Waxing and waning

I enjoy sending holiday cards.  It's my little way of reaching out, to the extended family on the other side of the globe, to friends made during travels and work and school, and to local friends too.  I often write a holiday letter if inspiration hits, and I enjoy receiving such letters myself.  The French don't follow this tradition so I know my cards last year surprised many of our French friends.  They seem much more likely to connect over new year's wishes, which are frequently sent via mobile texts or Facebook posts these days.  Holiday card sending and receiving may even be a little passé in the U.S., what with the ubiquity of social media, but frankly, in a year when I'm not writing a holiday letter (too little time and inspiration), sending cards still lets me connect with others, AND it is a very good way to take stock of the year and of one's social connections.  As it turns out, my address book and my card list both have needed some adjusting this holiday season, in ways that I haven't experienced before (and that I'm not sure I like).  Up to now, my address book has been something that has generally gotten thicker; it grew quite a bit over the past few years during my French sojourn.  (I use a physical address book to which I add little cards that represent each entry and that slip into a special binder: Levenger's mini-Circa model which may not even be available anymore.  I use digital address books for email and phone number lists only.)  Over the years, I've had to order additional cards to keep up with births, marriages, new friends, new addresses, but this year there seems to be a notable tightening going on.  In at least two alphabetical sections, I have had to cross out, condense, or rewrite a number of entries due to many more relationship breakdowns, divorces, and deaths than usual.   Perhaps it's just coincidence this year, but as a sociologist, I have to suspect that what I see may be a more significant, age-related shift in my social networks.

Is it all downhill from here?  Maybe, but maybe not.  As I consolidate my address book, my social networks on social media continue their intricate spread, even in the face of divorce or death. This month I've had my first significant experiences with the ways that social media are used to memorialize people and announce deaths.  I recently lost a childhood friend who was an avid Facebooker and while I got the news of her sudden passing via the now old-fashioned phone, it is through our more contemporary forms of social media, and the tributes posted via those media, that I have learned more about this friend's remarkable adult life.  And on my Facebook news feed the other day, I caught the announcement of a memorial service for another friend's deceased family member. While I haven't felt comfortable posting a personal message of sympathy on the boards for all to see, I've been astonished by the depth of feeling and the eloquence expressed by others.  I have also wondered if these posts and tributes are comforting to the immediate family, or is the 'public' sharing overwhelming?  I suppose we all in some way like to know that we have made a difference, or that our loved ones have, and perhaps these social media announcements and tributes offer sufficient testimonials to that.

Obituaries in more traditional media like newspapers also continue to be important testimonials.  In the U.S., at least in my local paper, the obituary section has grown while I was in Europe and now frequently includes photos and detailed stories of the dearly departed.  On the other hand, I have always found even the simple death notices in the national newspaper in Finland to be quite moving for the small glimpses they reveal, of the 'personal ', in what is generally a fairly discreet and private society. These are fairly large rectangular notices without the detail of U.S. obituaries, but there is often a poignant verse in addition to the name of the deceased, the birth/death dates, and the immediate survivors' names.  Such subtlety may be lost on the Facebook generation (and anyway, it's only the family that posts such an announcement in the paper), but I think such notices still matter. Posting Facebook tributes, reading obituaries, updating address books, sending (or not sending) holiday cards are all social rituals that mark, in small ways and big, the waxing and waning of our social networks and the inevitability of the human cycle of life.

Provence, 2013

While not as macabre as the gory scenes in the horror movie my sons watched with their friends last night in honor of Halloween, my local boucherie (butcher shop) is featuring brains, hearts, kidneys, necks, and intestines right now.  All parts of the lamb are available, including cervelle d'agneau (lamb's brain), coeur d'agneau (heart of lamb), rognons d'agneau (kidneys), as are pale legs of veal and filet mignon porc (what we call pork tenderloin in the U.S.).  The clerk at the butcher explained to me that it is butchering time. Some of the foods associated with this time are regional specialties from here in the South, such as pieds paquets (lamb's legs and tripe).  And not only this, it is also hunting season in France (last year at this time I first tasted wild boar, see Les plats traditionnels, Nov. 2012).  Sciolino of The New York Times Paris bureau describes the culinary excitement in Paris that comes with the annual start of this wild game season (see "Turning the Hunt into a Trip to the Market," The New York Times, Oct. 28, 2013).

At the Boucherie du Palais, Oct. 2013

Because of my family's sojourn in France where food and the eating of it are considered quintessential to the French way of life, food has been a topic more than once on my blog (see À table, May 2013, Où est le boeuf? February 2013, La cuisine fusion January 2013)  However, I haven't fully explained that there is a sociological specialty that considers how food and eating are intertwined with our social experiences, institutions, and structures. Food and its consumption is highly sociological because food has meaning not only on the personal level, but socially and culturally too.  What we eat, how we produce the food and process it for consumption, and how we eat it are all closely tied to who we are as individual and social beings and what we represent as societies.  The connections between society and food happen to be especially evident in France, with its tight seasonal and regional following of food and wine traditions, as represented by the autumnal dining focus on organ meats and wild game described above, and the myriad specialties associated with the different regions in France.  This week, I discovered in Marseille another specialty, this one associated with the Mediterranean part of France, a pan bagnat.   It's an excellent version of a tuna sandwich that comes from Nice, and it typically features bread moistened with olive oil, and olives, anchovies, and capers.  (Here's a recipe from the New York Times, "Pan Bagnat" by Melissa Clark, June 12, 2013.)

If you can avert your eyes from the outstanding view, the sandwich on the left tray is a pan bagnat

As we know, the French food culture has had foodies from elsewhere gushing and writing about it for decades.  Yet, France is not alone, nor is its culture frozen in place.  All societies have intimate connections to food, and they all have their food moments, when new processes, ideas and even new practices come about.  Just as societies evolve while retaining traditional elements, so do their foods and the rituals associated with them.  I've just picked up Luke Barr's Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard and the Reinvention of American Taste where he writes about a seminal moment in the evolution of the U.S. food culture, and in a more contemporary vein, I've casually been following the popular New York Times' food writer Mark Bittman's growing emphasis of vegetarian and vegan recipes over the past 2 1/2 years.  As it turns out, my family's French food moment, let's call it Provence, 2013, is ending soon, as we are returning to the U.S.  Bittersweet as that may be, it doesn't mark an end to my sociological observations of daily life. It just means that now I will see for myself if a vegetable-based food revolution is taking place in the U.S., and how that may be reflected in social terms.

Un été en Provence

One summer in Provence is often like any other; they seem to have a timeless quality about them.  The many old rituals that mark the beginning of summer here are one contributor to that sense, as I recounted a bit breathlessly last summer. (See L'estival, June 2012).  This year, the images presented in artistic and literary works, especially those by Provençal natives, have revealed other ways in which Provençal summers have eternal qualities.  For example, at the major two-part art exhibition in Aix and Marseille right now called Le Grand Atelier Du Midi, I saw scenes and portrayals of Provence by the painter Paul Cézanne, and others, that were astonishingly similar to sights we can see today even though they were painted up to 100 years ago--the gorgeous seashores and ports at Marseille or Cassis or Nice, and the hilly and mountainous landscapes of scrubby pines, olive groves, red soil near Aix and in the Luberon, the baigneurs (bathers), the agricultural workers, the people reposing on verandas or near open windows.  The artists who make up what is being called 'the studio of the south' all saw, despite their different styles and portrayals, the same amazing azure color of the Mediterranean sea, and the light, that famous Provençal light, that we ourselves can see here every day in 2013.  (See my earlier post about this exhibition, Les oeuvres d'art, June 2013.)

The timelessness of Provençal summers is also echoed in literature.  I've recently completed two parts of playwright Marcel Pagnol's memoirs in which he describes summer holidays in le midi (the south) starting in 1903 when he was the same age as my boys, about to enter quatrième (4th grade, or U.S. 8th grade). In La gloire de mon père we learn about the magical first summer at la Bastide Neuve  near La Treille with his aunt's family, and the epic opening day of hunting season which brought unexpected glory to his teacher-father and a new friendship to Pagnol himself.  The second book, Le chateau de ma mère describes how Pagnol's family managed to continue their visits to the beloved Provençal summer place during the school year despite the difficult and long distance from their home. (Both books have been translated into English: My father's glory, My mother's castle.)  The ways in which Pagnol described the landscape, the daily routines, the summer foods, even the melancholia associated with the end of summer holidays, continue to be evocative of Provençal summers today.  Not a day has gone by this month that we haven't heard descendants of the cicadas that Pagnol described, and the heat in August continues to bake the ground as it has each late summer since time immemorial.  Likewise, 21st century late summer days seem to be as languid as those experienced by Pagnol's family, with slow, lazy afternoons, drinks enjoyed outside, and the late and leisurely market-fresh dinners.  Even that first bit of sadness marking the end of the holidays has begun for us as it did for young Marcel many summers ago.  Some of the details differ, as Pagnol was describing a time when transportation and electricity were still fairly primitive and not widely accessible.  Our end-of-summer melancholia is reflected by the need to turn on electric lights as darkness cuts our dinners on the terrace a bit shorter each night, and by the filling up again of the empty parking spots on our street as locals return from their own holidays.  However, just as Provençal summers have always been marked with a sudden influx of fêtes, special market days, and boules tournaments that then gradually lead to slower, more relaxing days in the sun and shade, the end of summer, or any season really, is also both sudden and gradual, but in reverse. This is as true today as it was in Pagnol's and Cézanne's Provence, and one could even say it is true anywhere.  Gradually, we make small daily adjustments to our daily routines to accommodate shorter summer days and windier or rainier weather and calendar dates that come closer and closer.  Sometimes we may even try to ignore the signs a little as Pagnol himself did.  But then, suddenly, we have to accept, just like every year, that another wonderful summer, in Provence, or elsewhere, has come and is almost gone.

À table

As we move through le printemps (spring) into summer, we have more and more opportunities to participate in the French version of le pique-nique (picnic), and boy, do the French know how to picnic.  My spouse discovered this in his first summer consulting in France, when he was invited to the beach on a warm Friday evening after work by some co-workers.  He was awestruck by the blankets, the candles in the sand, and the elegant foods and drinks brought by everyone.  We've since picnicked many times along the Mediterranean beaches, particularly at dinner time, surreptitiously watching the French families around us.  Our more revealing picnicking experiences have come through the many sports tournaments we've attended with our sons and their teammates' families during the past two springs.  By now we know to expect the ubiquitous baguettes and wine, even at youth sports' events, (I first recount this discovery in Rouge ou rosé, June 2012), and we've even had the novel opportunity of introducing a favorite Bordeaux sausage to our French picnicking friends!

In thinking about how French picnics feel different from the American barbecue or the tailgate party, I think it is partly in the scale but also in the intention.  The many pique-niques in which we've participated seem pretty simple.  Everyone brings a bag or two, or a cooler, with their food, but we don't see the hauling of grills or the schlepping of piles of paper plates and huge quantities of food.  Among our two groups of sports families, salads and bread with some protein are the normal fare, while the supplies often include cute folding camping tables brought by a family or two, a roll of paper towels and a garbage bag, and of course, a corkscrew and plastic cups.  Simple sandwiches are often assembled on the spot, as our rugby-playing son's coach did last weekend, with a baguette, some ham, and a jar of moutarde de Dijon (Dijon mustard) that he pulled out of his bag, along with a bottle of wine to share.  Families may also share olives, cut-up watermelon, and cake or chocolates.  Each stadium or venue has a buvette (a bar, or a concessions stand) hosted by the sponsoring club, for those needing to supplement their picnics.  The limited offerings seem to be fairly standard and inexpensive, along the lines of one type of grilled sausage, french fries, candy, ice pops, crêpes, espressos, soda and beer.

photo courtesy of Bernard Guigues, AUC Rugby, 1 May 2013 (Tournament at Les Cadeneux)

The bigger difference between U.S. and French picnics seems to be in the intentionality of the dining experience.  At French youth rugby and football tournaments, there is actually une pause (a break), where matches stop and everyone attending eats at the same time, even at the huge rugby regional tournament last weekend in Avignon, with its hundreds of players and their families.  The research institute Insee notes that the French are much more likely than Americans to eat meals at the same times across the entire country, suggesting that well-established mealtime traditions continue to be important here.  Lunch is one of those meals that is particularly sacrosanct; at 13h (1 pm), Insee estimates that half of the French are engaged in eating their lunches (see de SaintPol et Ricroche, Insee, Le temps de l'alimentation en France, no. 1417, Oct. 2012).  At tournaments, this break in the action is notable; the little camping tables are quickly set up, food containers emerge, and the wine bottles are uncorked.  You don't just attend tournaments with some money in your pocket, hoping for a gap between matches that will allow your family to eat a greasy burger or something.  French picnic meals are planned, even if simple, and they will be eaten as properly as possible, à table (at the table).  I am often surprised by the unexpectedly lovely salads, olives, cheeses, and fruits that emerge from coolers, that reveal the clear effort and intent associated with mealtime.  Interestingly, I rarely see potato chips or crisps as part of the tournament meal (these often emerge as a snack, later), but we do see a lot more sweets than we might in the U.S.--chocolates, candy, and soda.  The French seem to gravitate towards sweets while Americans like their salt, but some of this difference may also be related to the importance of dessert as a traditional end to most French meals, and to the tendency for afternoon gôuters (snacks) to be on the sweet side.  My family isn't as consumed by the sweet habit (although we do eat dessert here, without guilt; see Les Desserts, Sept. 2011), but we appreciate the time taken to eat meals, even at tournaments.  The French savor their meals; despite all kinds of modern distractions, the hours spent eating by the French have actually increased lightly in the past years.  (See Insee source above.)  My family is becoming so acclimated to this aspect that I think we may have to acquire our own little French folding camping table to bring back to a U.S. soccer tournament someday.

photo: Decathlon http://www.decathlon.fr/media/803/8030285/zoom_400PX_asset_11984223.jpg

La cuisine fusion

Having been away from the U.S. for a year and a half, there are definitely foods and flavors we are missing.  Initially, we really missed Mexican food, improvising with chile peppers for jalapeños, and white or kidney beans for pinto beans.  We've gratefully accepted and frozen 100% corn tortillas from the U.S., yet we do appreciate the excellent avocados, coriandre (cilantro or fresh coriander) and seasonal tomatoes here.  More recently, it's the flavors of Asian food that we are craving.  There are several ethnic food stores in Aix, specializing in halal (food prepared according to Muslim dietary rules), orientale (Asian), and exotique (some of the above).  The one closest to us stocks the Asian foods we are most familiar with given our Seattle ties, and lately, I have been there more frequently than usual, adding tamarind paste, miso paste, and lemongrass to my regular purchases of fresh bok choy, soy sauce, noodles, and rice.  This is in part thanks to our purchase of a cookbook from the British-based restaurant chain Wagamama, which we visited twice while in London.  Certainly, Aix restaurants offer la cuisine orientale (Asian food), especially Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese, but what's missing are the Asian fusion foods that are so typical in the bigger U.S. cities, and that we so happily discovered in London.  We miss that amalgam of flavors and menus and ethnic specialties, where lemongrass mixes with soy sauce mixes with ketchup, and Korean noodles find themselves in Japanese miso broths alongside Chinese cabbage.  Some call this 'fake' Asian food, but what is authentic food anyway?

Here in France, one might say we are eating somewhat more authentic national cuisine, as it seems that everyone living here is intimately familiar with this cuisine, with its ingredients, how it's prepared, and how one eats it.  Traditional French foods we've eaten in the past weeks have included les entrées (appetizers) of escargot, or snails, main dishes of daube (meats cooked in wine sauces) or confit de canard (duck legs in their own fat), and plenty of cheeses and desserts.  Our kids' school meals are especially traditionally French, in the number of courses and what they contain.  In the U.S. on the other hand, we have grown up eating from a much broader plate, where meals, even single dishes, are comprised of a variety of ethnic flavors and foods.  When you think about it, all of American cuisine is fusion-based, since most 'American' foods have come to the U.S. via the movement of people across borders, from all directions.  (Much of it comes from immigration processes, but we also must account for the forced migrations and uprootings of peoples too, all of whom have and had their own food traditions.)  In the process, whatever traditional, 'authentic' recipes were brought by immigrants, or slaves, or indentured servants, have been fused to what is locally available (remember the stories of how the natives taught new arrivals how to plant corn?).  Later, the flavors of the meals become more complex with increased interactions with other new arrivals of different backgrounds.  In some respects many so-called traditional foods are not even so similar or authentic anymore to what is made back in the country-of-origin, such as the 'Chinese food' or 'Tex-Mex food' in the United States.  In my own ethnic traditions, even the processes have changed, in the opposite direction; what I learned to prepare from my immigrant mother were the Finnish holiday sweets, made 'authentically' from scratch, where butter pastries were laboriously mixed and folded over and over before being rolled out, and fillings were cooked from scratch, whereas my friends and cousins in Finland just go to the grocery store and buy the cookie doughs and fillings ready made.  The theme, of fusion, is something one recognizes with other social forces too, and not just in relation to food preparation and the meals themselves.  For example, this quarter in my sociology of religion course, we explore how the effects of immigration and the interactions and experiences with new people in a new place often result in new forms of immigrant religious practice.  Surely, these feel authentic to those following them.

As for France, its sources of immigration are much tighter geographically (coming mostly from the south and east), and thus, the external influences on its foods (and other practices) feel narrower or smaller.  There are certainly regional variations in the French cuisine that are influenced in part by the movement of people across borders, from the heavier German-style cuisine in the northeast Alsace region to the Mediterranean flavors here in the south.   Yet, it still seems to me that there is a tighter definition of what French food is and how it is prepared and experienced, and this is shared across the entire country.  Maybe it's because of the French school system's lunch offerings or standardized French geography lessons where children learn about the culinary and viticultural specialties of each region.  Maybe it's the relatively narrower range of foods available in regular grocery stores.  Or perhaps immigrants here face greater pressures to assimilate to French ways; people here are either French or they are foreigners, and fused, hyphenated, French-something or other identities are not as commonly expressed or recognized as they are in the U.S.  Whatever it is, as foreigners here, I feel grateful to be able to experience French cuisine, however authentic it is or isn't, in the place where it originated, while also satisfying my family's hankerings for foods from 'home'.

So, you can just call me a wagamama,* as I cook my way through my new cookbook, creating new fusions of la cuisine fusion, where tonight's Asian-influenced mackerel with soy and ginger was in fact pêche en Méditerranée (fished from the Med's waters) and the spicy vegetable stir-fry consisted of bok choy grown in the French town of Orange, west of here, and the peppers came from Vietnam.

*Or am I?  Apparently, a wagamama is not a mama at all, but a willful person, or even a naughty child, perhaps meant to signify the restaurant chain's philosophy of not following any one food tradition too religiously.  (http://www.wagamama.com/about-us)

Les âmes des vivants et des morts

As I prepare for a new online sociology of religion course, I have been refining how I explain the different approaches to understanding religion and religiosity.  Because sociology is an empirical science, we can only interpret and make predictions about things which we can observe.  Yet, religion is based on faith, faith in unobservable thus untestable forces, such as sacred beings and supernatural forces, after-lives and human souls.  In sociology, we can't assess the actual existence of these 'religious truths', and this often upsets or confuses my students initially, particularly those who hold religious beliefs.  My job over the course of a quarter though is to show that while sociology can't speak to the veracity of religious beliefs, it does recognize that religion is a very real social force, one which gives deep meaning and purpose to many people.  Through sociology, we can see how religion unifies people, divides them, how it interacts with other social institutions like political and economic systems, and how it remains important, even in the face of scientific or other secular beliefs.

The conflicts and misunderstandings underlying different conceptions of life and our world are all around us.  I have just finished reading the remarkable story of the living HeLa cancer cells that were unknowingly contributed by a poor black woman back in the 1950's (see The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot).  I am drawn to the vastly different ways the people in this story relate to the human body, particularly to the tissue taken from one particular body.  We learn how the doctors saw the living body as something to fix, something from which they could relatively harmlessly excise tissue in order to study it (and from which they did a second time after the body was no longer living).  The laboratory scientists and technologists tried to mimic the body by creating different kinds of culture media in which to try to grow and feed the cells in the excised tissue.  In the beginning, they also sometimes transported the living cells in tubes carried in pockets near their own bodies.  The tissue itself seemed distant from the body from which it came, until one lab worker noticed the painted toenails on the body during the autopsy and poignantly recognized that the collected tissues had come from a real person.  Eventually, the propagating cells from the tissue became a wildly successful commercial product, one which unfortunately did not benefit the descendants of Ms. Lacks.  To her family, the living tissue was confusing, in part because of their deep religious beliefs; was Henrietta alive, could she be brought back to life, could she be cloned, where was her soul or her spirit if part of her body was still alive?  There was a great deal of disconnect between what the Lacks' family understood and believed, and what the researchers and their staffs did.  In part, such different understandings reflect how deeply rooted questions of faith can be, whether the faith is in science or religion or even in the market, and how difficult it can be to find common ground.

In France, conflicts between religious and other views bubble up here and there.  A secular state such as this one officially and publicly has no place for religion, and any overtly religious expression is not allowed in public settings.  As of 2011, this applies to the wearing of the burka by Muslim women.   To French women who do wear the burka, the prohibition is untenable because it forces them to go against their deepest beliefs, and so we continue to see misunderstandings between secular and religious interpretations (see French police injured in row over burka, by Henry Samuel, The Telegraph, July 26, 2012).  On the other hand, the French have been able to marry other religious elements into their secular society to some degree without too much conflict.  I have pointed out earlier how Catholic religious holidays and rituals remain important calendrical markers (for example, see Encadrement).  Coincidentally, it's La Toussaint (All-Saints or All-Souls Day) again, a convenient date on the religious calendar around which to schedule a secular two week school holiday and bank holiday.  Yet there must be some lingering religious meaning to this time of year too, judging from the persistent and popular ritual of visiting cemeteries and family burial plots to leave potfuls of mums.  (I first noticed this ritual last year, see Un week-end champignons.)  Do the French believe in les âmes des vivants et des morts (the souls of the living and the dead), like the family of Henrietta Lacks that I mentioned above?  Maybe, maybe not.  One can certainly follow rituals without attributing any religious meaning to them, and the meaning of the ritual can shift to take on less religious undertones.  It may be that it just feels good or right to remember one's ancestors, to sweep off their gravestones, and to leave huge pots of chrysanthemums in mid-autumn, without attributing any of this to a belief in these ancestors' souls.  (The photos here show the special flower market adjacent to Cimetière St. Pierre in Aix, and burial plots within the cemetery adorned with fresh pots of flowers.)  The point is that religion remains salient, whether we are in 21st century secular France, or in the acclaimed hospitals and centers of scientific research of the past century and today.  Even when religion seems overshadowed by medical advances, secular laws, and empirically based discoveries, the influence of religious traditions and the persistence of religious beliefs and behaviors show us that religion remains a potent social force, one that helps many people interpret their world and their place in it.

Noms et prenoms

What a difference a year makes!  After a steep learning curve last September, this year we have managed la rentrée (what the French call the return to school, work, and normal life after the summer holidays) quite nicely.  By ourselves, we have purchased our own school supplies at Carrefour and Geant Casino, completed the forms for school, written our own checks for school lunches and sports registrations, and arranged our French classes.  It helps that our French has improved (not greatly, but enough) and we understand better how the French do things.  Yet, as I wrote many months ago, learning the customs in a new social environment, whether it is a school, social group, or even a society, is often a remarkably humbling experience, (see Humilité), and it is also a persistent one.  After one year, the lessons continue!  Here's my latest one:

To start the school and sports year off right, I decided while sitting at the sidelines of a soccer tournament last weekend, to engage my closest and most patient French friend with compiling a list of names, of my boy's teammates and their families.  It still amazes me that last year, I managed to faire les bises (kiss cheeks) with people multiple times a week at youth sport practices and matches yet I barely learned anyone's names.  It's like these weren't important.  I never even learned the soccer coach's last name last year.  In contrast, in the U.S., we have rosters and lists with the contact information, for sports teams, classrooms, schools, clubs, employee groups.  And, when we greet each other with handshakes, at least the first time, we almost always exchange first names.  In the first week of any U.S. course that I teach face-to-face, I memorize all of my students' names, to create more direct connections between me and them and to facilitate more active student participation during the course.  (I really do!  I do not however retain the 40 names in my head beyond the quarter, as I have new names to memorize and limited cerebral capacity.)  Here in France, upon meeting someone new, I have taken to introducing myself by saying my first name while exchanging kisses.  I think though that in that side-by-side motion of les bises, rather than with the direct gaze that comes with facing someone and speaking one's name while shaking hands, the French person is not really understanding the pronunciation of my Finnish name, and I certainly can barely make out the mumbled response.  (Did he just say Laurent? Vincent? Or did I hear a different sound at the end; was that Florian? Julian? Lucien?)

 

So, last Saturday, my friend and I began making a soccer team list for me, and it quickly became a game for some of the other parents on the team who joined in.  The entries grew into a list of the prenoms (first names) of players, parents AND siblings, even some of whom I'd never seen at any matches or were long grown up.  It became clear that the parents didn't all know each other's names even though most of the team had been together for almost two years.  Names were being tossed around, guessed at, and then spelled to me in rapid-fire French.  At one point, a soccer dad looked a bit startled when asked by one of my helpers for his absent daughter's name.  I piped up, explaining that I was trying to learn everyone's names, and I added, with a smile, that perhaps I could greet him by name the next time I saw him.  He didn't look relieved or convinced by this, even though we have exchanged dozens of bises with each other by this point and have attended at least 2 tournaments and many trainings together.  When I decided I also needed everyone's noms (last names), I passed the notepad over to a helper so that the French names could be written down more quickly.  After we accounted for all the players, the list was done, the game was over, and I put away my notepad.

I later realized that the list wasn't actually complete because we had forgotten to list the coach and his daughters.  I also realized that no one had thought to ask the names in my family.  Did the others not care about our names?  Why was this such a novel thing, to compile a list of names?  Nadeau and Barlow in their insightful book, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why we love France but not the French, suggest that the French conceptions of public and private spaces, behavior, and information differ from those of North Americans and I would say, of many northern Europeans as well.  The authors relate an experience which in a North American context amounts to a fairly intimate exchange, a visit into someone's home.  In France, such a visit has different implications, and it does not automatically imply that the names of the visitors or hosts will be exchanged.  Imagine visiting someone's home without learning their name!  Nadeau and Barlow suggest that exchanging names and occupational information in the French context amounts to a very private, intimate exchange, whereas having someone over for aperos (drinks) is a public, social activity that does not require the exchange of personal information.  The same must be true of sports events; the French families spend hours and hours together, eating together, and watching the children play their hearts out together, sometimes with great emotion, but to them, we are not in a social setting, or participating in a social activity that requires us to know the names of the people around us.  Clearly there are some different understandings and perspectives of what is private and intimate information and behavior, and what is fairly public or open.

Given my bicultural upbringing, I have had lots of experience switching between cultural contexts and with changing behaviors to match those contexts.  I'm sure those experiences have helped me and my family 'go local' here in France.  We can follow the customs, but sometimes we haven't immediately understood why the customs are the way they are.  It helps to remember that people see their social worlds in different ways for all kinds of reasons.  After all, it's partly the sociologist in me that makes me need to figure out people's identities.  I want to know where they are from, what social groups they are a part of, and what they do.  Knowing people's  names helps me sort them.  I do understand why that soccer dad does not mind being nameless, or maybe even prefers it, given the social world he lives in.  My world though is highly colored by my sociological perspective and my multicultural life; in that world, I need to know who this father is!

Les files d'attente

In a French book I just finished, about the experience of the two young French brothers who survived the Titanic sinking (as it is imagined by the daughter of one of those survivors, Les enfants du Titanic: l'histoire vraie de deux rescapées, Elisabeth Navratil, 2012), I learned a very useful phrase, les files d'attente (the waiting lines).  I have written about waiting lines in France several times earlier, and unlike what must have been a line of increasingly desperate and impatient Titanic guests waiting to get on life boats, the French in general seem to endure waiting lines more complacently and certainly very frequently.  The French faire la queue (stand in line) multiple times a day, at the grocery store cheese counters, check- out aisles (see Je ne sais quoi), bakeries and butchers, and I've been told more than once to take a book with me if I need to do business at the government offices for car registrations and immigrations (see Les Documents for a remarkable photo of the wait list screen at the Marseille prefecture last summer that shows how slowly government workers seem to move; only the officer at counter 10 was seeing a client, #828, at that moment, while there were hundreds of others waiting to see someone about their immigration papers.).  I have also recounted the rain that preceded my driving theory exam (Humilité) but I neglected to mention the nearly 2 hour wait for the start of the exam: scheduled time 8:00 am, actual time after 10:00.  I can tell you now that that experience was followed some weeks later by another file d'attente, this time in the hot sun in a dingy parking lot, for the practical driving exam.  The posted time of the exam, 9:45, was actually the time that the four students from my driving school were to arrive at the parking lot, driven over by one of our instructors.  After a private conference between the instructor and examiner, each student drove off with both instructor and examiner for about 25 minutes while the rest of us waited.  My exam, the last one, was underway finally around 11:15.  (Despite the heat and too much time to worry, I did pass, by a comfortable margin.  Even there though, the French tested my patience, because I had to wait an entire day for the results!)

While it might seem that there is some French exceptionalism to waiting in line, it is also very likely that French companies and organizations are quite aware of and use the copious scientific data available on line-waiting.  Alex Stone describes some of this research briefly in his recent New York Times piece.  ("Why Waiting is Torture." August 18, 2012. The New York Times online ).   For example, psychological studies suggest that consumers wait in lines more easily and with less complaining when they are occupied.  The larger supermarkets in Aix keep their shoppers who carry les cartes de fidélité (club cards as we call them in the U.S.) busy by letting them scan their own groceries with individual, handheld scanners, as they shop.  The shoppers then place the goods into their carts, directly into bags they have brought from home.  Then, these special shoppers stand in separate, purportedly shorter, automated check-out lines to process their scanned purchases.  The time-savings is questionable though, as we have been stymied more than once by long check-out lines for completing these transactions and by 'error' messages requiring assistance from clerks anyway.  Consumers though feel less frustrated if they are doing something worthwhile even if the wait isn't shortened.  At another smaller grocery store, I can get the weather report and my weekly horoscope on the television screens above the check-out area as I wait for the customers ahead of me.

Another line-waiting 'trick' detailed in the research is to provide customers with a sense of their progress in line, as they also tend to be more satisfied when they feel they are moving along quickly.  The inflated waiting times at Disneyland attractions as described in Stone's article are likely mimicked by French companies.  Recently, while waiting to chat online with a customer service representative at Orange.fr, my French cell phone service provider, I was periodically updated with my 'wait status', and even if there really weren't 10 customers ahead of me already chatting, I was able to do something else at my desk while tracking the dwindling number of chatters ahead of me until it was my turn.  It seems we all appreciate knowing that there is a clear end to our waiting.  I can tell you that when confronted with uncertainty in this regard, the French are every bit as impatient as people elsewhere.  We hear furious car horn honking multiple times a day as files d'attente appear along our narrow old town street when delivery personnel stop their vehicles suddenly to make a delivery, or as private individuals load or unload their cars or parallel park their cars into tiny spaces or simply can't decide which way to go.  I have even been yelled at by an impatient, rude, gesticulating French driver as I was standing on the street when my departing visitors held him up for a few minutes as they loaded their car with their luggage.  That was at once a uniquely French experience as much as it was a universal one.

L'estival

You might think that in a place with nearly endless sunshine and light, summer's arrival would be rather unremarkable.  In fact, the rituals associated with the start of l'estival (summer) are quite pronounced here, in the South of France.  It seems we spent all weekend welcoming the Provençal sun in its new season.

First, to celebrate the summer solstice, we enjoyed la fête de la musique (the celebration of music) on Thursday, June 21.  The tradition of free music in the streets until the wee hours of the morning is actually relatively young, 30 years old, but it is widespread throughout France.  Aix's fête (party) is well-known in Provence because there are so many stages set up throughout the many squares, so the music-lover has much to choose from, from the French pop, rock, blues, classical, reggae-style, orchestral, and so on.  Aix also has more reliable weather (some fêtes were canceled last Thursday due to bad weather in some more northerly French cities).  There were thousands of people in Aix on Thursday, more than we've ever seen, and of all ages, walking around listening to all kinds of music, drinking wine or beer, and occasionally the harder stuff.  Everyone warned us that the crowd gets a little crazy after 9 pm when the alcohol kicks in among the younger set and that there would be bottles and trash everywhere the next morning.  We didn't encounter anything too wild when we turned in after 11 pm, although the pulsating bass beat from the rock venue was audible until after 2 am.  Surprisingly, we found the stages largely disassembled and stacked for removal and the streets cleaned when we and the rest of Aix groggily wandered out to school and work the next morning.

On Saturday, we headed à la plage (to the beach) to La Couronne to celebrate a family birthday, and for many around us, it was no doubt the first visit to the beach for the summer.  Going to the beach is a true rite of summer here, and after some trial runs last summer and twice this spring (one visit to introduce the Med to my sister's family and another with the football team families), we are getting the drill down, especially for the late afternoon/dinner time beach outing.  The picnics at any time can be quite elaborate (salads and main courses and of course wine) as is the equipment (special beach blanket, cutlery, maybe even a table, or a sun shade of some sort).

Unexpectedly, I also got my midsummer bonfire on Saturday night after our beach visit, as Aix closed its main street again, this time for Les feux de la St. Jean (St. John's fire).  A bonfire in honor of St. John is traditional in Finland on midsummer also, a tradition which I have enjoyed many times, and it appears to be a re-created Provencal tradition as well.  The effect was a little different here though, as the bonfire was built just adjacent to the famous Rotonde fountain, on a city street, rather than on a northern lake, and the French pompiers (firefighters) were all ready with their fire hoses uncoiled and fire uniforms on in case the bonfire got out of control and spread to the dry trees and other vegetation nearby.  Not only that, the chaleur (heat) from the bonfire was doubly intense because the air itself was already so warm, and the Provençal dancers and musicians in their costumes carefully danced as far away from the heat as they could.

And finally, we marked the end of school and the end of sports' seasons this weekend.  Because of exam schedules, our boys effectively finished school on Friday, and both boys' sports clubs had grand fêtes (big club-wide parties) today.  The football club party that I attended for over 6 hours today (nothing happens quickly here) involved les apéros (appetizers and cocktails), a barbecue with sausages, chicken, tabouli, pasta salad, capped by the big event, the concours de boules (boules competition).  Boules is a very popular summer game here,  although I was told that hard-core players play year round.  It resembles the Italian bocce ball game and lawn bowling.  Nearly every family had brought a sacoche boules (a boules bag containing 3 boules each, an assortment pictured here), and there were enough players of all ages that I counted 14 games taking place simultaneously on the gravel soccer pitch with teams of 2 playing against each other, all in the intense sunlight.  This game is taken quite seriously; the points were carefully tallied between each set, with careful protocols governing who threw when, and afterwards, everyone shook hands.

I never thought welcoming summer could be so demanding or that it would be quite so important here.  But, l'été (another word for summer) signifies an extended time of leisure for the French and it does make sense that such a season would be welcomed with great fanfare and rituals, even in places where sunshine is a regular occurrence.  We are still trying to get into the French and Provençal seasonal rhythms ourselves, but the rituals we participated in this past weekend, the imminent arrival of summer guests, and a week's vacation in July should help us move right along.

Je ne sais quoi

During a break in my two-hour driving lessons this week, my driving instructor lit up a cigarette comme d'habitude (as usual) and asked me about sociology.  I explained to her in my limited French that one thing we do is look for patterns in social interactions and that many social patterns are in fact universal across societies.  She was skeptical and suggested that in France, the social classes are quite distinctive and separate from each other.  I suggested to her that all societies have social classes or social distinctions of some type, but that it is mostly in the details that the differences exist between societies.  This is perhaps the main point of most of my blog posts over the past 11 months.  Social or cultural differences exist, but by and large, culture itself is the same force in France as it is in the U.S. or anywhere else.

For example, this past weekend, we spent an entire day with French families, first at an all-day soccer tournament in another French riviera town, St. Cyr-sur-Mer and then at a barbecue in the evening among friends closer to Aix.  The language we spoke all day was not our own, but the interactions, the conversation topics, the way we spent our time were all very familiar.  We have found a new football club for next year with similar esprit d'équipe (team spirit) and inclusiveness as we had in Seattle.  The families all support each other, traveling, sitting and picnicking together at the tournaments we've attended.  Over the course of the past Saturday, we shared chairs, coffee, snacks, we cared for the coach's young daughters, and we even celebrated the end of the saison (season), with a team visit to the beach to cool off in the Med.  Later in the evening, our family attended a barbecue at my husband's colleague's home among friends we have met through him and his wife.  Like in Seattle, we shared stories, jokes, and observations over delicious food and good wine; the bonus was that we actually could follow some of the conversations better and participate more actively.

Both social events thus were very similar to our experiences at home, but in the cultural details they were different.  First, there is that way that the French have, to take things so easily, that je ne sais quoi (this means literally, 'I don't know what', and we use it to signify an undescribable quality).  The endless waiting at soccer tournaments is nothing new to us, but as we got into the afternoon, still under the unrelentless southern sun with some of us sitting on the bare ground, and with the lack of any posted information about the next matches or if we'd qualified for the remaining rounds, my family was beginning to get antsy.  Yet no one else was sighing, or rolling their eyes, and the kids, young and old, were amazingly patient over the long hours, entertaining themselves with our son's i-pod or playing different kinds of games with a soccer ball.  As we've noticed at many other tournaments, the French families seem to rarely obsess about time or the lack of information, good parking options or plentiful bathroom facilities.  They just shrug and patiently hang out.  I've seen this same je ne sais quoi at the grocery store when a growing line of shoppers stands expressionlessly while the little old lady at the front counts out her coins and slowly packs her grocery sack.  Even the cashier sits patiently.  Such nonchalance also extends to social evenings, where arrival times are never expected to be precise, we can bring something to share or nothing, and the meals begin and end late.  It seems our family is always the first to leave these evenings, this time departing the barbecue 'early', at midnight, just after eating dessert.  

I have a theory that the quality of taking things easily is related to cigarette smoking. Unlike in the U.S. where we encounter very few cigarette smokers in our social circles, there are many, many adult smokers here (and unfortunately young ones too), spread across all social classes.  I figure that almost half of the football parents smoke as does the coach (and he is not the only coach we know who smokes regularly), and on our other son's rugby team, I'd say half of the mothers smoke, and among our French friends outside of sports, perhaps one-third smoke.  My driving instructor smokes, and all along our street, rug merchants, tattoo parlor owners, hair stylists, and restaurant staff all stand outside for short smoke breaks many times a day.  Cigarette smoking is not looked down upon here; it is a cultural norm, and the act of smoking itself does force one to slow down.  Yet, because it's so common, I have begun to wonder if the effects of the nicotine in fact help foster the relaxed attitudes that the French have about schedules, parking, and waiting?  Because I've never been a smoker, I can't say for sure, but might the apparent cultural distinction be related to a physiological effect resulting from nicotine?  I say this, because I happen to know that despite the apparent casualness towards planning, the French families are just like our family friends in Seattle in that they spend time and energy preparing and organizing.  They prepare lovely meals for guests and have endless bottles of wine, they put together amazing salads and snacks for tournaments, they pack their cars with portable picnic equipment and parasols and even bathing suits for possible beach outings.  This is all a lot of work.  Maybe the smoking helps lower the stress of remembering the details?  Whatever it is, we are not planning to adopt the smoking habit ourselves, but I think we are beginning to learn to take things quite a bit more easily here.  That's a good thing, especially now, when the summer heat makes everything slow down anyway.

Bisous et autre échanges sociaux

I wrote many months ago about how our boys are learning the language and customs of their current home not just through school but also through sports (see Le Foot, 9/23/11).  One particular custom that they have had to embrace very quickly here in Aix en Provence is the exchanging of cheek kisses.  This particular échange social (social exchange) is very important all over France, but is even more widely practiced in the south and not just between men and women.  Our boys had to get into the act pretty quickly as young athletes are more or less expected to line up and greet each coach properly on each cheek at every meeting.  For my spouse and me, the first few months at les entraînements (sports trainings) and weekend matches were awkward; the French parents and coaches didn't really know how to talk with us, let alone how to greet us.  With la bise (cheek kiss), or a handshake, or no eye contact altogether?  The interactions have changed considerably after the recent holidays and after we've indicated firmly that we can faire la bise (give a kiss), even though it still feels like a fairly intimate greeting and I have to stifle my instinct to put out my hand.  Now I can expect to greet and be greeted on the cheeks at any sports training or match by easily a dozen people, some of them with smacking lips, others with grizzly or cool cheeks, some with two kisses, others with four, but all of them cordial.  This past Wednesday, I arrived towards the end of Saku's football practice, and spent the first five minutes exchanging 10 bisous before I was able to sit down and bavarder en peu (chat a little).  After the practice ended, another 5-10 minutes was spent exchanging more kisses with two entraîneurs (coaches) and five 12-year old boys who marched over, making sure they greeted even la mère américaine (the American mother).  Cheek-kissing your way to and out of sports trainings and Sunday matches is very normal here, and my spouse says that at the office, one makes similar rounds in the morning, greeting one's co-workers.  One sees this in town too, between grocery clerks and restaurant workers going on and off work shifts.

We're not just exchanging kisses though.  Increasingly, the weekly sports trainings and matches are also places in which, through the limited but growing conversational exchanges we are able to have, we are building our social networks and our trove of social capital.  In my sociology of family course, we speak of social capital as something rather like financial capital, both of which families need in order to survive or achieve successful outcomes.  Most of us have social capital in the form of family, friendship, neighborhood, work, and school networks which we use to find information, services, jobs, and other important resources.  Building new social networks when one moves takes time and energy though, and the challenge is even greater when the networks have to be built in a language that one does not speak well.  Certainly, school networks are often the easiest avenue for building social capital, but we've found that meeting busy French parents via a large French public middle school is pretty difficult, and that the connections built on the sidelines of trainings and sports matches have come much more easily.  French soccer and rugby families have helped us get rides for the boys when our single automobile has made it impossible to be at two matches at the same time, and these families fill us in on weekend game times, locations and other important information, like local football club gossip shared over a goûter (snack) one fall afternoon.  This past week, a rugby family very kindly helped us find and get an estimate from a reliable garagiste (garage mechanic) at a carrosserie (auto body shop) for, ahem, a little dent we acquired on our car recently.  All of these social exchanges have added to the capital we need in order to live here successfully.

We've also had some very useful social exchanges with my spouse's co-workers, our French teacher, my Anglophone book group members, and the staff and fellow students at our new auto-ecole (driving school).   Even the limited school connections have been valuable; these led us to Jori's current piano teacher and to our initial apartment, as well as to some new friendships.  It is also through school that we will likely begin to repay some of the initial social capital 'investments' that were kindly made in us by the locals here.  As our boys are just about to start their last trimester of their first school year, we will soon no longer be the newbies here, needing so much help.  We've already been asked to share our perspective on the boys' school to some prospective American families, and I'm sure it will just be a matter of time before I am asked about school supplies, sports clubs memberships, French driver's licenses, and all this kissing.

Leçons françaises

At the end of January, we will have been in Provence, and in France, for 6 months.  You might be wondering how our French is coming along.  From the start of school in early September, both the boys, and Allen and I, have had des leçons françaises (some French lessons), the boys at school, and Allen and I privately, at our home.  The boys were put into a special beginning French for foreigners class with just a few other students, and while they may have felt that progress was slow initially, at les réunions de parents d'élèves (parent-teacher conferences) in December, their French teacher seemed pleased with their progress (at least that's what I understood as the conference itself was in French!).  This week both boys remarked that they feel they have made a huge amount of progress in understanding French.  Some subjects, such as SVT~sciences de la vie et de la terre (biology and earth sciences) remain difficult, even for the native speakers, and some teachers are a bit more willing to make accommodations than others to beginning French speakers.  Overall, the school has been quite supportive of our boys, and what the boys learn there is being reinforced by the opportunities to speak and hear French elsewhere.  They can order meals for themselves, as they did today at burger joint with some friends after their early Friday dismissal, they can get themselves to and from their sports trainings, and they bring new phrases home to share over the dinner table: c'est pas grave (it's no big deal, or it's not serious), or ça veut dire quoi? (what does that mean?).

As for Allen and me, we are putt-putting along with our twice a week lessons at home with our French professor.  With her, we focus on dialogues in our French book, or we discuss a current event or something in our lives (like apartment-hunting or ultrasound terms), building our vocabularies and grammatical skills.  Thanks to what we have learned, we are now able to arrange occasional rides to the boys' games or tournaments with French families, buy some major appliances and arrange delivery to our apartment, order food, like a 4-kilo turkey for Christmas, from the local butcher, and renew Allen's residency card at the sous-prefecture.  I am pleased that I can now understand the automated voice commands on my mobile phone well enough to delete old messages!  Most telephone transactions remain difficult though, so I relied on a native French speaking friend to set up the utilities in our new apartment, and Allen's co-workers have also helped.  Because of his work, Allen has more opportunities to speak and hear French than I do, although English is spoken quite a bit at the office.  His French comes with a German accent (he spent 6 months in Germany as an exchange student in high school and speaks German well).  If you've read any of the French Tintin comic books in translation, Allen sounds like one of the Teutonic villains in Tintin's adventures, all of whom pronounce the soft French cee sounds as zee's.  

We haven't yet seen the new film, but the comic books, in the original French, comprise Jori's and my new favorite French reading material.  We can actually read and understand the stories, and for me, I appreciate the reinforcement of the relative pronouns or an imperative verb form that I have just learned (although it took a French friend to point out to me that Tintin is pronounced tan-tan in French, not tin-tin like we say in English!)


Going back to the German, I am finally at the point where my French vocabulary is big enough that when I'm searching for a word, I'm no longer thinking of the German equivalent, as I was when we first came in August.  In fact, a bittersweet thing has happened in that my German, which I studied in high school and at university for six years, is being replaced by French.  I have realized this over the past few months as I have had the opportunity to speak German with a soccer parent originally from Strasbourg, and a local wine salesman from Düsseldorf, and each time I meet either of them, I find myself tongue-tied, saying oui instead of ja (yes) and mais instead of aber (but), and fewer and fewer words in German come to me.  It's an interesting phenomenon because while the German is being undermined, my Finnish does not feel at all impaired.  Linguists have long noted that children and adults acquire second languages differently, and UW neuroscientists who study language acquisition suggest that second language learning early in life may affect the brain's flexibility in how it learns and uses languages and perhaps even stores them  (see for example, http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/bilingual-babies2019-vocabulary-linked-to-early-brain-differentiation).  Perhaps languages learned in early childhood, such as my Finnish, occupy a different part of the brain or are accessed differently, than languages acquired later in life, as German was for me.  If so, that space where the German is or was in my brain isn't very large or deep, as I seem to have quickly cleared it out for the language I need at my disposal the most right now.  That said, my bigger issue is having enough opportunities to speak a more sophisticated French.  Because I work at home, spending many hours each morning online working in English, I supplement my lessons at home with a weekly or bi-weekly episode of Coffee Break French (see http://radiolingua.com/shows/french/coffee-break-french/ ) or I listen to French radio while I chop vegetables or wash dishes, and I read the French papers online as much as I am able.  I am comfortable with and rather enjoy taking care of business with emails or sms-messages in French, but speaking and understanding spoken French is really where I need to improve.  Most days, the only spoken French I typically exchange is with vendors or shopkeepers, or sports coaches.   It's not terribly conducive to getting my French to the next level, as I'm ready to move on from passé composé (present perfect tense) and to be able to say more than avez-vous la coriandre aujourd'hui? (do you have any cilantro today?).  I'm also quite motivated to stay ahead of my kids, so I'm thinking about how to accelerate my language learning.

All in all, our language situation at this point, almost six months in, c'est bon (it's good).  We're managing fine, and for me anyway, I am quite inspired by the non-native French speakers around us who have mastered enough of the language to be able to manage more complex transactions (like setting up their own utilities or completing French tax returns?!), and by my children's progress.  Most of all, I am especially grateful to our French friends who include us in social occasions where we can experience French in its most natural settings, as it is spoken among family members over meals, or among friends celebrating events like fête du rois (Epiphany) last weekend.  Those are the places for real language learning.

Le shopping

Here we are in that last shopping week of the year, when you would think we are all tired of shopping, but in fact, Aix is hopping with shoppers and window-lickers (in French, window-shopping is the highly descriptive window-licking, lèche-vitrine).  The little huts in the Christmas market are still up and open for business, as are the children's rides, and the holiday lights continue to shine.  I have not seen much by way of after-Christmas sales, although after Christmas appears to be the beginning of the sale season for household towels and linens.

Shopping these past few months has shown us how the retail trade here appears to be much less in favor of the client or customer than we are accustomed to.  We have had numerous social interactions with shopkeepers and clerks that seem to suggest that making the sale does not seem to be the top priority.  Here are just a few examples.  A few days before Christmas I stopped in at a local specialty wine/food shop that I have patronized several times and which was open earlier than usual for the holidays.  This is one of those shops throughout France that is closed at lunch, (pity the lunch time shoppers), and which opens late on Mondays or not at all.  I was hoping to purchase some wine accessories and asked for a particular color that I had seen in the shop window.  You'd think I was asking for the world, given the responses from the sales clerk and the matron positioned behind the cash register.  And then when the item was located elsewhere and rung up, neither offered to gift wrap my items, yet such service was offered to me previously.  (This also happens to be the shop with ne pas toucher signs all over; don't touch the goods!)  In Paris last week, we were at a shopping center along Boulevard du Montparnasse that was open until 8 pm, and while standing in a check-out line at one shop, we noticed that the security guard stationed by the front door was turning away customers already at 7:30!  (So the sales staff would not have to work too many minutes past closing time?)  Another time, a few months earlier, I needed some assistance at the local Monoprix department store in Aix.  After I finally understood that I should go to the accueil (welcome desk),  I was stunned to find the grumpy woman there shaking her head at me and telling me she could not understand me so therefore could not help me.  Now, why would the staff at such a store in a town like Aix, that attracts lots of tourists and is full of international students, not be able to offer a friendly welcome and make an effort to understand its customers, regardless of the language barrier?  It's a little surprising that she was not able to speak English since I've had the experience elsewhere in Europe where large department stores specifically hire multilingual sales staff.  Maybe the customer service clerk chose not to speak English!?  We've had several instances when that has happened, when we have muddled along in French and strained really hard to understand some important transactional details that were being explained to us, only to discover that the clerk could speak and understand English.  For example, we struggled at our bank branch for many months, and on one visit, the bank manager suddenly said something to us in flawless English.  Our jaws dropped, and then closed, and we have never heard her speak English again.  Of course, we WANT to use French as much as possible, but sometimes, especially in matters like banking, if some important point could be clarified in English, like the fact that we have a limit on cash withdrawals each week, we would be ever so grateful! 

On the other hand, I've had some examples of superb customer service.  Just this week, a friendly frame-shop owner patiently listened to my mangled French, helped me select a simple frame/mat for a large photograph of Aix that I had brought to her shop, and agreed to frame the print in less than 24 hours!  I received a text on Christmas Eve morning that the gift was framed and ready for pick-up, and it was beautifully wrapped for me.  Similarly, a few weeks before this, I stopped in at a linen shop for some French linen rideaux (curtains) for the front windows of our new apartment.  After some exhaustive discussions with the kind young shop clerk (whom I didn't understand fully), I purchased a sweet set of white linen roman shade style curtains edged with lace for the kitchen (they attach with velcro, so the inward-opening windows are not obstructed), and 2 long linen drapes in alternating off-white and beige stripes with ties at the top for the salon/salle à manger (living/dining room).  I was already sighing with happiness about the exquisite linen I was buying when the store clerk surprised me by telling me that I could return my curtains for a store exchange, if they for some reason did not work out.  (That is the only time I have ever been apprised of a return policy at any French shop.)  Needless to say, I shall give these shops my future business, and I even popped in the next day to thank the young sales associate after I'd successfully hung my drapes.  Another place I take my business regularly, even though it's out of my way and is not our regular branch is to the Aix post office just outside the old town.  I truly enjoy going there because the staff are friendly, patient, able to understand broken French, and plentiful.  Not bad for a branch of the civil service!  Finally, to be fair, I am happy with the grocery delivery service at Monoprix, and I do shop at the store regularly.  We've had good luck and bad luck with several other delivery services, because apparently, delivery to one's front door is not necessarily automatic, if you live on the troisième étage (fourth floor).

Clearly, just like in other places, there is good customer service and there is bad customer service.  What seems to be different from our shopping experiences in the United States, where the customer is always right and poor customer service is a death-knell for business, is the feeling that some French retailers do not care about their customers.  Yet, these shops remain in business, some for a long time, and the French patronize them.  That suggests that there is perhaps something else going on, that goes beyond basic economic principles, something more...yes, sociological.  That is, shopping, here and elsewhere, may be governed by different kinds of social rules.  Making shopping easy for the customer, being personable or even grateful, these are simply not a necessary part of the interaction between seller and buyer here.  The French also perhaps appreciate and look for certain quality markers in their shopping more so than we do in the States.  For example, there is a baker in town who attracts customers not because the customer service is terrific but because he has the prestigious Meilleur Ouvrier de France title (see the wikipedia entry explaining this uniquely French status symbol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meilleur_Ouvrier_de_France)  Other shops may sell small batches of artisanal or French-grown products or they may have a well-known family name associated with their business.  It may be that the French simply value these marks of quality or status more than they do customer service with a smile. 

Beaujolais nouveau

This past Thursday, the French gave thanks....for the release of this year's Beaujolais wine (and they call this release the Beaujolais nouveau, the new Beaujolais).  In Beaujolais country, in Lyon, for example, Thursday was a social evening of wine tastings in restaurants all around the city.  In Aix, the celebration is considerably smaller, but we went out for a delicious dinner with our Lyonnaise friends and drank a bottle of this year's new wine.  (For my food-loving readers, I had magret de canard-duck breast, with a delicious puff pastry encasing chévre-goat cheese, a fig and some lard-French bacon, and a cabbage and carrot salad on the side.  Délicieux!)   The funny thing about Beaujolais is that everyone we've talked to, French and otherwise, dislikes Beaujolais wine!  So the release of this very young wine (a friend likened it to grape juice) is largely a marketing ploy by the Beaujolais vintners.  Apparently the wine is popular in Asia and the commercial release is more appreciated in Japan and in other locales than it apparently is here.

The Beaujolais actually would probably go very well with turkey, the center of another celebration of thanks, which we Americans will recognize this upcoming Thursday, and which I have the task of marketing, in a way.  On Thanksgiving, our children will go to school as usual, but they will spend their lunch hour enjoying a Thanksgiving feast at a local restaurant with about 40-45 Collège Mignet section internationale students.  I have been asked, as the token American parent, to speak about the Thanksgiving tradition to these children.  I haven't decided exactly how I will present Thanksgiving, given the myths and realities associated with the origins of our current turkey feast.  (That shared meal between the starving pilgrims and the generous Wampanoags was probably not as friendly, innocent or gracious as we were taught as children, nor did it likely involve fat turkeys, mashed potatoes or glorious pumpkin pies. And, the later ramifications, for the emerging United States, are often celebrated while those for native American societies, are usually overlooked.)  I also cannot avoid seeing the sociological implications of a holiday in which the day's rituals reinforce traditional gender roles and bring to fore intense familial relationships and rivalries that threaten to upend the turkey dinner itself (see Jodie Foster's film Home for the Holidays).  My poor students have to re-examine their own experiences of Thanksgiving each fall quarter, and I'm afraid they never think about Thanksgiving in the same idealized way again.  

The French seem quite interested in the idealized view of Thanksgiving, perhaps because of what they have learned from Hollywood films and other media.  Several French friends are eager to taste a Thanksgiving meal chez nous (at our place) while another French friend seems to recognize that it is an important family holiday.  For our part, we'll be curious to see how the French chefs will interpret the Thanksgiving meal at the local restaurant next week.  Le dinde (turkey) is available here but I haven't seen any 10-12 pound birds at the charcuterie/boucherie (meat shop/butcher), nor have I seen many French ovens that could even accommodate that, let alone the side dishes.  (We'll wait to try after we get settled into our new apartment and our pots and pans finally arrive, something for which I will be truly grateful!)  For dessert at the restaurant, a French parent is making and bringing in the pumpkin pies, which she must be making with the pumpkin-like courges (squash) we've seen at the market.  I shall do my best to offer an engaging explanation of American Thanksgiving, perhaps first by framing it with the idea that many societies have rites of thanksgiving particularly after harvest time.  In this way, Thanksgiving is a typical social ritual.  Then I will recount the loose roots of the American version and the ways in which this day of thanks is celebrated today, with food, family, and American football.  Perhaps that last part will grab the attention of at least some of the kids.