brown water of the river and the way the light and shadows played in a dance on the sunlit quays.

My relationship with Paris may be fickle, but sometimes it's just perfect.

Who Cares What People Think?

2011-06-28T17:51:00.001+02:00

I bought a copy of last week's L'Express and was intrigued to see that the main story, spanning several pages and including about 5 different articles, was entitled Ce que les américains pensent des Français, or "What Americans Think of the French".

Aside from the content of the articles, I was interested that this was something L'Express thought would make a good cover story. It was clearly inspired by the DSK affair, where an extremely crude and simplistic summary of the two sides would be that the French cannot believe he actually did it and blame either a conspiracy theory or a prudish American mentality that can't tell the difference between seduction and attempted rape, while the Americans are outraged that the French would question the alleged victim's integrity.

I have a feeling, though, that this is an issue that runs deeper than current political scandal. I've often noticed that the UK press, or at least certain branches of it, shows many more signs of rivalry with the French than the French press with les anglais and assumed that it was an indicator of a British inferiority complex combined with a French sense of superiority to everyone on the planet. Now, however, I think I have come closer to understanding the explanation. The French have much more of a love/hate relationship with the US than with the UK, decrying the damaging effects of the globalisation of US culture while guzzling Big Macs at a rate that is second only to the Americans themselves. So while the British conside the US as an ally and the French as rivals (culturally speaking, at least) the French are far more concerned by the Americans themselves than the nation that they see as their puny "anglo-saxon" sidekicks.

Expression of the Weekend

2011-06-14T23:04:00.001+02:00

Il va demander son zéro-six.

In France, mobile numbers all start with the digits 06.

Voyage of Discovery in the West

2011-06-07T21:12:00.008+02:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent Ascension weekend at a gîte in the Charente-Maritime, halfway between Bordeaux and La Rochelle and about 40km from the Atlantic coast. During this time, I discovered (or confirmed) the following:

- Many place names in the Charente-Maritime end in –ac. We discovered Givrézac, Gémozac and Jonzac …

- …But there are also the better known Cognac and Armagnac, which we explored in their more “spiritual” forms.

- French people sneer at the Spanish for putting lemonade in their wine but it is perfectly acceptable to mix Cognac with Schweppes.

- I like Cognac mixed with Schweppes.

- If you park your car illegally in the pretty medieval village of Pons while indulging your unsociable tendencies on the Friday after Ascension, you don’t have to worry about being caught because the only 2 policemen in the village aren’t working.

- The Atlantic coast has great beaches.

- The sea is warm enough to swim in.

- It’s not a good idea to have the front door of your gîte lower than ground level, especially if the drain outside the door blocks and there is a massive thunderstorm. It’s even harder to sweep the water out if the uneven floor slopes away from the door.

Word of the Weekend

2011-06-05T22:34:00.003+02:00

Accordéon.

In normal French, this means the same as it does in English. On Ascension weekend (bank holiday on Thursday + pont on Friday = 4 days anywhere but in Paris) it means one of these frustrating traffic jams where you slow down, pick up some speed, slow down again, pick up some speed, and one hour later you've travelled about 20km.

In close second place, and on the same theme, did you know that caisse is a slang word for a car? I didn't ( I thought it was bagnole, but maybe I'm just out of date) until spending a weekend in the country with Understanding Frenchman and 15 of his friends. Clearly he edits his French for me a bit too much the rest of the time!

So, far too many hours on the autoroute today but photos from the gorgeous Charente-Maritime coming soon!

Quoi de neuf?

2011-05-31T20:45:00.003+02:00

Looking back over my blog from the past few months, it struck me that while I have posted many a (hopefully) witty comment on the more incomprehensible aspects of French living, it’s been a while since I wrote about my actual French life.

One of the great things about my life is that I have a job that I really love. The trouble with having a job that you love is that sometimes you care a little bit too much about doing it well and it eats into the rest of your life and takes up a lot of your thinking time. When you also love many other things in life, that can lead to a lot of stress. I realised things had gone a bit too far when I had a long break in Scotland over Easter and, by the time I had finally started to relax, it was time to go back to work again. Since then, work has still been manic, but I have been making an effort to be calmer, more relaxed and a little less obsessed with filling every waking minute (and some when I should be sleeping) with exciting things to do.

So here is what I have been doing while trying not to do anything. Sunny weather always helps!

Visit the Base de Loisirs in Cergy. Cergy has a reputation for being a bit grim but this is a beautiful park with several lakes and lots of forest. We just had a barbecue, but you can also go sailing, take a cruise or even go swimming!

Picnic in the Parc du Château in St-Germain-en-Laye. Officially this isn’t allowed, but a park official looked at our spread of apéro snacks, couscous, fruit, salad and large quantities of wine and said, “As long as it’s a light picnic, it’s fine.”

Discover the Parc de Montsouris. This is probably the Parisian park that looks most like a British park. Not too much dust, and you are allowed to play on the grass!

Take a trip to Burgundy. Only 2 hours’ drive from Paris and also accessible by train, this area is proper countryside, with enough tree pollen to make me sneeze non-stop for two days. Luckily, the French healthcare system has since provided me with three types of medication and since then I’ve been fine. This was my first outdoor swim of the year, in a reservoir, and there is also lots of amazing food to taste! We adopted a friendly dog that insisted that we take it for a walk.

">Drink on a terrasse, preferably surrounded by all your friends and beautiful flowers.

Plan your next trip. Holiday weekends are coming up, so it’s time to go further afield again!

We Will Shock You

2011-05-22T22:44:00.004+02:00

As any expat knows, the rest of the world loves English-language music. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that they understand the lyrics, with the result that far too many songs about copulation with ones female progenitor are blasted out in the aisles of French supermarkets as old ladies fuss about finding the ripest tomatoes and any anglophones in the vicinity cover their ears and blush in shame.

Listening to Autoroute Radio in the car today, I heard another delightful yet macabre example: a government advert reminding people that kids are legally required to use special car seats and wear seatbelts and that the biggest cause of death among under-tens in France is road accidents was followed by the broadcasting of Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust."

I Don't Think, Therefore I Strike

2011-05-13T21:23:00.002+02:00

The latest dispatch from a country that prides itself on its Cartesian thinking:

Today the RATP was on strike, running one train in 3 (or 4, depending on who you believe) on the RER lines A and B. The reason for cutting the service? Because on a normal schedule, the trains are too full.

In Praise of French Customer Service

2011-05-11T18:27:00.002+02:00

Just because I never thought I would have the occasion to use that title ...

I went to the bank today. Now admittedly, I went to the bank to complain about the ridiculously high charges that they were levying for running my account, but when I got there (and after I had hung around for ages avoiding the stares of the grim-faced lady with the anklebiter-sized dog who clearly thought I was going to queue jump her before anybody said "Bonjour" or asked me why I was there), what a welcome!

One of the major differences between my French bank and my UK banks is that in France I have a personal advisor. I know his name and I have his phone number and email address, which means that I can actually ring the bank instead of a call centre in Bangalore and make appointments with a real person.

M. Real Person dealt with the objectionable charges on my account, explained the difference between Visa and Electron cards and how to avoid paying fees on international transfers within and outwith the Eurozone, calculated my social security and tax payments for the year, recommended options for savings accounts, apologised for calling me English and taught me several useful expressions in bureaucratic and financial French, and all without once implying that I might be dumb, too foreign or wasting his time. Given that visits to the bank generally cause me sleepless nights as I try to predict all the things they might do to pull the wool over my eyes or avoid helping me at all, it was a very, very pleasant surprise!

Eddie Izzard: Swimming in the European Melting Pot

2011-05-01T09:29:00.000+02:00

I saw Eddie Izzard perform last night at the Théâtre de Dix Heures. He was about 5 metres away from me. In an auditorium that can't have held more than about 100 people. Where the backstage curtains could be pulled back to reveal a small courtyard with a few dustbins and a waiter called Thierry in it. Eddie was speaking French.

For those of you who don't know, Eddie Izzard is an incredibly famous comedian who normally performs in venues like Wembley Stadium, in English.

Like most Brits, Eddie studied French at school until he was 16. He makes mistakes with genders, verb tenses, forming past participles, vocabulary and just about everything else that can go wrong when you speak a foreign language. He sounds like an English man. And yet, he can stand up in front of a room full of people and talk non-stop for an hour. Not only that, it's extremely funny.

You can hear Eddie in French on YouTube here. I reckon this should be shown to all British kids learning French at school because wow, what an inspiration!

Masking the Truth?

2011-04-11T21:57:00.000+02:00

Last week, the French law banning the burka officially entered the statute books.

Obviously, in a politically correct nation, especially one with a large Muslim population, you can't actually call it a law banning the burka, so in fact the law states that you are not allowed, in a public place, to wear any kind of clothing designed to conceal your face. Presumably, Paris carnival will be cancelled next year. And Hallowe'en (but that was an American fad that went out of date a few years ago, and anti-Americanism is pretty rife in France too, so surely nobody will be that upset).

I find this law worrying. I have never felt the urge to cover my face for any reason other than that the weather is cold (Does the law also apply during Alpine blizzards? Or is one allowed to “hide” one's face from the elements?), and I can see that there are circumstances where wearing a veil could be problematic, but the idea that the government has the power to stop me doing so troubles me deeply. This law will do nothing to make France a better place. It will do nothing to tackle the problems posed by certain types of radical Islam. It is taking away people's freedom to dress as they like not to solve a real-life problem but to pander to some people's blinkered vision of what the country “should” be.

In the meantime, in the recent local elections, several Front National candidates were able to gain a significant proportion of the votes in their area despite the fact that the electoral campaign posters showed only the face of Marine Le Pen and not their own. One stood under her maiden name so that she would not be recognised in the community. Apparently far-right voters are not too concerned who represents them in government as long as the politics are prejudiced enough and the party leader is blonde and fair-skinned.

La République se vit à visage découvert? Perhaps not.

A Modern French Paradox

2011-03-25T18:02:00.003+01:00

The other week, I realised I needed to pay my rent but had run out of cheques in my chequebook. Having been assured by various people that a replacement would have been ordered automatically and sent to my bank, I went to ask for it.

It wasn't there.

The man who works there, who seems very nice and helpful despite the fact that he works for a French bank, did some digging around on the computer and found out what had happened. With a totally straight face, he explained to me that a new chequebook had been ordered for me in October when I used the tenth-last cheque in the old book. The new book was subsequently delivered to the bank. This was somewhat premature because I go through cheques at a rate of approximately one per month when I pay my rent.

Everything would have been well and good, however, if they had actually told me that the new chequebook had arrived. And their reason for not doing so was that they didn't have a mobile phone number for me. Apparently knowing my full postal and email addresses as well as my place of employment, my date of birth and my first pet's maiden name was not enough to enable them to get in touch with me, as despite the fact that they charge me through the nose for sending endless pages of bank statements, advertising and other irrelevant information through the post, the only way to communicate this particular piece of information was by text message.

The fact that I responded to this story with as straight a face as the bank man's is probably a sign that I have been in France far too long.

The paradox in all of it was that the bank's inability to communicate using anything other than modern technology meant that I was unable to pay my rent for this month. The reason? My landlord abhors bank transfers and will only accept cheques, which he exchanges on a monthly basis for a receipt written in beautiful copperplate handwriting using the fountain pen he keeps in his breast pocket.

Illness the French Way

2011-03-14T19:04:00.005+01:00

Back in the middle of winter, a French friend of mine announced that he was suffering from "une bronchite".

Being the kind, caring friend that I am, my first question was, "Do you mean a French bronchite or an English bronchite?"

Given that he had been going to work all week, I was pretty sure it was the former and made him a cup of herbal tea with honey. Had it been the latter, I would have driven him to the hospital.

This is not to undermine my friend's suffering or accuse him of malingering. It's just a cultural and linguistic difference that I find interesting. Where the French have bronchitis, the British have a cough. What we call a tummy bug, they call "la gastro" (une gastro-entérite). We have a temperature; they have fever. We have sore throats, they have angina.

I don't think this is purely an example of common Latin-based French words sounding impressive to Anglophone ears. The French really do take their illnesses seriously. Sometimes I look at the quantities of prescription medicines that they consume and imagine the superbugs that they must be breeding by regular use of antibiotics and I think it's wasteful. But sometimes I think of their longevity and the quality of life here and I wonder if there isn't a positive side to it too. If I had a serious health problem, I'd certainly rather be in France than anywhere else. What do you think?

As a footnote, it was my turn to be ill last week. As I emerged from the bathroom on Thursday morning having just thrown up all of the night before's dinner, Understanding Frenchman looked at me in concern and said, "Do you need me to call a Doctor?"

"No," I replied. "I just need to phone my boss and tell her I'll be late for work this morning."

Perhaps I need to get over my Anglo-Saxon work ethic and become a little bit more French.

Roo! Adventures in the Wild West of the Ile-de-France

2011-03-08T19:09:00.004+01:00

My friend V came to visit from the UK the other week and, leafing through my Routard guide to Week-ends autour de Paris, we stumbled across a description of the enticingly named Château de Sauvage, not far from Rambouillet in the Yvelines. In fact, Sauvage is simply the name of the tiny village where the château is located, but it nevertheless lived up to its name. The guidebook referred to an accueil inexistant and it was right: even after we had discovered the rusty iron gate behind which lay the marvels of the park, it took us a while to find anyone to accept 8.50 euro entrance fee indicated on a scrawled sign tied to the tree near the entrance. Admittedly, we weren't trying that hard - we were already letting ourselves be distracted by the fabulous flock of sunset-coloured flamingos on the lake, the displaying peacocks and the emu that was promenading on the paths.

The château park is owned by a conservation association and is essentially a kind of safari park for pedestrians and populated by what appears to be an extremely random selection of animals. As well as the flamingos, there are several other kinds of exotic birds, some unusual species of deer and, best of all, the kangaroos.

I had never seen a real kangaroo before and I was surprised by how small they were. The first ones we saw were just sitting around and not that interesting, although I did think their long tails were fun. Then eventually we saw one hop, which was pretty exciting. The best bit, though, was when we saw a tiny head poking out of one of the females' tummies, and they even let us get close enough to take this video:

Who would have thought such exotic sights were to be seen in northern France in February?

An Unholy Riot

2011-02-23T13:48:00.004+01:00

Normally, one of the things I love about France is how people are so quiet. Discretion is highly valued here and, as a result, especially on public transport, people tend to read or whisper to each other rather than yelling into mobile phones or listening to loud music without headphones. A couple of times I arrived in France from Italy and the first thing that struck me as I got off the train at the Gare de Lyon was the fact that there were so many people and so little noise. I tend to use my time on trains for head-space or reading, so I like it when it's quiet.

This week, however, has been something of an exception.

Coming back from our ski trip last Saturday, Understanding Frenchman and I found ourselves sharing a carriage with a group of about thirty kids from the Parisian suburbs who'd also been on a trip. As we had been up since 5am and the SNCF had considerately given us reserved seats right in the middle of the bedlam, we did roll our eyes somewhat, especially as it became clear that these kids were not likely to shut up and let us sleep. To be fair to them, however, they were not in any way offensive, just somewhat noisy (and that only by French standards). The best bit, though, was when, in between letting off whoopee cushions next to each other's backsides and yelling about the flavour of their crisps, the kids behind us embarked on an earnest conversation about whether it was correct to say un vespa or une vespa, the kind of questiom I often find myself musing upon on long journeys but not necessarily what you would expect of your average group of 12 year olds.

Another thing I love about France: even teenagers apparently think grammar is interesting.

My second experience of the week was on the RER late on Monday night. As I was about to step on to the train, I heard the sound of riotous singing and almost ducked back into another carriage but then decided the loud one might be entertaining and went to take my seat. As a Brit, I automatically assume that noisy singing in public is the result of people being drunk, but not this time. Nope, these guys had been to church. And with the volume they were singing at, you could have been forgiven for thinking that the Lord, as well as being an almighty saviour, was also mighty deaf, because if three of them could make that amount of noise in a train carriage, their services must literally raise the roof.

So the singing went on for quite a while and once again, while once again it wasn't offensive (at least to me - many French people have different views about public displays of religious faith), it was very, very loud, and eventually a voice from the back of the carriage shouted out, "Shhhh!" When that didn't work, the owner of the voice, who surprisingly turned out to be an elegantly dressed woman who may or may not have had too much champagne to drink that evening made her way somewhat unsteadily down the carriage and asked them to shut up. The chief perpetrator indicated that he was getting off at the next stop anyway, elegant lady wobbled back to her seat and the singing continued, louder than ever.

When the train eventually did arrive at the next station, Mr Happy-Clappy did indeed make his way to the exit to get off ... but the doors wouldn't open. He kept pressing the button until finally they sprung apart, he jumped out, and once again the voice from the back of the carriage piped up, "Thanks be to Jesus: he's let you off the train!"

Yet another thing I love about France: when the humour does surface, it can be very, very funny!

From Bambi Beginnings to a (more or less) Elegant End

2011-02-19T16:50:00.005+01:00

In case my last post gave the impression that I spent my week in the mountains seething at the rudeness of my fellow franciliens, I should hasten to say that I actually had a great time. Understanding Frenchman and I booked our trip with the UCPA, an association that organises sports holidays for the under-40s. You stay in hostel-type accommodation and everything is included: ski pass, equipment hire, lessons and three fabulous meals a day. Skiing is never cheap but the prices are about as good as it gets: as little as 350 euros a week out of peak-season. It’s also a good way to go on holiday on your own because it’s very sociable and easy to meet people.

We went to Les Deux Alpes, a pretty village in the Isère department not far from Grenoble. After a crazy start to the winter, the snow has actually not been great this year and some of the lower pistes were closed when we arrived. I was actually too hot on Sunday and Monday, as well as suffering from the realisation that while you never entirely forget how to ski once you’ve learned, you can feel pretty stupid in the time that it takes to come flooding back to you. The exertion of descending the easy slopes badly, coupled with the fact that my ski boots really hurt, made the first couple of days feel more like hard work than a holiday but by Tuesday, with a fresh fall of snow and new boots, I was having a great time.

Mont Blanc

On Wednesday, the sun came out and from the top of the station, at 3600 metres, there were stunning views of the Parc des Ecrins and the rest of the Alps, stretching all the way to Mont Blanc during clearer moments. On Thursday, we took a half day off skiing to go for a ramble in the snow and visit the ice cave under the glacier at the top of the mountain.

Ice Sculpture

By Friday, I had skied down a couple of red runs, played in the powder off-piste, learned to ski backwards and only fallen off a chairlift once. All in all, it was a good week.

In the Wrong Zone

2011-02-19T16:23:00.000+01:00

In France, there is a proper time and place for everything. If the time is February, the proper place to be is on the ski slopes. So, it being February and me being culturally well-adjusted, to the ski slopes I went.

To cater to this lemming-like behaviour, school holidays in France are organised so that different académies (school districts) go on holiday at different times, meaning that only 20 million people are likely to be stuck in traffic on any given Saturday in February. The académies are organised into “zones” A, B and C and those which make up A and B are nicely scattered around the country. Zone C, on the other hand, is comprised of Paris and the neigbouring académies of Versailles and Créteil (as well as Bordeaux), meaning that the whole of the Ile-de-France goes on holiday at the same time. The cynical explanation for this is that it means that the rest of the country doesn’t have to go on holiday with the Parisians and the result is that pretty alpine villages begin to resemble the corridors of the Paris metro.

At one point, I was waiting in a queue for a lift when a woman suddenly slid over the front of my skis to the small space in front of me. I was giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming that she couldn’t help it until her husband followed suit. A sarcastic “Allez-y” popped out of my mouth before I could help it but Monsieur just glided serenely on after Madame. Later, I overtook them on the slopes and Monsieur suddenly sped up just to have the pleasure of passing me (on the inside, bien sûr). It could have been the périphérique but for one big difference: he did it with a beaming smile and such insouciance that I smiled back. Even Parisians have to relax a little bit on holiday.

The Other Amélie

2011-02-08T21:08:00.002+01:00

As anyone who knows me will testify, I don't really do sport. Exercise yes - if it's rollerblading, dancing, climbing mountains or even doing aerobics, I'm up for it, but if I have to hit a ball or score points, I just can't. So I don't.

The same applies to watching sport. I watch figure skating avidly and gymnastics with enthusiasm but apart from that the only spectator sport that gets me excited is Six Nations rugby and even that's more to do with my torn loyalties than any real love of the game. (Incidentally, Understanding Frenchman and I watched the Scotland-France game together last weekend and, in a true victory for international relations, are still speaking to each other. Now we can sit back, relax and support each others' teams against all kinds of evil opposition, but especially the Auld Enemy.)

Yesterday night, however, a friend had managed to get free tickets for the GDF Suez Women's Tennis tournament ... with a twist. Yesterday was not the actual tournament but the Soirée Amélie, where celebrity friends of Amélie Mauresmo, winner of two Grand Slams and Olympic silver medallist, were invited to play (very) informal doubles games. The celebrities, who, for those who might recognise the names included Yannick Noah, Guy Forget, Henri Leconte, Mansour Bahrami, Fabrice Santoro, Kad Merad, Michel Boujenah and Michèle Laroque, were a mixture of current and veteran tennis players and people who are famous for completely different things, such as music and acting. (Some were, impressively, famous for more than one of the above.) All of them were hooked up to microphones and their banter and tennis tricks combined to produce pure comedy gold for large parts of the evening. The players in the final were all "real" tennis stars, which meant that, in between the silliness, we actually got to see some impressive sport as well.

For someone with no experience of watching live tennis whatsoever, it was probably a good introduction. I might even go back to see the real thing sometime, especially if the tickets are free!

Too Much Information?

2011-02-06T23:07:00.002+01:00

I may have been complaining recently about absences of information in certain areas of French life but, credit where credit is due, my local mairie does seem to be doing its best to restore the imbalance created by the national lack of roadsigns.

I was pleased, when I first arrived in my new home town, to receive through the letter box a card informing me of useful telephone numbers. There are three different numbers for the emergency services in France, so having these, along with the number for the town hall, the post office, the emergency locksmith and the centre for lost dogs (would a dog know how to dial the ten-digit number even if it did happen to have a mobile phone?) was both welcome and useful. The fact that the mairie sends out new copies of these about once a fortnight does have me wondering if they have nothing better to spend my taxes on but hey, at least they're trying.

The latest delivery, however, is not just a small piece of cardboard, but an entire 24-page booklet. It's title, Document d'information communal sur les risques majeurs à Perfectville leaves the reader in no doubt as to its importance. This is serious stuff.

After a page outlining one's role as a citizen, as defined by Article 4 of the Law of the 13th August 2004 concerning the modernisation of civilian safety, the booklet explains what I must do should I hear the Signal national d'alerte. The alarm is tested on the first Wednesday of every month and sounds like an air-raid siren, but, I have learned, the real thing lasts 1 minute and 41 seconds instead of 1 minute only. If I hear it, I should seek shelter, listen to the radio, avoid using the telephone and trust the Education Nationale to look after my children rather than going to collect them from school.

Further reading informs me that the major risks in my area seem to relate to subsidence and the transport of dangerous goods. Despite the colourful diagram suggesting that collapsing and expanding soil is a common problem in this part of the Hexagon, the text itself explains that any serious damage to buildings or people is rare. Should I encounter an accident involving hazardous materials, I must remember not to smoke and avoid inhaling any any noxious substances.

So there we go. Sometimes France tells you nothing, but sometimes she provides far more information than you ever thought you needed to know. I shall go to sleep tonight a better citizen than I was when I woke up this morning. . . and try not to worry about which of these major risks is likely to present itself in the near future.

What's On TV

2011-02-02T18:31:00.003+01:00

Canal+ is showing a fabulous imported BBC series called MI-5 at the moment. It's shown on Tuesday night and highly recommended for anyone who likes spies, intrigue and high-quality television.

Also, I don't very often watch Arte (which also shows a lot of high-quality television but you have to be experiencing a high-quality state of intellectual motivation to watch it), but last night their "Theme" was Italian politics, with a programme detailing Berlusconi's rise to what appears to be invincible immunity and an attempt to explain why Italians still vote for him. It inspired me to post about the "dark heart of Italy" over on my Italian blog.

Finally, I discovered a while ago that if you decide to subscribe to Canal+, you can expect lots of mickey-taking from your friends about the first Saturday of every month. This is because the powers that be at the television channel have decided that, once a month, their viewers should have the right to watch a porn film, and that first Saturday night is when the ration for the month is screened. Luckily, other powers that be have decreed the first Sunday of the month free museum day, so you can compensate for your indulgences of the night before with some highbrow culture. France is funny :-)

What's Your (Department) Number?

2011-01-30T21:52:00.004+01:00

After a couple of glasses of wine last weekend, an English friend and I, suddenly and for no apparent reason, found ourselves filled with the urge to test our knowledge of French regions and départements. This knowledge seems to be something that all French people either learn by osmosis as they grow up or are forced to learn at school, but we did shockingly badly. I even got the number of a department I once lived in wrong. I have a theory that, as a foreigner, your chances of ever reaching native-level knowledge without some serious effort are minimal because, like multiplication tables, if you don't learn them by a critical age, you probably never will.

The regions are relatively easy. Names such as Bretagne (Brittany), Normandie, Alsace and Lorraine are familiar to anybody who knows anything about France and even the less well known ones are big enough and have obvious enough names that you can pick them up fairly quickly.

The départements are another story. They're much smaller than the regions, and there are 95 of them in metropolitan France, each with a name and corresponding number. Many of the names come from rivers and, as a result, are harder to remember because rivers are long and thin and flow from one place to another. The Centre region, for example, is divided into 6 departments: Eure-et-Loir, Loiret, Loir-et-Cher, Cher, Indre and Indre-et-Loire (and if anybody knows why there are two spellings for Loire, please post a comment!).

The numbers mostly correspond to the name of the department's position on an alphabetical list, so that Ain is number 01 (not to be confused with Aisne, which is number 02) and Yonne is 89. There are, however, some exceptions which provide interesting trivia for the true département geek. Corsica used to be one department, number 20, but was split in half and the 20 became 2A and 2B (not to be confused with 02 above), so there is no number 20. Likewise, departments 91 to 95, which lie around the outskirts of Paris, are newer and therefore not in order. The Yvelines was created at the same time but has number 78, which was the number of the old Seine-et-Oise that, along with some of the other new departments, it used to be part of.

So why is learning this fabulous list so important to the residents of France and how do they manage it? Well firstly, the department number forms the first two digits of each postcode, so unless you're like me and have lived in so many places that you're at risk of forgetting your current address, never mind the one you lived at 5 years ago, everybody knows their own and that of their nearest and dearest (or at least the people they write letters to).

Secondly, and far more interestingly, however, the number also appears on car registration plates. It used to be part of the registration number itself but on modern plates it's at one side. Its presence means that when somebody rudely cuts up a farmer driving his tractor along a road in Brittany, rather than merely jumping to the conclusion that such a person must be a Parisian, the Breton can have his suspicions confirmed by the 75 number plate. Likewise, when Parisians are held up by someone with a distant department number crawling round the périphérique, they can enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that they are superior to this rural cousin with no knowledge of the great metropolis.

Understanding Frenchman, who always likes to look on the bright side, claims that Parisian drivers are more tolerant of those with "foreign" numberplates than they are of fellow franciliens. Which kind of makes me wish I'd been able to take my car somewhere far, far away to be registered!

See What I'm Driving At

2011-01-23T21:45:00.002+01:00

Over the past two weekends, trips to visit friends on the other side of the Ile-de-France and in Franche-Comté have probably caused me to more than double my hours of driving experience in France. In the course of approximately twenty hours, I have experienced miles of traffic jams where you can’t even get the clutch up in first gear, rain stotting like hailstones off my windscreen, black ice, thick fog, hairpin bends, roads with no lines on them, the Boulevard Périphérique and the very best of il fallait le savoir driving rules. (And yes, when I brought the matter of the invisible speed limit signs up with Understanding Frenchman, that is exactly what he said: “You just know what to do. You learn it at the driving school.” Which explains why the French driving theory test includes hundreds and hundreds of potential questions and why it’s very common to fail it several times. And then, after all that effort and angst, everybody just ignores it anyway.)

Anyway, the aim of this post was not actually to have another rant about the French tendency to value theoretical knowledge above all else, even their own lives, but to report on the fact that, once you get out of the Région parisienne, driving in France can actually be very enjoyable. I really don’t mind having to figure out the speed limits by myself when I’m not worrying about the fact that some moron is trying to overtake approximately two centimetres from my right-hand wing mirror.

Franche-Comté was particularly beautiful. It’s the region next to the Swiss border where the Jura mountains are.The summit of the highest mountain, Mont d’Or is at 1463m, but because the whole area is on a high plateau, the landscape is more one of rolling hills than jagged peaks. From the summits, though (which in the case of Mond d’Or can be reached in an easy 5 minute stroll from the high car park!), there are stunning views over the Swiss border and south to Mont Blanc mountain range, as well as glimpses of Lake Geneva and Lake Neuchatel.

As well as being a mountain, Mont D’Or is also a cheese. Without a doubt the best way to eat it is local style: whole and melted in its own crust and container, with potatoes and local charcuterie to dip in, just like fondue but, because of the crust, even more delicious.

As you drive away from the mountains, the roads take you through pretty villages and past castle fortresses. At one point, we thought my faithful TomTom was leading us astray (especially when she told me to turn on to a bumpy road full of potholes with no markings other than a sign warning us that it was never cleared of snow) , but it turned out to be a beautiful drive, with the hairy hairpin bends more than compensated for by the spectacular views down from the plateau to the plains below. If you want to discover one of the more “hidden” regions of France, Franche-Comté is definitely recommended!

Il fallait le savoir

2011-01-05T10:25:00.006+01:00

On French T.V. for about 3 minutes in the evening there is a mini-programme called Fallait le savoir (You just had to know). In this programme, two children explain useful information to each other about things like recycling and global warming. It seems to me, though, that the attitude of "il fallait le savoir" applies to many other things in French life as well as environmental awareness.

When I first got my car back in the summer, I decided to do the responsible thing and spent several hours on the internet practising the Code de la Route (Highway Code). As well as (beginning to) get to grips with priorité à droite (the complicated rule by which cars joining a main road from a side street have priority... but only on some roads ... and not on dual carriageways ...unless it's the Paris Périphérique ... and so on) and speed limits in kilometres per hour, I learned a lot about road signs.

Six months down the line, I wonder why I bothered. Because it seems to me that a lot of the time, the information that you need to know isn't actually displayed. For example, if you're driving along a main road in the country at 90 km/h and you have to slow down to 50 km/h to pass through a village, don't expect there to be a sign on the other side of the village telling you that you are now out of the 50 zone and can drive at 90 again. You're just supposed to know.

Likewise with parking. Parking spaces where I live are incredibly expensive to rent, so I park my car in the street wherever I can find a parking place. Back before Christmas, I parked on a wide street with no yellow lines, along with several other cars. Coming back a week later, I scraped the snow off the windscreen to discover a parking ticket under the wiper. After scrutinising the ticket for several days, I was finally able to discover what I had done wrong. My town has alternate parking, where you park on one side of the street for half the month, then switch sides. The switch happens at 8am on the middle day. Which is fine, if inconvenient. Except that today, with the snow gone and time on my hands, I parked in the same street (on the other side) then walked the whole length of the road. A road sign does exist in France to say that alternate parking applies. It's in the Code de la Route. It was not displayed anywhere on that street. The authorities clearly did not feel it was their responsibility to tell me where I could and could not park. Il fallait le savoir.

On the upside, even at a rate of 11 euros a week, paying the parking fines is still cheaper than renting a space!

Happy New Year!

2011-01-04T22:04:00.003+01:00

Ok, so it's a little late, but we Scots take a while to get over a Hogmanay party.

After a quiet family Christmas, I came back to France in time for New Year. (No travel hitches this time, but I'm still working on my conspiracy theory about the fact that it wasn't reported in the media that the pre-Christmas Eurostar trains were cancelled not only because of speed restrictions on the line but because the snow was causing them to BREAK DOWN. Remind you of anything? Last year, perhaps?)

Although this is my fourth year living in France, it was my first Hogmanay here and I was delighted to find out that the French celebrate new year the same way as they celebrate everything else : by eating lots of delicious food. We went to a party at a friend's house and ate the following: champagne with foie gras and smoked salmon, seafood platters, roast lamb stuffed with mushrooms with a foie gras sauce, many delicious cheeses, pineapple, lychees and oranges and an ice-cream log for dessert. I would have expected to have been as stuffed as the roast lamb after all that but the fact that the meal began at 9pm and finished at 3 in the morning meant that I was actually just comfortably satisfied and still able to dance the new year in a fireworks exploded on the skyline outside every window of our friend's tenth floor flat.

On Saturday, another friend hosted an ice-skating party at the outdoor rink at the Hôtel de Ville. I used to be a competitive skater but the combination of years of lack of practice and scary teenagers practising their hockey manoeuvres on innocent members of the public meant that I had to restrict myself to going round in circles and avoiding the hockey players' victims as they sprawled across the ice. Nevertheless, it was fun to try again and the Hôtel de Ville makes a beautiful backdrop with its fairytale architecture and sparkly Christmas lights.

Then on Monday it was back to work. Believe it or not, more than 1% of 2011 is over already!

The Light at the End of the Channel Tunnel

2010-12-23T11:09:00.001+01:00

As the pessimist once said, “If you think you see light at the end of the tunnel, it's not. It's a train coming to run you over.” This would have been quite an accurate image, except that in South East England on Tuesday morning, the chances of a train travelling through a tunnel at a speed likely to run you over seemed minimal.

On my arrival in London, a mere 23 hours late, I dragged my suitcase from St Pancras to King's Cross only to discover that there were no trains whatsoever leaving for the North that day. I schlepped my luggage over to Euston, hoping to catch the cross country service only to discover that Virgin had decided that the thousands of passengers who were supposed to travel on the hourly East Coast service would not all fit on their trains and were telling people to go back to St Pancras, where a miracle would apparently happen and north-bound trains would appear.

(On the fifteen minute walk between the stations, my one consolation was looking at the Eurostar queue, which was several kilometres long and served by security guards to lead it across the roads and volunteers serving coffee (we Brits really do queue well), and being eternally grateful that I wasn't in it.)

At St Pancras, a member of staff told me that the proposed solution was to take a train to Sheffield and catch a connection to Scotland from there. This sounded like an idea more likely to have been suggested by an armchair railway enthusiast with too much time on his hands than an actual, practical solution, so, despite the temptation to run for the Sheffield train before the rest of the millions got there, I decided to try changing direction entirely and phoned my brother, who lives in the South West, instead. Luckily, he answered his phone and luckily I could stay with him that night, and luckily the only flaw in my journey from then on was an abandoned bagel which I had ordered but didn't have time to collect in Paddington before I dashed to grab a seat on a delayed and very crowded train.

Funnily enough, there is loads of snow in the South West but the trains, apart from being a little late, appeared to be running just fine. I'm off to build a snowman!

Random Acts of Kindness

2010-12-22T16:39:00.001+01:00

As well as the guardian angel lady who got me on the Eurostar this morning, in the midst of a winter of Parisian rudeness, a couple of other acts of kindness have touched me recently.

This morning at the metro station, a lady kept the gate open for me so that I could get my suitcase through. She stood holding it as I fumbled for my ticket, organised my multiple bags and pieces of clothing and shoved the suitcase under the turnstile.

And the other week, also in the metro, I was trying to change trains at Bastille and because the connecting passage was blocked for building work, came out of the exit by mistake. When I went to the information desk to ask the man to revalidate my ticket, he not only did so with a smile and without telling me how stupid I had been, he also gave me a free magnet wishing me a happy Christmas from the RATP. As public transport workers are normally the grumpiest in the world, this counts ten times over on the kindness scale.

Merry Christmas, everybody, from me as well as the RATP!

Eurostarry-Eyes

2010-12-22T16:37:00.001+01:00

November 2010

“Eurostar can't afford to make the same mistakes again,” I said confidently to numerous friends and acquaintances when they asked about my Christmas travel plans. Last year, I managed to catch an Easyjet flight home in the 4 hour window between Charles de Gaulle airport opening and Edinburgh airport closing and counted myself incredibly lucky, especially as two friends were on a train which got stuck in the Channel tunnel and had to be towed out, meaning that they arrived home in the Midlands (in a taxi paid for by Eurostar) in the wee small hours of the morning and about 13 hours later than expected. This year, we were sure that the train company would have resolved their problems and snow on the train tracks somehow seemed less of a problem than snow on an airport runway.

Mood: Far too confident

December 17th - 18th 2010

Snow was falling in the Ile-de-France. Horror stories began to come on of friends waiting days for flights and spending the night in the airport.

Mood: Ever so slightly smug

December 19th 2010

Eight Eurostar trains were cancelled as more snow fell overnight. Messages from Eurostar suggested rescheduling journeys if possible but the snow melted. I was becoming a little bit worried about making my 2 hour connection in London but I figured I'd catch another train.

Mood: Optimistic

December 20th 2010

10am: I set off for the Gare du Nord. A couple of trains had been cancelled that morning, and mine was also cancelled, but others were running. I would get there eventually, I was sure. Nice lady in a yellow jacket told me to go and join the queue to wait for a place on the next train.

Mood: Not too worried yet.

10.45 am:This isn't the end of the queue...nor is this... 3 loops around the concourse of the Gare du Nord and this might be it. But Eurostar trains hold hundreds, right?

Mood: It'll be fine.

3pm: I've been waiting in this queue for 4 hours now. I have begun eating my family's Christmas presents and am vaguely wondering where I could get a corkscrew to open the bottle of wine. Occasional announcements come over the tannoy but we can't hear them because we are about 5 miles from the Eurostar terminal. We can't see the departures board either. Some nice people behind offer to keep my place so that I can go and buy a sandwich. Not sure I can go to the toilet though – it's too far away. My phone battery is running out and I'll have missed every connection in London apart from the sleeper train. Hmm...

Mood: Resigned

4pm: Rumours start to spread that the only trains arriving in Paris are 4 hours late and broken down. The station is freezing and I can only feel my feel because of the biting pain in my toes.

Mood: Surprisingly upbeat, especially about the fact that I have a nice warm flat and friends to spend Christmas with in Paris.

5pm: Suddenly the queue starts to move. Is this it? Has the famous 6 o'clock train arrived? Nope, the queue is moving because there are no more trains and staff are telling people to go home.

Mood: Still upbeat about the flat and the friends but hoping I don't have to go through all this tomorrow. Also somewhat pissed off that despite the fact that northern Europe is supposedly in the grip of an Arctic winter, it's about 5 degrees in Paris, the slush is turning to grey water and it's raining. I wouldn't mind being held up in the snow if there actually was some.

December 21st

7.30 am: Phone call from Understanding Frenchman at the Gare du Nord. Eurostar trains are departing and the queue is not enormous. I jump out of bed, throw on yesterday's clothes, grab yesterday's suitcase and make a dash for the metro.

Mood: No time for moods, just move!

8.15 am: Arrive at the Gare du Nord. The queue doesn't look enormous...until I realise that instead of looping around the concourse, today it's stretching out along the platforms for TER Picardie. It does seem to be moving, though, so I stand in it.

Mood: resigned, again

8.20am: Chat to a friendly French couple to check I'm in the right queue. They chat to one of the SNCF staff, who they seem to know. I chat to her. When I tell her that I was supposed to travel yesterday and that I'm all by myself, she adds me to a little group of desperate but somehow privileged people who have buggies, crutches and other signs of needing extra help. She leads us through business class to avoid the howling mob and slips us into the queue for the train.

Mood: Ecstatic
Lesson Learned: Chatting gets you everywhere, especially in French in France.

9.48 am: I am on the train. The train is slipping through the frozen fields of northern France and the carriage is blissfully warm and quiet.

Mood: How lucky am I???

Christmas Lights in Paris

2010-12-08T21:57:00.001+01:00

Place Vendôme: Modern but Classy

Galeries Lafayettte: Eastern Splendour

Galeries Lafayette: Glamorous

Printemps: overly pink and not improved by the animated pink teddy bears who looked as though they were humping chairs in the windows

Brussels

2010-11-23T18:36:00.003+01:00

I have been to Belgium a total of three times in my life, and every single time, it’s rained.
Luckily, many of Belgium’s most pleasant activities involve staying inside and eating hot things. It’s no accident that “low season” in a Brussels hotel happens in August and not in January.

Brussels is only an hour and a half from Paris (on a very fast, very chic train!) and, having left after work one evening, I was quite surprised to find myself in a foreign country. I think this effect was increased by the fact that I spent the train journey reading the French “Le Routard” guidebook, the first few chapters of which are mostly about reassuring French people that the food is good in Belgium and reminding them that it’s not a good idea to try to imitate the Belgian accent if you’re actually French. Sound advice, I suspect.

On the first night, we went out for a delicious, meaty meal at “Le Pavé Bruxellois” near the main square. Afterwards (and for most of the weekend) we went for a walk and I amused myself by taking pictures of the endless circumstances in which you find copies of the Mannekin Pis statue. We even saw the real one. (There is also another, less well known statue of a little girl peeing but it was too rainy for us to be motivated to go and find it.)

Chocolate, tourists and the Mannekin Pis

Mannekin Pis Chain Gang

Chocolate Mannekin Pis

Mannekin Frites

The next day saw us darting between bars and chocolate shops, trying to keep our umbrellas intact in the howling wind. (Brussels for me was a real reminder of what it’s like to live in northern Europe. By comparison, Paris is for sissies.) We went to the Chocolate Museum which, like most chocolate-related things which don’t involve lying on the sofa under a blanket and eating lots of it, was a little bit disappointing but not a bad way to spend a rainy hour, and they did give a demonstration of how to make the outer shell for pralines by hand and hand out a small free sample at the end. Afterwards, in an attempt to be more cultured, we went to an exhibition at the tourist office called “Europe in Brussels, Brussels in Europe”, where we learned all sorts of things like the number of immigrants in the city and what the 12 stars on the EU flag mean. (Apparently the number 12 symbolises unity and it has nothing to do with the number of countries in the union as I previously thought.) It was very interactive and we enjoyed building Brussels out of soft, giant bricks and pressing numerous buttons to make things light up.

As well as sausages, beer, chocolate and waffles, Brussels is famous for its BDs or comic strips. So much so that there are murals like this on the ends of many buildings. Like the other items on the aforementioned list, they brightened up our grey day as we walked around.

Finally, chased by the cold and the rain, we arrived at the train station an hour early and went to ask at the information desk if my ticket was exchangable. The guy replied sarcastically, “Yes, for seventy two euros” (the price of a new ticket) but it was worth asking the question just to hear the Belgian “septante – deux” instead of “soixante-douze.” I went home happy.

Sometimes it's Hard Being French

2010-11-16T20:11:00.003+01:00

Reading one of the blogs I follow the other day, I came across the link to this article, published to mark the occasion of “Be Nice” Day, which was recently launched in France by Psychologies magazine. The article gives a whole range of statistics about how many French people admire kindness as a quality, how many don’t, and why so many of them find it hard to exhibit themselves in their day to day lives. (Reasons included lack of time, a fear of being used and the belief that people don’t respect you if you are nice.)

What I found particularly interesting, however, was the statement by a psychologist at the end that “the main obstacle (to kindness) is a lack of self-esteem”. It has long been a theory of mine that, while the French may appear rude and arrogant on the outside, many of them suffer from a huge lack of confidence on the inside, largely stemming from being part of a society that demands high standards in just about everything and never stops reminding you that you probably don’t live up to these standards.

Many mother tongue speakers in France do not believe that they speak French. What they mean is that to words which come out of their mouths are not the same as those which you read in a textbook or which are set down on paper by the Académie Française. (Listen to any French person reading aloud and you will understand the difference.) At school, it’s common for children to receive negative marks in tests, which are marked out of 20 but with one point being taken off for every mistake. If you’re French, you’re supposed to be slim, elegantly dressed, intelligent, highly educated in every subject, witty and capable of sophisticated conversation at all times. You’re supposed to achieve everything your job demands of you in a 35 hour week, serve delicious dinners accompanied by the perfect wine at weekends, enjoy several perfectly-organised holidays per year in all the right places and have a circle of friends who are able to sustain the same high standard of living to accompany you. If you fail, not only is your own life crap, but you’re letting down the whole of French society as well.

It’s no wonder that a large percentage of French people lack the self-belief to reach out to and empathise with those around them. The rest, of course, simply don’t have the time.

Winter Entertainment

2010-11-15T18:32:00.001+01:00

The clocks have gone back, the nights are drawing in and the beautiful autumn leaves have fallen from the trees and are quickly being turned into mushy compost on the pavement. And it keeps raining.

Finding things to do indoors suddenly seems like an extremely good idea.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve discovered two good live music venues to recommend for a rainy evening in Paris. At the end of October, I went to Le Sentier des Halles to see Bitter Ruin, a male/female duo whose music whose style, according to a review on the website, is “noir indie folk”. For “noir indie”, try substituting “gothed up” and you’ll have some idea of what the music was like: you could hear the folk basis but it was dramatic, emotional and great to see performed live. I also liked the venue a lot – it was intimate and friendly but still pretty cool.

The next weekend, I went to the Flèche d’Or, which is in a converted station in the 20^th, next to Père Lachaise cemetery. Entrance is 8 euros, which includes 4 euros towards a drink and performances by up to 4 live bands. It was a bigger venue than the Sentier des Halles and a bit empty when we went in, but it quickly filled up as the more popular bands came on. I personally didn’t like the music so much, but there was plenty of variety and it could definitely have been a place for a fun night out.

Most recently, I went to see Draquila at the cinema. I’ve posted more about it on my Italy blog, but if you have any interest in Italian politics (or corruption and scandal) it’s a must-see.

Not on Your Life?

2010-11-08T19:54:00.001+01:00

While walking around Paris, I have recently taken to eyeing up the adverts in the estate agents’ windows, not because I believe that I will ever be able to afford to buy property in Paris but more because I enjoy the combination of admiring extravagance from afar and feeling ever-so-slighly self-righteous about not having that kind of money to throw around myself. The other day, however, Understanding Frenchman saw that my eye had been caught by prices that appeared to have a few zeros missing off the end and explained to me that these properties were being sold en viager.

The English translation of viager is “life annuity,” an expression that I had only ever vaguely encountered in connection with a Monopoly board. In France, however, it is apparently quite common to buy a house in this way and I would love to know if it happens in other countries as well. The houses are generally being sold by older people and the buyer agrees to pay a set amount for the property, followed by a fixed sum of money for every year of the seller’s life until the person dies.

The older person gains an obvious benefit here in having a guaranteed income for the rest of their life, and many choose to sell their properties in this way precisely because they need that money. The advantage for the buyer is, of course, the possibility of getting a bargain if the seller dies earlier than expected. And apparently there are enough people out there who are willing to gamble on someone else’s life (or to have their own lives gambled on) in this way to make for a healthy market in this kind of sales. Hmm …

Why Sometimes the Fonctionnaires don't Function

2010-11-02T09:46:00.002+01:00

Finding myself with a whole lot more free time than predicted this weekend, I dipped into my copy of Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong, a fabulous book which attempts to explain to confused expats exactly "what makes the French so French." Unlike many of the titles aimed at an expat audience, it's a serious book which describes the workings of the French state in detail and actually offers credible explanations for why France is the way that it is.

Having just had a frustrating experience at my local tax office, I started with the section on fonctionnaires. The word fonctionnaires is often translated into English as "civil servants" but in France it encompasses a vast army of 6 million people, from teachers to firemen to the lady in my local tax office, who are employed by the state to carry out its functions.

There are 3 main categories of fonctionnaire: A, B and C. In theory, to be a C, you don't need a university degree, to be a B you might well and to be an A you probably need a post-graduate qualification. There is also category A+, who are the highest ranking civil servants. The book explains how, to get a job as a civil servant, you have to pass a gruelling concours (competitive exam) which tests "general culture", technical knowledge and aptitude for the position. Pass rates for these exams range from 1 to 12 percent. For those who pass, further training of up to two years is often required. In other words, getting to be a fonctionnaire is hard.

All of this was very interesting to read, but it didn't answer the question that every expat has at the front of their mind almost from the moment that they set foot on French soil: if these people are so carefully selected and highly trained, why on earth are they so inefficient and unhelpful? So I turned to Understanding Frenchman in search of the answer and this is what he said.

In France, everybody wants to be a civil servant. (Well, not quite everybody, but if 10 percent of the population actually are and the pass rate for the exam is only around ten percent, a lot of them do!) The main reason for this is job security. Fonctionnaires are guaranteed a job for life, get to retire early and are virtually impossible to sack. For many French people, these benefits far override the higher salaries that they could be earning in the private sector. As a result, far more people want civil service jobs than can actually be given them, and as a result of that, the people who end up with the bottom and middle jobs are overqualified to do them. They take them anyway, though, partly for the reasons mentioned above and partly because it's easier to get promotion within the civil service than to apply from the outside. Movement through the ranks depends on performance management grades, and even movement from one geographical location to another depends on a system of points gained partly through performance and partly through length of service. Crucially, though, "customer service" (I hesitate to use the expression because it's our taxes that pay their wages, but you know what I mean) is not one of the assessment criteria.

To put it crudely, when you go to your local tax office, the chances are that the person you are confronted with is bored with their job, has very little external motivation to help you and is just waiting (or potentially working very hard, but not at helping you) until they have enough points to move on to a job that actually suits their interests and capabilities. Obviously, this is not the case for everyone, and there are probably plenty of devoted fonctionnaires out there who do care about their jobs and about serving their country, but the chances are that they're not the ones that you meet in your daily life.

And why is it that the private sector can't offer salaries and benefits to rival those provided to employees of the state? It's because in France it's both difficult and expensive to employ people in the private sector, mainly because of the high charges that private companies have to pay to the government ... to pay for the fonctionnaires!

F1: Sleeping in the Fast Lane

2010-11-01T11:22:00.003+01:00

I recently had the experience, for the first time in my existance, of spending the night in an F1 hotel. Although F1 have hotels on 4 continents, the vast majority are in France and, as most of the long distance travelling I've done in France has been by train, I had never had the pleasure of staying in one until now.

For anyone else who's never been to one, F1 hotels are the hospitality industry equivalent of Ryanair. Ours was located at the back end of an industrial estate and just a stone's throw from the motorway. For 29 euros a night, you get a room that can sleep three people, a towel that might just be big enough to dry the entirety of an adult human as long as they were under 5 feet tall and even a sticker across the opening of your bedroom door to prove that it hasn't been used by someone else prior to your arrival. A polite notice in the bathroom requests that you flush the toilet when you've finished using it. Some F1 hotels are completely unstaffed in the evenings; you just check in using your internet reservation number and credit card. (Maybe Ryanair could take idea this on board and be the first company to offer pilotless aeroplane flights.) Ours, however, had a very friendly receptionist who seemed genuinely pleased to see us and point us down the corridor in the direction of our tobacco-scented non-smoking rooms.

In fact, most of the 6 hours or so that we spent in the hotel were perfectly acceptable and some aspects were even pleasant. But something about the fluorescent lighting, the bare walls and that invitation to flush the toilet meant that even after only 5 hours' sleep, we were happy to get out of there as fast as possible.

Not Ranting

2010-10-29T15:08:00.002+02:00

I went out in the car the other day in search of petrol. Out of the four service stations I found, three were already closed and one closed the pumps in front of me as I was waiting in the queue. The motorways seem to be relatively well provided with petrol but, in the car-dependent suburbs, a tankful of 95 really does seem to be like gold dust.

My friends from Italy were supposed to be coming to visit this weekend. They turned up at the station to find that their train had been cancelled due to the SNCF strike. In theory, they could have exchanged their tickets, but all the later trains were full. My friends from Italy are no longer coming to visit this weekend.

Not ranting. Just saying.

Seasonal Confusion

2010-10-29T14:39:00.003+02:00

Last weekend, some friends and I managed to defy the petrol crisis and make it all the way to the mountains without having to get out and push the car once. We also managed to get back again safely, but I would have been completely happy to stay. Forever.

There were lots of reasons why I loved Haute Savoie, many of them relating to melted cheese and mulled wine, but the best bit of the trip was the incredible change in the weather that we witnessed literally overnight. Saturday was a gorgeous autumn day, with rays of low October sunshine streaming through the clouds. Sunday was a vin chaud day, as it rained from the moment we got up in the morning until after dark, but on Monday we headed out into the blustery wind to discover that the rain had fallen as snow higher up in the mountains and, on closer inspection (a.k.a. driving further up the hill) what looked like a delicate dusting of icing sugar turned out to be a veritable winter wonderland, with a good 15cm of snow and lots of opportunities for throwing it at each other. Walking amongst pine trees with branches laden down with white powder, our feet crunching gently underneath us, it was hard to believe it was only October, so we indulged in some early singing of Christmas carols.

It looks as though my next trip away from the city might have to be a skiing holiday :-)

Sarko, the Footie and Losing my Democratic Rights

2010-10-20T22:48:00.004+02:00

Last night's post, I realise, was something of an opinionated rant. Now, I love writing polemic. I also quite enjoy expounding in a polemical fashion in speech, at least until I see that look in my listeners' eyes that says "I really don't agree with what this crazy person is saying and ... just get me out of here now." But up until that point, I really quite enjoy it. I do find, though, that after publishing a piece like that (or scaring away an audience of poor souls who just wanted to make polite conversation), I suddenly feel a desperate need to be reasonable and open-minded again. So here, from the angel on my other shoulder, are a couple of reasons why the situation in France at the moment is not as bad as it might be.

One is that, in recent years, the government has succeeded in introducing a "minimum service" during strike times. This means, for example, that a certain number of trains have to run and that when the teachers strike, the mairie sends in people to look after the kids. (Little devil voice says that this may make people less likely to object to the striking and therefore let it carry on longer, but I'm ignoring it because I'm trying to be positive.)

The second is that, while the violence and the vandalism related to the lycée strikes is shocking, to be fair to the majority of the students, the demonstrations were supposed to be peaceful. Today's news reports are now suggesting that ordinary demonstrations were infiltrated by kids who just wanted to cause trouble, a bit like the way football hooligans cause trouble at football matches. So the country's youth may be deluded/brainwashed/looking for an excuse to skive off school, but at least they aren't all hooligans.

What has depressed me about the whole situation, however, is the fact that I have absolutely no power to change it. I live in this country, have a permanent contract to work in this country, pay taxes in this country and at the same time do not have the right to vote (except in local and European elections). By leaving Scotland, I've already lost the right to vote in Scottish Parliament elections because they are regarded as local government even although the Scottish Parliament has the power to make decisions about most of the issues that I have strong opinions about. Ironically, if there is a referendum on Scottish independence, I won't have the right to vote in it, while some random French person living in Scotland would. I do still have the right to vote in UK national elections, but even that disappears after a certain number of years. It's not something I've ever seriously worried about before, but somehow all these photos of burning cars are making me change my mind ...

I Didn't Want to Write About the Strike but ...

2010-10-19T18:07:00.001+02:00

...

when teenagers in a town a few kilometres down the road are tear-gassed by the police after throwing bricks at the windows of their schools and Molotov cocktails at cars, it becomes hard to ignore.

I didn’t want to write about the strikes because they happen so often in France that it becomes the kind of expat moan that’s on a par with complaining about the dog dirt on the street – so well known it’s a cliché and hey, if you don’t like it, don’t choose to live here, right?

But as the effects of the current strike encroach ever-further on my back yard (and as people at home keep asking me about it!), I’ve been motivated to do a little bit of research (aka ask some friends) about what it’s really about. This is what I’ve found out so far:

The main feature of the reforms is that the minimum retirement age in France will be raised from 60 to 62. To claim a full pension at that age, however, you have to start working at the minimum school leaving age, so it’s argued that for many people, the age is effectively being raised from 65 to 67.

The people who go on to further education therefore feel that they are being penalised.

The people who started work at 16 are complaining that they already work more years than anybody else and are now being told to work even longer.

These people are also cross because pensions in France are final salary-linked and, as they tend to be in lower paid jobs, as well as contributing for more years, they also get a smaller pension.

The people who get promoted to superior positions with higher salaries are cross because “final salary” used to mean the average of the final ten years but this is being extended to the last twenty years.

None of this, as you may have noticed, is actually caused by the raising of the retirement age. All of these “injustices” were present in the system already.

For comparison, in the UK, the pension age used to be 60 for women and 65 for men. It’s now being raised to 65, and potentially 66 for everybody. Previously, you had to work from the age of 21 to retirement age to get a full pension. Now you have to pay contributions for thirty years to get the basic amount, which is a sum and not a percentage, and if you pay for more years than this, you get an additional pension. (A clever way of presenting the facts that perhaps the French could learn from.) To my knowledge, no Molotov cocktails were thrown and no cars burned when these changes were introduced.

Now, I can understand why if I were approaching retirement age, had just learned that I would have to work for an extra two years and was extremely selfish, I might feel like striking against the French government’s reforms. Admittedly in a country with the best healthcare and one of the longest life expectancies in the world, these baby-boomers are quite clearly throwing the toys out of their luxury pram, but they got their thrills in ’68 and have apparently never experienced anything quite so memorable since, so at least their actions kind of make sense.

What I really don’t understand, though, is the school pupils who are destroying the fabric of society that is there to support them in the name of opposing reforms which, if successfully blocked, will allow the toy-throwers an endless life of ease, while the young pay ever-higher contributions in ever-lower paid jobs to support them. The fact that this is in any way seen as reasonable behaviour is a sign of a society that has become so blinded by its destructive way of operating that it doesn’t realise that, by opposing its government and vandalising its infrastructure, is actually destroying itself.

Anyway, having got that out of my system, I think I’ll go off and appreciate an evening of cuisine, conversation and culture in a country that is otherwise a very nice place to live in!

Burgundy at my Feet

2010-10-13T13:19:00.003+02:00

Much as I love Paris in many ways, I'm not really a big-city girl. Deep down inside of me is a little girl who grew up in a country where the entire population is a lot lower than that of the world's great metropolises, in a capital city where fields, hills and beaches are never more than a short bus ride away. Part of surviving Paris, for me, is therefore finding as many opportunities and places to escape to as possible, and I was delighted to discover the other weekend that Burgundy fits the bill perfectly. We went to the town of Vézelay, two hours' drive from Paris, to walk in the countryside, taste the wine and visit the beautiful medieval buildings.

I had only ever seen the region from the motorway before, so I was surprised to find out that the seeminly endless landscape contains deep river valleys, lush greenery and interesting towns nestled among the rolling hills. The town of Vézelay itself is dominated by its basilica, perched on a high cliff overlooking the surrounding countryside. The backbone of the town stretches down the hill behind, with old, old buildings and as much French tradition as you could expect to find in one place.

In the afternoon, we went for a walk along the river, following the GR which leads to Avallon. We had also booked a wine tasting and were much amused by the fact that when the wines were described as made “in the traditional way” this actually meant that they were full of chemicals, unlike the organic versions which were also being sold. I wasn’t hugely impressed by any of them, so I just bought one bottle, of Melon, a rare variety of wine that is only produced in that region and also got a couple of pots of local honey.

As with most holidays in France, the food was definitely a highlight of the trip. Burgundy is the home of escargots and boeuf bourgignon, as well as producing some of the country's best wines (with or without chemical help!). The restaurant where we ate on Saturday night was called L’Auberge de la Coquille. It was situated right in the heart of the old town and the food was wonderful. For 19 euros, we had a four course meal that included: snails in garlic butter with parsley, meat in Bourgignon sauce for main course, a generous slice of gloriously runny cheese and a delicious sorbet with cassis to finish, all washed down with Irancy wine.

We were also amazed by just how friendly everybody we met in Bourgogne was. People went out of their way to offer us directions, point us on our way and generally check that we were ok. The waiters at the restaurant were not only polite but friendly and didn't seem to mind that we arrived an hour later than expected and ended up staying very late to appreciate their delicious food.

l arrived back in Paris very late on Sunday night desperate to get out and do it all again, so it's definitely good to know that, when I need to escape Paris next time, Burgundy is just down the road!

Vallée de la Chevreuse

2010-09-30T19:25:00.003+02:00

On Sunday, I took the plunge and, following garage number 2's advice, took my car out for a long drive. Driving for more than half an hour meant going out of my comfort zone, away from the routes I know well enough to predict which lane to be in and even, for the first time, on to the motorway. Actually, it wasn't the first time. I drove on the motorway once before when the lane I was driving in suddenly turned into a slip road, but was able to get off it at the next exit before panic set in. But this was the first time I had intentionally driven on the motorway, so I armed myself with my trusty TomTom and a trusted friend and on the whole, it went pretty well. We did get a bit lost once and the TomTom did try to send us in the wrong direction at one point (one thing I've learned about these things is that when the voice and the picture contradict each other, you should always trust the picture), but my passenger's comment at the end was, "It wasn't as bad as I expected," so I count that as a success.

We visited the town of Chevreuse, not far from Versailles. The Vallée de la Chevreuse was gorgeous, with the streaks of sunlight streaming through the autumn leaves, and Chevreuse itself is very pretty. We walked past the lavoirs (old wash houses) and climbed the hill to the château, where there was a Breton fête going on to raise money for charity, then had lunch in an old-fashioned crêperie before getting back in the car to brave the journey home. I definitely still find driving stressful, but at least on days like this, the stress is balanced out by a relaxing afternoon somewhere beautiful!

The Boy Does Nothing

2010-09-27T19:29:00.004+02:00

Looking at my visitor statistics for this blog, I have just learned the disconcerting fact that the vast majority of the people who stumble across my blog by way of Google had entered the search terms "looking for a marriage of convenience." I can't imagine that my blog comes very high on the list of results, but 30 persistent souls then clicked on the link to this post.

Judging by the fact that none of them has pursued their search any further by attempting to contact me, I can only assume that none of them were big fans of doing the housework. Ah well ...

Two Conversations

2010-09-24T19:00:00.000+02:00

Mechanic at the garage of a French car manufacturer where the showroom is shiny, the mechanics are smooth and the famous daughter of the house is named Nicole:

“You car is very sick madam. We will need to replace the four very expensive parts. With the revisions recommended by the manufacturer (who happens to actually be our company) it will cost you 1500 euros to make it roadworthy. There is also a 100 euro charge for us telling you this.”

Mechanic at the independent garage around the corner from my house:

“There is nothing wrong with your car. All you need to do is drive it more. No, there is nothing to pay for the consultation. Here are your keys and have a nice day.”

Watch this space for some road-tripping stories!

In the meantime, I’m off to check the small print of my breakdown insurance …

On Being Accidentally Funny

2010-09-15T22:54:00.001+02:00

Just as I hit "publish" on my previous post, it occurred to me that, under the circumstances, the title is even more apt than I had intended :-)

Confessions of a Walking Disaster

2010-09-15T22:47:00.003+02:00

It was one of those days. In fact, it was two of those days. On Tuesday morning, I got up early because I had to drop my car off at the garage before going to work. The other weekend when I took my dear little Clio out for a drive, she was struggling to accelerate even when going downhill, so I had decided it was time for a visit to the car doctor.

When I got in the car, the key wouldn't turn in the ignition. The manual told me that it must be a problem with the battery, so I opened the bonnet, poked around with the battery, realised it was highly unlikely that I was going to solve the problem, closed the boot, tried the ignition again and then gave up and did what every self-respecting adult does in a mechanical emergency and called my dad. He didn't answer the phone, so I walked to the garage to cancel the appointment, was very relieved when they didn't laugh in my face and told me to call the breakdown assistance number from my insurance company and walked up the road just in time for work.

My day at work involved two malfunctioning computers, editing photocopies in which I discovered mistakes after I had walked about a million miles to the only functioning photocopier in the building and produced forty pages of the wrong thing and cleaning up some sick which an unfortunate child decided to deposit on the floor.

The day did get better after that, I must admit, and ended with a very agreeable evening in front of the TV watching Desperate Housewives and collecting advice from my Facebook friends on how to jump start a car. It would appear that I'm some kind of techie groupie because I got thirteen replies in the space of a few hours, mostly from people with engineering degrees but one from an archaeologist. To the archaeologist, I'm impressed with your all-round general knowledge and life skills!

Unfortunately, none of my expert friends was available in the immediate vicinity with a car and a set of jump leads, so this morning I decided to follow the garage's advice and phone the insurance company. This turned out to be much less stressful than I thought, although I did question my understanding of the French language for a minute when the woman on the other end of the phoneline asked me if I knew how to read text messages. Um, yes. The breakdown guy turned up right on time, got in the car, and turned the key in the ignition. The engine started immediately. He clearly thought I was a bit nuts but he was sweet and he said he liked my accent so I forgave him for clearly not believing that twenty minutes before, as well as every other time I had tried, the ignition had been completely blocked.

I drove the car to the garage, where they kindly agreed to look at it that day and offered to undertake some "revisions" of dubious necessity that were going to cost rather a lot of money. Having lost all faith in my ability to make technical judgements, I agreed to most of them and left.

I spent most of the afternoon on tenterhooks and didn't really feel any better when I got a phone call from the garage telling me that the total cost of the repairs to my car would be in the region of 1500 euros. Somewhat gobsmacked by this, I didn't really follow what the mechanic said next and had to phone them back two minutes later to check that they weren't going ahead with the costly revisions that I had agreed to that morning on a car that might be fit only for the scrap heap.

I collected the car from the garage at the end of the afternoon along with three pages detailing what needs to be done and why it's going to cost me 1500 euros. I had to take it home and translate it to find out that the major problem is with the throttle body and its attendant parts.

This is a dilemma, oh readers. Acquiring the car (from a friend) has so far cost me approximately 500 euros, which I could probably get back if I sold it as scrap. Buying a car of the same age and mileage would cost me at least 3000 euros (second hand cars are expensive here), so if I pay for the repairs and everything is OK, I'm still on to a good thing, especially as one of these 3000 euro cars could end up having all the problems that my current one has and cost just as much to repair. At the same time, it seems like an awful lot of money to spend on a car that in the UK would only be worth about 1800 pounds and which might just develop another problem as soon as I get this one fixed.

So, advice in the comments box please, readers. And if you haven't got any advice, just write and tell me that I am not a total walking disaster. If enough people say it, I might start to believe it even if it isn't true!

Musée du Quai Branly

2010-09-12T22:05:00.002+02:00

Last Sunday was free museum day and my friends and I decided that it was a good opportunity to visit the Musée du Quai Branly, which is just along the Left Bank going up the river from the Eiffel Tower. We got a little bit distracted on the way by the fact that, despite the interdiction signs all around it, the Trocadero fountains were full of people paddling and even swimming and we took the opportunity to dip our feet in before continuing over the river to the museum.

The building is easily recognisable because its walls have plants growing out of them all the way up. You go in the entrance and walk along a winding path through the garden to the door of the building itself. In fact, winding is a good way to describe most of the building. The exhibits are on the first floor and you go up a meandering walkway on which words from many different languages are projected to make the shapes of a flowing river on the floor. The actual surface of the exhibition area is not all that big but they fit a lot of stuff in without making it feel crowded through innovative use of the space.

The objects themselves come from all the continents of the world apart from Antarctica and Europe and are the kind of thing you would expect to see in a museum of ethnography or anthropology - artefacts like tribal masks, totem poles and articles of clothing. They are presented, however, very much as works of art, with the explanations kept to a minimum. I really liked this, because I hate going to museums where you spend all your time reading the information and none of it actually looking at the exhibits.

My favourite section was definitely Oceania because the artwork was sort of primitive looking but very expressive at the same time. I wished I had lump of clay or some wood to carve so that I could make something similar myself. There is a special exhibition on at the moment about the River Congo but we didn't go to that, partly because the queue was enormous and partly because we felt we'd already seen enough. That's the great thing about free Sunday - you haven't paid a fortune to get in so you can look at exactly what you want and leave without feeling guilty!

If you don't laugh ...

2010-09-12T21:27:00.004+02:00

I was talking to a French friend today about the town where I went to university and the fact that, because the nights are so short in the north of Scotland, we used to always get woken up by noisy birds in the small hours of the morning. What I wanted to say was, "A Aberdeen il y a beaucoup de mouettes qui crient très fort à trois heures du matin." ("In Aberdeen there are lots of seagulls who scream really loudly at 3 o'clock in the morning.")

What I actually said was, "A Aberdeen, il y a beaucoup de muettes qui crient très fort à trois heures du matin." English translation: "In Aberdeen, there are lots of dumb girls* who scream really loudly at 3 o'clock in the morning."

The puzzled expression on my friend's face was confirmation enough that, once again, I had been caught out by these darn French vowel sounds. Sometimes I'm so ridiculous I even crack myself up.

*Dumb in the sense of being unable to speak. If it had been the other meaning, it would actually have been true.

Mountains!

2010-08-16T11:22:00.003+02:00

Hello blog, it’s been a while! But that’s ok, because I’m just back in Paris after spending a whole month in my favourite part of the world – the wonderful area in the south east of France and the north of Italy where there is sun, mountains, lakes, delicious food and lots of amazing things to do - and I have lots of adventures to tell you about.

The first week, I went with a group of friends to the Alps. We stayed in a friend’s holiday home in a tiny hamlet on a perilously twisty road that in winter is only accessible on cross country skis. The area is a rock-climber’s paradise, so inevitably even the “easy” walking was also somewhat vertical. Despite our aching muscles, we had a fabulous time and managed to fit in lots of great eating (tarte aux myrtilles, crêpes, home-made cake, enormous group dinners and a barbecue), drinking (especially génépy, a local delicacy that’s similar to Italian grappa), lake-swimming and view-admiring (photography stops are a great excuse for a breather!) as well as the strenuous exercise.

Then it was back to Paris to do laundry and pack my bags for Italy – posts about that will be appearing on my other blog soon!

Tour de France

2010-07-25T20:22:00.001+02:00

I saw the almost-end of the Tour de France by accident today. I was on my way to the bookshop on the Rue de Rivoli when it gradually dawned on me that the hoards of people and the fact that the road was closed off were not merely symptoms of Paris in the summer but a sign that the world's most famous cycle race was about to speed past my very eyes. People were already gathering at one o'clock but I got my shopping done and managed to find a space standing on a bollard from where I could just about see over everybody else's heads just after four. At around half past four, a great cheer rose up from the crowds and the first group of cyclists went past. They were so fast it was literally a blur. Under normal circumstances, these guys would be way over the speed limit. They were followed by a whole load of cars with bits of bikes spinning away on the roofs, then the next group arrived. I only meant to stay to watch the first group but there was something captivating about the speed and the effort and the concentration of the cyclists. And the fact that these guys have been doing this for three whole weeks. Amazing.

Bridging the Gap

2010-07-25T20:02:00.002+02:00

In France, when a public holiday falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday, people often take the Monday or the Friday off work to allow them to have a 4 day weekend. This is called a pont (bridge). I only learned this year, however, that when the holiday falls on a Wednesday and the weekend is extended even further by taking two days off, the metaphor is also extended (literally and metaphorically!) and the extra days become a viaduc.

Celebrating le 14 juillet

2010-07-15T21:52:00.002+02:00

The 14th of July is France’s Fête Nationale. In English, it’s often called Bastille Day but the French don’t really use that name. Because they like to refer to actual dates (they even use historically significant ones as street names, perhaps as a way to back up the French school system, where the teaching of good hard facts is still at the heart of the curriculum), they often just call it le 14 juillet too.

Anyway, the great thing about le 14 juillet is that you can actually start celebrating it on the 13th, so it’s basically a 2 day party. And if you are lucky enough to live in Paris, you get to party with the firemen. Tradition has it that , on the evening of the 13th and sometimes the 14th too, the Parisian fire stations are opened up to the public for the Bals des Pompiers (which translates rather nicely into English as Firemen’s Balls ;-) ) I went with a group of friends to the one in the 18ième (Montmartre). We started off at the Ristorante Pulcinella for some delicious pasta and Barbera d’Alba. Living in France has clearly brainwashed me, because I had forgotten just how good Italian food and wine can be and I’m now even more excited about heading back to Italy in August. Then we went down to the fire station, where we were lucky not to have to queue for long to get in and were greeted by lots of lovely firemen looking muscular and heroic and collecting donations from everybody as they went in. To be honest though, after that, we might have been just about anywhere, as most of the firemen were either serving drinks or standing around watching the crowds of ordinary people as we danced. There was a rumour that there would be a strip-tease later, but we didn’t stay long enough to see it. The parties go on until 4am and there was a massive queue when we left about midnight, so I’d be prepared to believe that things would have heated up later on, but we got kind of bored of shuffling around to 80’s music and the last train home was calling. It was fun while we lasted, though, and I’d definitely go again, especially as different fire stations have different kinds of parties, with different music and so on.

Inside the Fire Station

Big Red Shiny Fire Engine

On the 14th itself, I was supposed to be going to a picnic, followed by watching the fireworks at 11pm, but the picnic had to be called off because of the massive thunderstorms that raged all morning and most of the afternoon, so we ended up in a bar instead. It cleared up in time for the fireworks, though, which we watched from the Pont Alexandre III and which were spectacular. I was surprised, however, by how quiet it was. Despite the massive crowds, everyone was just standing around talking quietly, and when it was all over, most people seemed to just head home. I guess that’s (one side of) France for you though – quiet and restrained even at a national party.

Driving on the Right Side of the Road

2010-07-14T12:27:00.002+02:00

As lots of you already know, I got my first car a couple of weeks ago. Yep, first EVER car and, as with so many other things in life, I ended up making it even more complicated/scary/exciting by doing it in France. (It also happened through a kind of exchange involving 3 people, two cars and three countries, with none of the car owners actually living in the country where the car was registered, but with a bit of effort on everyone's parts, that ended up working out just fine, so thank you to those involved!) Anyway, the car has now arrived and, after 4 trips to the garage and 6 hours at the prefecture, is now officially mine.

I passed my driving test a couple of years ago in the UK. After that, I drove my mum's car a few times on quiet country roads, moved to Italy, where even being in the passenger seat is terrifying, and then came to France, so I was a little bit apprehensive about actually gettting in my little Clio and driving, especially on the wrong side of the road while sitting on the wrong side of the car. In fact though, I think that my lack of driving experience has actually been a benefit here: I'm used to having to think about where things are rather than doing it automatically, so it's fine. I thought it might be weird that, while you move the gear stick with the other hand, the gears are actually in the same position, so you pull the stick towards you to get first, but actually that seems to make sense when you actually do it. The other thing I like about the gears is that reverse is to the left of first gear and to get it, you have to go into neutral and pull up a button on the gear stick, so you definitely know when your car is about to go backwards. As someone who has always had an irrational fear of going for fifth and somehow finding myself heading backwards down the motorway ( I know this could never happen, but it doesn't stop me being scared of it), I really appreciate that button. If anybody ever drives a Renault in France, this may turn out to be useful information, as my friends recently bought a Twingo and it took them a while in a multistorey carpark to work out how to find reverse.

I have had a couple of scary split seconds coming out of junctions and aiming for the left hand side of the road, but only on quiet streets with nobody around, which I think is where this is more likely to be a problem, because there are no signs or other traffic to remind you. I hope so at least ... The hardest thing for me has actually been adapting to speeds in kilometres per hour. In town, the norm is 45 but sometimes it's 30 and I always forget that actually 30 km/h is really, really slow. It also makes it harder to know what gear to be in, as the rules I learned from my instructor don't work, and although obviously you're supposed to listen to the engine, I do use the rules to predict what I'm going to want to do next.

So far, my driving has been limited to very early morning practice drives, a couple of trips to work, some visits to the garage and an embarrassing moment with an old man helping me to reverse into a space in the underground carpark at Carrefour with lots of people looking on, but in fact I don't really need the car for short local journeys. What I'm really excited about is being able to go on trips out into the countryside, to the beach and to the mountains. Just a bit more practice and a lot more confidence needed before then...

Picnicking in Paris

2010-07-08T11:52:00.004+02:00

I know that before I lived in Paris I ate picnics. In fact, I have picknicked in places as diverse as the Circus Maximus in Rome to the sound of Live Otto with firemen spraying water us to cool us down and the top of a Scottish mountain in January, where your biggest worry is whether the water has frozen in your bottle and how to get enough calories down your throat before your fingers freeze off. But I don't think I ever picnicked as I have been doing in Paris ever since the sun began to contemplate coming out a couple of months ago. Before, having a picnic was a way to eat a meal without having to go home or pay extortionate prices in a restaurant. In my Parisian life, a picnic is an event, or possibly an activity, a bit like the way that in the UK going to the pub is a hobby rather than something you do because you want to buy a drink.

Here's the lowdown on the places I've discovered so far:

The Pont des Arts, the pedestrian bridge over the Seine opposite the Académie Française is popular but relaxed. You can sit on the wooden boards watching the sunset over the river and wave at the people on the cruise boats down below. (We had a very international picnic here, followed dancing the tarantella at Place d'Italie and eating proper Italian ice cream. The Italian festival has finished now but I definitely recommend it for next year!)

The Ile de la Cité: the western quai of the island seems to be popular and looks very beautiful but one of my friends claims she saw a rat there once, so the Pont des Arts is probably safer!

The Bois de Vincennes turned out to be a less good place for a hike than my walking guidebook would have had me believe, but the Allée Royale has a stunning view of the castle and would be great for a big group picnic with lots of games.

The Terrasse de Saint-Germain-en-Laye also has amazing views, this time of the river Seine and the skyscrapers at La Défense. For variety, hiking, cycling and shade, there is also the enormous forest just behind.

The Champ de Mars is also supposed to be a cool place of an evening but I haven't been yet so I'll let you know!

L'Illusioniste

2010-06-24T20:07:00.001+02:00

Jacques Tati has a very special place in my heart. When I was little, my mum took me to see Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh, and it is my first ever memory of laughing so hard that I actually cried.

Tati is a French film director who was born in 1907 and died in 1982. His father was Franco – Russian and his mother was Dutch – Italian. His film Jour de Fête was one of the first full length colour films ever made, although it initially came out in black and white because of costs. (Thank you, Wikipedia). Thanks to the Edinburgh Filmhouse, I’ve seen most of his major films and Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot is definitely the funniest, being almost pure slapstick, while the others are more gentle comedies.

L’Illusioniste is based on an screenplay of Tati’s that was left unfinished when he died. The film has been turned into an animation by Sylvain Chomet, the director of Les Triplets de Belleville (Belleville Rendez-Vous in English), and while the slapstick comedy is less funny than it would be if it had been acted by the man himself, the animation is very faithful to Tati’s style. I was particularly delighted to find out that most of the film takes place in Scotland and takes the mickey out of Teuchters and Edinburghers alike (so it will no doubt be a resounding success at the Filmhouse…) Without giving away too much, I can say that it is funny, nostalgic and sad and everybody should go and see it, because films this good don’t come out very often. Enjoy!

Music At My Feet

2010-06-23T19:19:00.004+02:00

June is an amazing month in France. In theory at least, the sun comes out and suddenly every mairie and association is organizing outdoor events, generally for free, all over the place.

Parc Floral

Last weekend, my friend was visiting Paris and she and her friends invited me to a jazz concert at the Parc Floral in the Bois de Vincennes. Vincennes is one of these little Parisian suburban towns with a park and a château and dinky little versions of expensive Parisian shops on its high street. The castle is impressive in its vastness and appeared to be a prime spot for wedding pictures, as it was dotted with posing couples and small girls in big dresses.

You have to pay to get into the Parc Floral but the concert was free. It was a little bit cold and wet for an outdoor concert, so we kept having to move between the seats that were well and truly under the cover of the bandstand and the ones on the outside that occasionally caught a glimpse of sunshine between the thundery showers. The jazz was good, though.

On Sunday, I met up with the same friend and her friend, this time for a Chopin concert in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Unfortunately, I wasn’t listening to the instructions properly and spent the first half in the Tuileries instead, but, this being a French concert, all I really missed was the pompous speeches at the beginning. 2010 is the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth and there is a whole series of these concerts in the gardens to celebrate.

Sunset in Paris

Finally, on Monday night, it was the famous Fête de la Musique, always held on the first day of summer, where as well as organized events, musicians of all kinds descend on to the streets to perform for anybody who wants to listen and many people who don’t. I went to see the wonderful Kila (trad music gone modern) at the Irish Cultural Institute, then wandered the streets with my friends for a while listening to bands of varying quality performing covers of old rock songs of varying quality. I decided to be good and headed back to suburbia for an early night, only to discover that the streets of my hometown had been taken over by lycée bands and their adolescent groupies and that several of them were trying to perform hard rock on a far to efficient sound system outside my bedroom window. The moral of the story? Never come home from Paris early, as at least the culture there is genuine and the participants have left high school.

Aperitivo Italiano a Parigi

2010-06-19T23:59:00.002+02:00

On Friday night, my Italian friends and I went for aperitivo Italian style at Miroglio Caffè on the rue St Martin. The prices were steeper than even the priciest bar I ever went to in Milan, and the plates were smaller, but the drinks, the buffet and the staff were all authentic enough. If, like me, you ever feel the need for a bit of Italian culture and a spritz Aperol in between visits to the boot, this could be a good way to satisfy it.

Do You Hear the People Sing?

2010-06-13T11:52:00.001+02:00

A long time ago, when I was a very young girl (well, not that young, and probably old enough to know better), I thought musicals were great. All of them. While other girls my age were lusting over Take That, me and some of my friends (who shall remain nameless to protect their pride) were singing along to Michael Ball and knew all the harmonies in The Sound of Music.

I have grown wiser since then. I've realised that Michael Ball is cheesy, that the lyrics of Miss Saigon don't scan and that making millions by turning the story of Jesus Christ into a piece of light entertainment is inappropriate to say the least. But I haven't abandoned my love of musicals completely. I'm just more selective about what I like.

One of the musicals that I not only still like but also appreciate as a work of art is Les Misérables, so when my friend and I saw that it was coming to the Théâtre de Châtelet, we decided to buy tickets straight away. The French are not that into musicals (the only one that has enjoyed long-running success here is, bizarrely, The Lion King) and although the original version of Les Misérables was in French, it was only when Cameron Mackintosh's English language production opened in London that it became a huge success. The version playing at Châtelet is in English, with French subtitles, although a French translation of the English version also exists.

The production is amazing. Somehow, the show's creators have managed to distill Victor Hugo's 5 volume novel into a couple of hours of theatre and still convey both the essentials of the story and the complexity of the characters. The scenery and use of special effects is also innovative without being too obviously technical for the story.

As an added bonus, if you go out to the theatre terrace during the interval of the evening performance, you can drink a glass of champagne while watching the sunset over Notre Dame, the Théâtre des Halles and the Tour Saint Jacques. Definitely an experience not to be missed!

Travels in the Land of Sea, Sand and Cider

2010-06-03T19:59:00.003+02:00

By a curious coincidence, or perhaps bad planning, or rather, good planning, I've spent the last two weekends on the Normandy coast.

The first weekend I went to Trouville and Deauville, which are two separate towns so close that they actually share a train station. Deauville is where swanky Parisians go for their weekends at the seaside and is rather posh. Trouville, on the other side of the river, is not quite so posh. Naturally, I stayed in Trouville, at the excellent campsite where, if you get a good spot, you can unzip your tent door in the morning and get a fabulous view over the sea before scrambling down to the beach for an early morning swim. Having bought my tent for 25 euros in Decathlon the weekend before, and given that my last recent purchases from said shop include the bike with the dodgy brakes and an inflatable mattress that automatically deflated itself in the course of the night, I was rather relieved to wake up each morning and find that the tent was still standing. Despite many early expereinces swimming in the North sea and off the west coast of Scotland, I wasn't actually brave enough to dive into the water first thing in the morning, but we did manage a swim on Sunday afternoon and it actually felt quite warm! We spent most of the rest of the weekend wandering on the beach, barbecueing, picnicking and drinking cider, which in Normandy is considered to be a soft drink.

The next weekend, I found myself admiring the cliffs at Etretat, which are the French version of the white cliffs of Dover. The rock is so vulnerable to the relentless attack of the sea that all along the coast there are natural arches and vertiginous precipices. Unfortunately, I left the memory card for my camera in the computer that weekend, so you'll either have to imagine it or Google it.

I like Normandy a lot. It's green and pretty and looks like the countryside, and it has the kind of vast, sandy beaches that I remember from my childhood, but a few degrees warmer. I'm not sure it would be healthy for me to stay there for long though – along with the cider, the local specialities are cream, cheese and calvados, and I enjoyed them all!

One of the certainties of life...

2010-05-27T18:19:00.002+02:00

... is paying taxes. While it may, as my friend with socialist leanings likes to remind me, a privilege to do so, actually carrying out the process is a pain. In the UK, the pain of paying taxes is a little stab of regret when you see the figure that was automatically deducted from your salary, in France you have to fill out a form telling them how much you've earned just for the pleasure of being sent an enormous bill afterwards.

As well as your salary, you have to declare other sources of income, including interest on foreign bank accounts. If the interest was paid in another currency, you have to convert it using the exchange rates from the Paris Bourse for the day that it was paid into your account.

Without the wonder that is the internet, I don't know how I would ever have found all this information out, but thanks to modern technology, I am now nearly ready to sit back and enjoy the privilege of contributing to society. Ahh, the satisfaction.

Spain Part 3 - Flamenco!

2010-05-16T17:55:00.001+02:00

Three weeks ago, I went on a wonderful trip to Spain. I met interesting people, saw some amazing sights and generally had a really great time. But now, I just don't have the inspiration to write about it. I think I'm suffering from blogger's block. At the same time, though, I want this blog to be an accurate record of the things that I get up to, partly for you, my dear readers, and partly because when I'm an old lady sitting in my armchair without enough money to pay the heating bills because I spent my youth paying pension payments in far too many countries with far too much bureaucracy to allow me to ever get any money back, I want to remember all the good bits. It would therefore be a bit unfortunate if I only wrote blog posts about having nothing better to do than write boring blog posts. And so I am also suffering from blogger's guilt.

The solution? The photo post: a quick summary of my doings, with lots of pictures to tell the real story. Please excuse the absence of unusual vocabulary, interesting sentence structures and original ideas.

On the Saturday of my trip to Spain, R. and I went to Seville, where R's boyfriend lives. I was lucky enough to be there the week of the Feria de Sevilla, a week-long celebration of Andalucian culture, by the Spanish, for the Spanish. Although hundreds of thousands of people attend the event, it isn't at all a tourist festival. Nearly everybody who goes is Spanish and most of them are from Andalucia.

Inside the private caseta

On the main festival site, there are thousands of marquees, or casetas, where you can buy drinks and food and there is music and flamenco dancing. There are public casetas, where anybody can go, and private ones , where you have to be a member of an organisation or know somebody who has contacts with the sponsors to go. We started off in a private caseta that a friend of R's boyfriend got us into, then moved on to the public ones later.

All the Andalucian people who go wear traditional dress and one of the most fun things about the festival is just looking at all the outfits. The music is mostly Sevillanas, which are traditional dances from the area, so you have to know at least some of the steps to join in. R. gave me a quick lesson before we left, but I couldn't quite do it fast enough to really join in. The traditional thing to drink is sherry with lemonade, which quenches your thirst all through the evening.

View from the Big Wheel

As well as the casetas, there is a funfair on the Feria site, and we couldn't resist going on some rides at the end of the evening. By that point, I was very glad I wasn't wearing a flamenco dress!

Spain Part 2 - Malaga

2010-05-09T18:28:00.004+02:00

On my second day in Spain, I decided it was time to venture out into the big world by myself and take a trip to Malaga. This involved trying out pretty much all of the fifty or so words of Spanish that I had hurriedly crammed into my brain before I left, which was quite exciting for me, as I haven't very often been in countries where I don't speak the language. I survived buying a train ticket, but when I got on the train, somebody was sitting in my seat and I decided that my linguistic skills were not quite up to telling them that and went and sat somewhere else, which was fine until both the woman whose seat I was sitting in and the train conductor tried to find out why I was sitting there. I said something garbled that was probably mostly in Italian and probably made them think I was crazy and best left alone, we all smiled at each other and everyone was happy. This pattern continued all day and, even in the tourist mecca that is Malaga, nobody tried to speak to me in English, so I may have sounded like an idiot, but apparently not a British idiot.

The first thing I did when I got to Malaga was go to see the sea. The last time I had seen it was at the Cinque Terre last Easter and I had been missing it. The views along the coast were impressive, but although it was warm enough to swim, I somehow wasn't tempted and settled for walking on the sand in my bare feet instead.

I had paella for lunch in a beach front café and then set off under the full glare of the 30 degree sunshine to climb the hill to Malaga's castle fortress. There is a small museum, but apart from that, there isn't a whole lot to see at the actual castle. What you can do, though, is walk around the ramparts and admire the stunning views of the coast, the city and the hills beyond.

By the time I walked down the hill again I was running out of time, or I would have gone to visit the cathedral, which is large and imposing and stands among the myriad of small pedestrian streets that make up the old centre of the city. Malaga reminded me a lot of Nice and I would definitely go back there to see more of the city as well as to swim at the beaches of the Costa del Sol.

Spain (Part 1)

2010-05-05T21:22:00.003+02:00

The past few weeks have been one of these frustrating times in blogging life where I've been so busy doing things that I want to blog about that I have no time to actually write about them. It's a wee while now since, with Ejafyallajokull spewing its ash into the skies over northern Europe, it was doubtful whether or not I would be able to travel to Spain to visit my friend R. in Andalucia. And to be honest, when Vueling, the low-cost airline that I'd never heard of with a website that looked as if it had been translated in its entirety by Google, proudly announced that they were the airline that was to “open Europe”, I was still uncertain as to whether I should get on the plane at all.

But I did, and everything was fine.

R. lives in a small town that lies inland from Malaga on the train line to Seville. She was working when I arrived, so her Spanish friend met me at the train station and we went for a drink at the Irish bar. A few of their other friends were around, so I spent a lot of the afternoon trying to follow conversations in Spanish and for the first time in my life really appreciated people practising their English with me. I can understand the gist of written Spanish because it's a lot like Italian, but spoken Spanish is very fast and it's hard to make out all the syllables in the words quickly enough to understand. Then Rebecca arrived and we went to get some tapas. The region is famous for its olive oil and everything was fried in it and delicious. The town was made up of beautiful white houses arranged in tiny cobbled streets. During the day, it smells of the oil factories but at night the streets are filled with the scent of orange blossom.

The next day, R. and I wandered around town in the morning, then I took a walk out into the countryside nearby in the afternoon while she went to work. The weather wasn't great but because it had been raining a lot, the landscape was surprisingly green. Underneath the lush grass and the flowers, however, you could see the burnt-coloured soil and the only trees were olive trees and orange trees, so it was easy to imagine how it would look after a scorching hot summer.

Why French Trade Unions are Like a Volcano

2010-04-19T14:33:00.004+02:00

Worldwide, transport is in a state of chaos as the result of an unavoidable natural phenomen. People are stranded on the wrong continent. Food supplies may be affected. Injured soldiers cannot be brought home for treatment. Heads of state cannot get to Poland for the President's funeral and Angela Merkel is travelling across Europe by bus.

Spain is offering its airports and railways as an alternative route home for stranded travellers in Asia and the Americas. The Royal Navy is about to start a "Dunkirk - style relief mission" to repatriate Britons from continental Europe. Eurolines is offering extra services and international ferries are filled to capacity.

In France, the SNCF railway workers are on strike.

Paris in the Spring, Paris in the Rain

2010-04-11T12:54:00.006+02:00

I've been kept busy over the past couple of weeks with far too much work and a very agreeable number of visitors. The right kind of visitors too: the kind that do the washing up when you're out at work, are happy to go for dinner in a Perfectville creperie when you decide you haven't got the strength to go into Paris, who find interesting things to do that are off the beaten tourist track and who don't insist on going up the Eiffel tower when the queue is about 4 hours long.

The weather has been changing here recently. Sunshine has been mixed with storm clouds and the fresh blossoms on the trees have been beaten by the rain. Much of the beauty of Paris comes from the the effects that the light has on the buildings and last week all of that took place against the backdrop of an ever-changing sky. Here are the best of the pictures:

Salon des Vins

2010-04-10T20:33:00.000+02:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was given a couple of free tickets for the Salon des Vins, which happens twice a year in Paris, once in November and once in March. Hundreds if not thousands of independent producers from all over France bring their wines to an exhibition centre in Paris and thousands of Parisians flock to the stands to taste them. My friend S. and I went with an open mind about what to try, but the first stand we visited was a producer from Languedoc-Roussillon, which is in the south west of the country, and we soon decided that the people from there were by far the friendliest. This might be because Languedoc-Roussillon wines don't have a lot of snob value in France and Parisians tend to like snob value, so these guys had to work that little bit harder to sell their wares. Many of the producers just gave you one glass of whatever you asked to try, but the Languedoc ones led us carefully through their selection, starting with the simplest and cheapest and working up to the most sophisticated and expensive along the way, telling us about the grape varieties and production along the way. I developed a particular taste for wines that had been aged in oak barrels, which gives them a flavour that I never used to like but which now reminds me of the scent of the earth and the woods in autumn. I'm no expert on wine, but it was interesting to try the different kinds in order, because it really made me notice how, while the cheaper, simpler ones taste just as good at first, as you drink more, the flavour becomes boring, whereas with the more sophisticated varieties, you get different flavours as you work your way down the glass.

For anyone in the UK who wants to try it, Fitou is the main Languedoc-Roussillon wine that you can buy there. I also invested in a gorgeous summery white from the Loire valley that tasted completely different to any other white wine I've ever had (and I don't normally like white wine much anyway) and a sparkling rose from Savoie which looks too pink to be real, tastes all sweet and girly, and which I plan to drink on my birthday.

As I say, I'm no expert in wine, but with a tasting session like that a couple of times per year, I reckon I could become one if I stay here long enough!

Maison Européene de la Photo

2010-03-25T20:28:00.003+01:00

One month after the event, I still haven't finished posting about my trip to Milan (on my other blog) but in the meantime, I thought I'd share my latest cultural discovery - the Maison Européene de la Photo, which is in the Marais, near St Paul metro stop. The exhibitions change all the time, but at the moment there is one called "On the Road," which is mostly pictures of cars and highways stretching off into the distance in America, an interesting one about African hunters and a man who tried to invent a written language for Africa, and, by far the most popular, an exhibition of work by Elliot Erwitt, who has taken many clever and amusing pictures, particularly in New York, Paris and Rome. Definitely worth a visit!

Wandering in Paris 2

2010-02-23T09:55:00.005+01:00

One of the major disadvantages of having a job that allows one to live in Paris is that one is often obliged to go to work when one would rather be strolling in the streets of the capital, taking photographs and indulging in philosophical thought. Yesterday, however, I took advantage of the fact that I was on holiday to head into the city centre with the full intention of doing just that. It was a warm day and I was able to wander around for several hours without freezing to death or being obliged to resort to sheltering in an overpriced cafe. I wouldn't say I got as far as thinking genuinely philosophical thoughts, but here are some of the photographs.

The first thing I discovered was this building, which is just behind the Louvre. The part on the left is the town hall of the 1st arrondisement, which is separated by the bell tower from the church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois.

Then I walked along the river and took this picture of the Pont Neuf and the Ile de la Cité:

I crossed over to the Latin Quarter, then walked up the river and over to the Ile Saint Louis. This picture is looking north from the island, where the sun was shining on the buildings but the sky behind was darkening and it was about to rain:

Back on the Right Bank, I walked along the river and past the Eglise St-Gervais:

I finished by taking a few pictures of the Tour Saint-Jacques on the Rue de Rivoli, which is one of my all-time favourite Parisian landmarks: