Foreign Perspectives

What is it about the French and their toilet habits? Whilst the rest of the world has moved on from pissoirs (in regular use in Paris well into the latter decades of the 20th century), France seems to have maintained their habit of peeing up against a wall.

A very common site in the countryside here is a car stopped alongside the road with a man standing peeing beside it. You might think that a coach would pull into a hotel and use the facilities as they do in other countries. France habits are different. Here, they pull into a hotel car park then the men head toward the hotel wall and the ladies squat beside the nearest hedge or parked car, totally ignoring overlooking windows or security cameras.

Of course, that’s just urine, isn’t it? Well, no, it isn’t. I’ll leave how they deal with “number 2s” along the road to your imagination but it’s certainly not in any kind of sanitary way. After all, why did you think the French invented perfume?

In the rest of the world boats have a holding tank for toilet and other waste water. French canal boats simply empty it straight out the bottom of the boat and the only reason why canal boats aren’t followed by a trail of toilet paper is that it sinks to the bottom. Bet that’s put you off paddling your feet in French canals!

Septic tanks tend to frighten the life out of brits moving to France. Quite rightly too. In the UK they are widely used in the country but there they are built well away from the house although you could quite safely drink the water coming out the other end. In France? Well, we’ve just been to a lovely park with a nice little sportsground and childrens’ playground. A rather smelly sewage plant is right inside the park! We even know of someone who built their septic tank right outside their kitchen window. I think that it’s safe to say that neither would be permitted under UK planning regulations but then who needs regulations to tell them that having a septic tank under your kitchen window isn’t a good idea?

Why can’t they clean up their act and get on like the rest of the world?

For a start, they’re almost all entirely in French. You’re probably thinking, why wouldn’t they be, after all French is the language of France, isn’t it? Well, yes, but the French don’t use the Internet that much so most people looking at the site won’t be French. Last year, the local Chambre of Commerce paid serious cash for a brand new website to attract tourists to the area yet it’s entirely in French when the majority of tourists coming here aren’t French and neither speak nor read French particularly well.

In fact in some cases French sites clearly don’t work and have obviously never been tested. For instance, it’s actually impossible to register for a job interview on the ASSEDIC site if you’ve not had a job before. One reason that we’re registered on very few French listings sites is that few of them actually work; when we looked up one of the local hotels a few years back we found that only one out of about 4 or 5 of the websites that they were listed on worked.

The other thing that’s quite typically French is to have a beautiful website which is totally invisible to google et al because it’s all graphics. For instance, the brand new website for the Sense winebar in Perpignan looks lovely but try turning the graphics off and all you get is the empty screen which is seen by the google bots.

Where there are more sensible developments are with the utilities and banks which generally provide at least a minimalist website in English and you can even phone EDF and France Telecom in English.

Then there’s the comments on the pages. You may have seen a few entries with comments but I’ve received a good deal more comments than that. Snag is that the others are basically spam. That’s actually a good thing though as it shows that the site has a decent profile on the internet (otherwise they’d not bother trying to get their links onto it). Strangely, the vast majority of spam comments target one particular page from early 2005. Thus far, I can’t really see anything particularly special about the page but if the spamming of it keeps up, I’ll have to see about adding something to it to see how they’re finding it. It isn’t a single spammer either as you might think.

Whilst the majority of people running B&B or self-catering places incorporate their blog into their main property site, we don’t. How come? Well, way back we did do that in a way as it was originally known as Mas Camps News. At that time, the bulk of the postings (which represent the early postings in Foreign Perspectives) were related to the property in some way but the later ones were more to do with our life in France and not really that specific to the property. Also, having the FP site separate gives us a lot more freedom in what we can write.

Still, aside from the current lack of feedback, it is quite an enjoyable activity.

The normal landries couldn’t cope with the volume that we needed and were quite expensive so we started looking for an industrial laundry or rather an Laverie Industriel which seemed likely to be the proper phrase for such a thing in that the little laundries were called laveries. We looked, and looked and looked without success. That didn’t really surprise us as the organisation of the French phone book is unbelieveably bad and the yellow pages can only be used to look up the phone numbers of places when you know which town or village they’re in. So we struggled on for a bit and the backlog of ironing built up.

Eventually, one of the local hotel owners called round to say “hi” and we found out where the laundry was. It’s not called a laverie industriel though, it’s called a blanchisserie as you can see from their truck.

One of the things that the laundry deliveries makes quite obvious is that France basically shuts down over the Winter. That changes the running order for laundry volume considerably as we don’t close therefore our little trolley is filled to the top unlike those of the larger hotels which, as you can see, are only about half full.

Anyway, be aware that even if you know the French word for a small version of something, it doesn’t always follow that you can work out the name for the larger version of the same thing.