Foreign Perspectives

Archive for February, 2007

Everyone in the world seems to have the impression that French food is the best in the world. But is it? Down in the south of France, the answer is very definitely “no”.The menu that just about all of the local restaurants offer is determined by whatever pre-prepared food they can buy in the local cash & carry. The net effect of this is that there is next to no variation between one restaurant and another as each one serves the same bland diet. In fact the only variation that you’ll find is in the typeface and layout of the menu itself because the cash & carry don’t preprint those.

This is a question that many would like to ask but few are brave enough to actually ask it. The answer is different depending on where in France you choose to live.

If you are aiming for a brit-enclave such as Brittany or the Dordogne, the answer is probably “no” as in those areas it’s quite possible to live within the English-speaking community and to rely on those that make their livelihood supporting it. The only potential difficulty is the mayor’s office (“mairie”) but in the majority of cases they will be able to deal with you in English too. There’s no problem with the likes of tax, electricity and the phone company as all three plus similar outfits have at least one office set up to deal with English speakers (and if there is only one office, that office can deal with you where-ever you are).

Outside the brit-enclaves, it’s a different story and, for the most part, you will need to speak French quite well although it is still possible to deal with tax, electricity, etc. via their English speaking branches. Where you will encounter difficulties is in dealing with the plumber, electrician, school and mayor’s office. Even though we speak degree level French we have found that, for example, some electricians refuse to understand us because they simply don’t want to be bothered working for non-French.

If you aren’t English, then you’ll also find that the French are a good deal more willing to speak English to you. One of the shop local assistants claimed not to speak English for almost three years until they found out that we were from Northern Ireland and Australia when they suddenly became quite fluent English speakers.

So, yes, you could move to France and live here without speaking any French. However, in most cases, you’ll find live that little bit easier as your level of French improves.

I read the other day that there are over a million blogs in the world at the moment which is a pretty staggering number. In practice though, the real number of blogs is much smaller. I don’t think that you can really count a blog that’s not been updated for a few months and many of those blogs counted haven’t been updated for over a year.Why is that though? Simple really: you need something to write about, it takes a fair amount of time to keep it up to date and there’s often little indication that people are reading what you write anyway.

This is one area of 21st century living where France is at best in the 20th century and quite often in the 19th, particularly if you’re a foreigner. As you drive through France, that just about every petrol station of any consequence advertises itself as 24/7. If you look at the small print, you’ll find that outside the normal hours of about 8am to noon and 2pm to about 8pm these stations are automated. Fair enough, after all France is quite rural and a lot of these stations don’t get a lot of business outside normal working hours. The snag is that when they’re automated you almost always have to have a French debit card to use them so they’re not really 24/7 if you’re a foreigner.

This sort-of 24/7 service applies to many things in France. For instance, we recently had a problem with our electricity on a Sunday afternoon. We weren’t expecting to get any help from the local electricans as it’s virtually impossible to get them to do anything as regular readers will know so we thought that we’d try calling those advertising themselves as 24/7. It turns out that the expression “24/7” in France means that they have an answering machine switched on outside normal working hours and don’t actually do any work at the weekend. One consequence of this is that there’s a bit of a backlog of work needing to be done each Monday. As a result, none of the electricians that we called at the weekend arrived ’til after the work had been done by a very competent Dutch electrician on Monday morning.

You usually don’t see French expats online, or at least not in English but I just came across one excellent blog that gives a view (in English) of a French resident in America. Reading it definitely gives me a “foreign perspective” on life from there for sure. Every time I’ve been to America it’s always seemed like home. Well, except in Concorde Mass but then that’s where the War of Independence started so you’d expect some differences there (eg those they call patriots, we’d call terrorists in today’s terms).Yet, even though it’s been a considerable time since America and France were on opposite sides of a war, the French still think that they’re subject to “French bashing” by the Americans. Odd.