The beautiful game

For the time being, I think it's fair to say that I'm 'soccered out'.  I've followed more World Cup games in this year's competition than I've ever done, recording almost faithfully the outcomes of each.  This is all on top of the live trainings and games and tournaments in which my own son plays and which I orchestrate as the family's resident soccer mom.  So, while I wished Messi, the magician, had been able to help his fellow Argentines win, I found the goal by the German "Super Mario" yesterday to be a magnificent end, for his team, and for my 2014 World Cup viewing experience.  (An earlier experience, in 1990, culminated in a similar result, except then I found myself in Germany, celebrating that victory in the streets of a small town.  It's hard to believe that this year's hero, Mario Goetze, was not even born then.)

Soccer/football has been widely called the beautiful game.  It's the name of a documentary film on African football, and apparently, the soccer great Pelé has referred to football as such.  It's definitely beautiful because it is so simple, anyone can play, with very little equipment and space.  The game has also been called an illogical one and an anxious one, because it's not often the team with the greatest possession or the best shots at goal that wins, and this World Cup certainly showed us this a few times.  But why do I enjoy it so much?  I've never played it, not even as a child.  I suppose having children who play, especially at an increasingly higher level makes it beautiful because the experience feels very academic to me.  I learn so much from each game; I absolutely enjoy watching a game and then reading analyses or talking with knowledgeable individuals about what I've just seen.  I also learn about how the sport is organized in different societies, like what I learned about le foot in France: Un certain regard May 2013.

Friendships have also come about through this sport and that's a beautiful thing too.  It's not just our son who hangs out with his football buddies; our entire family spends a lot of time with football families.  We travel and socialize with them: we've recently  attended a wedding with our U.S. soccer friends, and in France, we camped several times over tournament weekends.  I even shared a humble bungalow with a French dad and his son.  Not all of the moments were beautiful ones, even in Provence, but the French penchant for proper pique-niques alongside the soccer pitch, complete with wine, (see A table, May 2013) and the many language and cultural lessons learned make for many cherished memories in my book.  (See Allez les gars for what we learned about Provencal cross-town rivalries, Nov. 2012, and Le bonheur, Dec. 2012, for the challenges some French girls face if they love the beautiful game too.)

The ultimate beauty of fútbol for me though is how sociological it is and how well it reflects social life.  David Brooks at the New York Times captures this, yes, beautifully, in his op-ed piece last week: Baseball or Soccer? 10 July 2014, where he argue that soccer is in a sense a mini-sociological platform, and how each of us in our social worlds is playing soccer.  We all have our roles, and these roles may be enacted in different ways depending on all kinds of social factors: who is filling the other roles--the ones with which we are interacting, what are the constantly changing environmental conditions (on the football pitch, in our workplace, or at home...) and so on.  Even when we feel tuckered out, by sometimes overwhelming social demands, by too many football matches, too many hard tackles on the pitch, whatever it is, we may retreat for a short while, but never completely.  Who we are, the game(s) we play, and the life we live are all inherently social.  I'll let Brooks sum this up:  "Most of us spend our days thinking we are playing baseball, but we are really playing soccer. We think we individually choose what career path to take, whom to socialize with, what views to hold. But, in fact, those decisions are shaped by the networks of people around us more than we dare recognize."

Les blogs

I know where the expatriate ladies do lunch in Aix.  Last week, my Canadian friend and I scored a table sans reservation (without a reservation) at a lovely restaurant adjacent to a fountain, and it became clear by the end of the meal that this was the place to have lunch, particularly for English-speaking expatriate women.  Is it because the wine is pink and chilled, and the waiters speak English? (Coincidentally, I posted a photo of this chilled wine in my previous post Rouge or rosé, and I describe a meal at this same restaurant last November on the night of the new wine release, see Beaujolais Nouveau.)  Or, it is because expatriates tend to connect with each other wherever they are in the world, and sometimes they just coincidentally converge on the same restaurants at the same time?

While I've not become heavily involved with the expatriate organizations in Aix, there are many of them.  I'm most familiar with the English-speaking organizations which connect primarily the large numbers of North Americans, Brits, and Down-Unders who are here.  These groups create a sense of community and serve as important resources among people undergoing similar experiences.  This is not unlike older immigrant communities that have served to integrate, support and even assimilate their members in new countries over the centuries.  In the West, I'm thinking of the Chinatowns and little Cubas or other international districts in larger cities.  In these communities, ethnicity or national origin and language have been the typical ties that have bound people together to share resources and information so that they can successfully forge new lives in their new homes.  The differences with the contemporary expatriate communities is that in these latter communities the members seem to be connected most closely by their social class backgrounds.  Most of the expatriates seem to be relatively well-educated, of middle to upper middle class, and their occupational roles have largely transferred laterally here.  These are people who have been able to find or create professional positions for themselves on par with what they left behind, and who are not starting at the bottom of the the social ladder like earlier and less privileged immigrants have often had to.  Even those who do not speak French well do fine here, because in a sense, their educational and social statuses trump their linguistic deficiencies; they know how to get information and learn quickly how to work the system, so they are able to hit the ground running. 

One particularly important tool for these expatriate communities is the use of online resources.  Certainly, such resources and online access are available to everyone these days, but many expats, because of their educational and social backgrounds, are particularly adept at using online tools to connect and seek information.  They may also have more time and access with which to log in most effectively.  Here and now, expatriates are emailing, twittering, texting, and blogging, as they connect to other expats like themselves, and these much more immediate ways of communicating have largely replaced the letters and phone calls that immigrants of the past had to really on.  (That's a wall of old mailboxes photographed in a passageway in Marseille several months ago.)  I am particularly aware of the expatriate blogging communities in France, but they exist all over the world.  While there are broader ones centered on Paris and in other large areas, I'm noticing in Provence and in other regions of France, smaller, tighter blogging communities of primarily Western, middle to upper middle class women sharing their experiences here, asking questions, telling some of the same kinds of stories (of the endless rosé, the escapades of the French villagers, the familiar frustrations with the French ways, etc.), and posting stunning photographs of quintessential French scenes.  Some of these women appear to have formed online friendships and avidly follow or link to each other's blogs.  (My little sociology blog here on which I'm recounting our experiences from a sociological perspective doesn't even register on these amazing networks of French-themed blogs.)

The concentration of women bloggers, especially American and English-speaking women married to French husbands, is notable, but they aren't alone; there are all kinds of other expat blogs, of Finnish women (and no doubt Spanish and Italian and...) living in France (is it the water, or the French men?), of Irish and Dutch expats farming organically or restoring houses in France, of Christians evangelizing the secular French, and so on.  This suggests to me that expatriates, even those who are well-educated and economically-privileged, have the same needs to connect socially with each other that many other earlier or less economically stable immigrants have.  The Internet facilitates these connections, by giving opportunities via les blogs (the blogs) to share and link and relate virtually.  Yet, sometimes virtual connections may not be enough, and we want face-to-face contact with someone who speaks our language.  Then, we rely on the French to facilitate our social connections, by doing what they do particularly well--providing us with good dining opportunities and delicious food and wine, at lunch or anytime.  With these we share our expatriate stories and experiences and renew our spirits for yet another day.  Santé! (Cheers!)

Les communications internationales

Our family has been on a little multilingual spring break road trip.  We started in Bourgogne (Burgundy) where we attended a rugby tournament and visited Dijon, and then continued to Verdun to see the increasingly faint remains of World War I trenches (as seen in photo) and villages détruits (destroyed villages).  We continued northward into Germany's Saarland, to Trier, to see a roman gate, a holy tunic and Karl Marx's home.  We made a tiny jaunt into Luxembourg to buy some cheap fuel for the car, crisscrossed back through France's Alsace-Lorraine to Germany's Schwarzwald (Black Forest) for some cake, and then returned to the south of France.

Before we left, we had numerous arrangements to make, with sports coaches, French teachers, and friends.  For many such communications, I use texting as it works well for me in terms of French language communications.  (And I think the French find it less painful to read poor French than to hear it spoken!)  I am able to express myself better in written French and I can read French, so textos (text messages) are an excellent way to communicate when I can't understand spoken French instructions or requests, or when I want to ask questions myself.  I've gotten us to sports tournaments and rendez-vous (meetings) and met up with new friends.  I'm even learning some French text language.  If "I don't know", then  je ne c pas works for je ne sais pas.  Text messaging is also very versatile for me when I am faced with multiple languages.  In the past few weeks, I've had textos simultaneously in one day, in French, from two sports coaches, a French mother, or my French teacher, in Finnish, from my new Finnish friend in Aix, and in English, from my kids, husband and a Canadian friend.  It is so marvelous to know that one can correspond and make plans relatively easily with people in multiple languages, all at the same time, with the use of texting.

To my utter dismay, my polyglot texting ability is not matched at present by verbal agility.  I was mostly completely tongue-tied on this vacation, speaking French to the German gasthaus proprietors, oui, oui, je prends un peu (yes, yes, I'll have a little) and German to the French waitstaffs, danke schön, (thank you very much), and resorting to English by default or Finnish in frustration.  Already, my boys have been cringing at my accent when I speak French, and while my German grammar is better than my spouse's, he is far more fluent in spoken German.  On this trip, none of this seemed to matter, as I truly could not verbally express myself clearly in either language.

Fortunately, written language and spoken language can also be combined with body language.  Even if the languages do not come out clearly all the time or the words aren't spelled correctly or in the right order, with gestures and hand signals, we can connect with others and communicate well enough.  Through a combination of these forms of language, we can chat with rugby team parents, find lovely German inns and a former French abbey converted into a hotel, and enjoy delicious local wines and fresh asperge or Spargel (asparagus), and glace or Eis (ice cream), depending on where we are.  On this trip, we were even able to get a car tire fixed in Germany after closing time on the evening before the holiday marking der erste Mai (May Day), thanks to the spouse's German language skills, my body language skills (imagine the pantomime: "Oh dear! What a big nail in the tire!"), and the international language of cold hard cash.

The result?  A very happy May Day spent in both Germany and France, and celebrated in (click here) traditional French fashion with a bouquet of muguet (lily-of-the-valley).         

Pro-democracy movement in Moldova?

A former student of mine currently teaches English in the Peace Corps in the small, former Soviet republic of Moldova, so naturally I thought of him when I saw this morning's papers reporting on the youth protests against the government in the Moldovan capital city of Chisinau. These youth protests resulted from suspicions over the recent elections in which the Communists had a stronger showing than some had expected. Moldova is a poor country, and after the Soviet patronage ended and the initial flirtation with western capitalism, the Communists were re-elected into office. But, the younger generations are unsatisfied with what they perceive as a corrupt leadership that has done little to improve the conditions in the country.

These protests remind me immediately of the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in 1989. In many ways, that was a generational protest, as the Moldovan one is being described, 'grandparents vs. grandkids'. One big difference now is that these Moldovan youth organized seemingly more spontaneously, without a lot of time or legwork, but with the help of newer technology unavailable to the Chinese youth of the late 1980's. As The NY Times reported today, such organizing using Twitter and Facebook has been the more recent pattern in other former Soviet republics as well. Technology-savvy youth can quickly mobilize and then congregate, surprising even the organizers themselves. (See "Protesters in Moldova Explode, With A Call to Arms on Twitter," The New York Times, 4/08/09.)

How will the Moldovan authorities respond? They can block Internet access as a way to counter the means the youth are using. And, like the Chinese leaders in 1989, the Moldovan authorities may crack down with military force, (more strongly than yesterday), if they perceive genuine threats to their power. My student actually emailed me later this morning, much to my delight and relief. He is safe, but he had hiked into the capital city to see what was happening (mass transit networks were down) and wandered around taking some fantastic photos. He heard that more activities could take place on Friday, and I'm hoping if he decides to go into Chisinau again he'll exercise caution. The military will likely be in force, and the outcome may be much more deadly.