Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Many things that seem “obvious” in the UK, aren’t in France.

Of course, there are many things that are clearly different between the two cultures and after a while you think that you’ve gotten into the swing of things and can extrapolate into other areas of French life. Everyone knows that it’s common practice to urinate in the streets in France for instance so you turn a blind eye to that after a while as it’s just “something French”, like the streets being constantly full of dog poo. If you thought about it, perhaps you’ve wondered if the French would drop their trousers and do a load in the streets too. Well, I’ve not seen it done in the streets but it’s surprisingly common to see a van pull off the road in the country and the driver head off into the field with a toilet roll.

What about more “universal” things though? Clearly it’s obvious that electricians, plumbers and the like will flock to do even a small job where a large building is concerned. Isn’t it? Well, from a UK-mindset it certainly is obvious. Not so to the French. For them, a small job is always a small job even if it’s in a large building and therefore there are likely to be a lot more similar small jobs in the future with the possibility of a large job now and again.

If you do need something relatively small done, what happens is that the electrician/plumber/etc. will come out (quite quickly if you have a large property) and give you an estimate. He’ll then say that he’ll be back to do the work the next week, or perhaps even later in the same week. After a while in France, you get to consider “next week” as meaning sometime in the next month or two so you’ll wait quite a while before wondering if he’ll actually be back. In fact, if the estimate was for an amount under EUR 500 or so, he will never be back because French tradespeople just can’t be bothered to do work under that level.

Initially, we thought that the reason they didn’t come back was that we were foreigners, we’d said something we shouldn’t have, misunderstood something, or whatever. It’s not that though because our French neighbours told us that it’s typical of the attitude of the local tradespeople: they can’t get any small jobs done either. Want someone to put in an extra electical socket? Either do it yourself, or wait ’til you need the whole house rewired.

The overall effect of this is clear in French towns and villages all over the country. Over a period of time, the bit of the wall where that section of plaster fell off isn’t redone, the door that needed repainted hasn’t been, etc. It’s particularly evident in this area as there are twins of those towns and villages just over the border in Spain. Wherever you look, you’ll see that the French villages are that little bit rundown and if you walk into the backstreets you’ll see houses everywhere that look pretty much derelict from the outside. There are exceptions to this, of course, but they are almost always the houses owned by foreigners who’ve bought an almost derelict house and had it restored. The strange thing is that in equivalent Spanish villages, almost all of the houses look like they’ve been restored yet in many cases the buildings on the French side were built when this area was part of Spain.

The effect is so pronounced that you can pretty much watch the sweep of foreign ownership through the various villages simply by looking at the increasing number that are well maintained.

So does anyone do odd-jobs in France? Yes: the ex-pats do but the French certainly don’t.

That probably seems like an odd question at first glance. How can a country with a fairly major economy be called backward?

Oh, I agree that it has such things as new technology, consumer rights, labour legislation and the like. Unfortunately the belief that anything outside France doesn’t really matter is quite widespread and this negates a large part of those aspects of an advanced economy.

Consider new technology. Yes, France has internet access across most of the country. However, few people use it. Take for example our experiences of the Summer of 2005. Up until then, no French person had every booked online with us but over a six week period during that Summer something like 80% of the French bookings were made online. That’s not a bad percentage as obviously not everyone will book online. Interestingly though, for nearly all of that 80% their booking with us was the first thing that they had ever bought online. They’d never booked a hotel, never reserved a flight, hadn’t even bought a book on Amazon before. This was quite a representative group too which made it even more unusual. So, yes, France is very much a backward nation in terms of internet use in comparison to the rest of the western world.

What about consumer rights? In any supermarket in the UK, you can take back a faulty product and have your money refunded. Try doing that in France sometime. The attitude in the shops seems to be an amalgam of the very worst of practices from decades ago elsewhere. Refuse to pay for a service not delivered? The first reaction is to take you to court because you have to pay for it anyway. Think the bill from your insurance company is too high this year and want to change to another one? Sorry, you had to cancel the insurance two months before we told you what it would cost (no, really, that’s true!). It’s very much a backward country in this area.

Perhaps you think that France was way ahead of the game in introducing chip & PIN technology for its debit cards? It was, 10 years ago. Snag is that as with other things they only considered France so the technology they used couldn’t be rolled out elsewhere. Net effect? France has had to change all it’s card machines to cope with the international chip & PIN standard. Result of this? Chaos. It made life so complicated that all the shops in one local tourist village have stopped accepting all cards.

Note that I said “debit cards” in that paragraph. That’s because, even now, France doesn’t have credit cards in the sense of the term as used elsewhere. Overdrafts don’t exist either. In fact, on the whole France is one of the most backward nations in terms of financial products in the western world.

Labour legislation is one area where France will argue that it’s more advanced than anyone. The problem is that the laws governing employment are so strict that the unemployment level is much higher than it needs to be. Small companies just can’t afford to employ people in the hope that the business will follow: they need to be sure that the business is there because sacking employees is such a long and costly affair.

So, in many respects, France is quite a backward looking country.

In days gone by you could carry quite a selection of items onboard: case (up to 110 cm total dimensions) plus an assortment “personal items” which include such things as a handbag, coat, umbrella, walking stick, camera, a reasonable amount of reading material, essential medication, binoculars and briefcase or laptop. Bring a child and you can add a child seat and can take the pram up to the aircraft door.

Those are the former “official” items that you could bring but, as we’ve all seen, you could bring on bags substantially larger and, of course, you could always buy more stuff in the shops and dutyfree after you checked in which consequently was never weighed and had the overall effect that some people could barely carry the bags onto the plane. So, in reality, nobody paid much attention to the official list of items but even if you did, there was a very substantial chunk of luggage that could legimately be taken onto the plane. That’s before you even consider the exceptions that were always made.

Fly from the UK today and you’ll find that things are a good deal more strict. The case is now down to 55cm (essentially a laptop bag) and the personal items have all but disappeared from the allowances. It’s been a while since you could take a syringe on without proving that you were diabetic but even liquid medicines now require a prescription to prove that you need them.

Also out are the exceptions. So that precious cello that can’t go in the unpressurised baggage hold can’t go which is causing some grief with musicians who travel around.

OK, I do accept that the security risk at the moment means that there will need to be limitations on what can be carried through security checks. However, that’s the point: it’s the security checks that are limiting what can be carried on. The only real reason that you can carry on a 55cm bag is that business in the UK would grind to a halt if laptops couldn’t be carried around as airlines simply aren’t equipped to carry large numbers of fragile items in the hold. Is a 55cm bag packed with electronic equipment “less risky” onboard than a cello? Quite obviously it isn’t: a cello looks very simple on an x-ray, a laptop is anything but simple.

So why not the cello? Well, simply because the authorities don’t want to complicate the life of the security people with growing lists of exceptions. The large number of passengers passing through security checks means that yes/no decisions need to be taken quickly and at very low levels. The people on the ground screening your luggage almost certainly don’t know why they are excluding certain items, just that if an item isn’t on their list then it’s not permitted. Which is, of course, the problem – they need to be educated as to why each restriction is in place. For instance, all liquids, gels and the like are out because numerous explosives come in that form but I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people checking your luggage don’t know that’s the reason.

With some education, perhaps we could get back to a sensible carryon allowance. A 110cm bag full of clothes is much easier to check than a 55cm one with a laptop. For one thing, the complex electronics that make up a modern laptop could easily conceal a bomb timer; that’s even before you consider the battery which usually isn’t transparent on a scanner. In practical terms, I suspect that one extra bag needs to be permitted to carry passports, tickets and the like but I’d be inclined to call a halt beyond that for the majority of people.

When the panic button was pressed in the UK in August, the effects were seen here the next day, but did it have any lasting effect?

The small shop in our local airport doesn’t sell much wine or honey these days as it mainly sold those whilst people were wandering around after they’d checked their luggage. The wineries are none too pleased as there was a considerable amount of wine taken home as hand-luggage before the scare. A pilot who was staying with us recently thought that he’d be able to get his little case of wine onboard by showing his pilots license ’til I reminded him that the guys that flew the planes into the twin towers also had a pilots license.

I was expecting at least some increased level of security on my flight from Barcelona to Santiago but if anything the security was much lower than I’d been expecting. Thanks to the wonders of online check-in I was never even asked if I’d any sharp objects in my luggage, if I’d packed it myself, etc. In fact, the only contact that I had with anyone prior to boarding the plane was when someone had a fairly cursory glance at my passport just before I walked out onto the tarmac.

What about the increased security in the UK airports though? Delays in flight arrivals are much more common as the increased security level means that minor discrepancies result in flights being held until the source is identified. Earlier in the week one of the flights was an hour late because someone had dropped their boarding card for instance. Is that crazy? No, because the effect of the error was that it looked like someone who should have been on board the flight actually wasn’t.

What doesn’t seem so sensible is the very arbitrary reduction in the maximum size of carryon luggage. Is it really a co-incidence that the size corresponds to that of a laptop bag? I doubt that very much. The other aspect is that it now takes much longer to collect luggage from flights as almost everyone has checked baggage these days (quite a nice little earner for the likes of Ryanair with their charge for checked luggage).

I also can’t see that the security staff will maintain their vigilance in picking out potential terrorists. In todays world what they will more than likely do is to stop and question anyone who looks Muslim. OK, I will grant that this tactic will presumably pick out a higher proportion of potential terrorists than just picking out people at random in that the threat is, in practical terms, originating from the Muslim world. However, it’s also going to alienate Muslims in general and it may well sway the views of some middle of the road Muslims towards the anti-west mind-set which isn’t in anyone’s interest.

To indicate how ridiculous this kind of method of picking out potential terrorists can be, consider the flights from Belfast to London 10 years ago. They were all met by a couple of officers from the Metropolitan police. The ONLY people that they stopped to question were men walking by themselves. I used to travel back and forth from Belfast to London quite frequently so was able to experiment with this. If I was travelling on my own, all that I needed to do to avoid being stopped was to walk alongside a woman. Any woman: I didn’t need to speak to her, or do anything other than walk alongside her. I wonder how long it will be before the security people start picking out their subjects for questioning on the basis of some equally silly thinking to “single guy alone = terrorists”?

Arnold

I read an article in the Conexion today about integrating yourself into French society and one piece of advice was to speak French to the kids and ban English TV which set me thinking.

The family giving that advice was effectively robbing their kids of any chance of being bilingual which is a major advantage that you can give your children by living here. Moreover, isn’t that trying to be “more French than the French”? After all, a growing number of the French are finding that speaking English is an advantage in todays world. OK, France as a country may not like that situation, but that’s the reality.

Friends of ours are finding that by only having French TV and having their children going to French school that it is already becoming harder for them to communicate with their 10 year old (they’ve been here about 5 years). She’s not as fluent in English as she is in French and that situation can only get worse (or do you think “better”?) as she gets older. I’m sure that it’s not only her English language that she’s losing but her British culture too.

What about her parents? They only watch French TV so are gradually becoming more detached from the reality of life in the UK. Is that a good thing? I’m sure that they’ll not lose their ability to speak English fluently but if they stay here another 20 years, I suspect that going back to the UK would be like moving to a foreign country. Just look back to 1986 to see what I mean. How much has the UK changed since Thatcher? You don’t fully understand French taxation now I’m sure, but with a 20 year gap, would you understand UK taxation? I think not. Scotland didn’t have it’s own government then but it could even be a separate country in 20 years time: how much would that change UK culture? Even if you’d left as little as ten years ago, chances are you’d not know the English terms for e-mail and the like and be quoting your Minitel address to people. But you get the idea – the longer that they are out of touch with UK life, the more it will seem like a foreign country.

As for your kids: remember that they’ll have spent a much larger proportion of their lives “abroad”, so will they still consider the UK as “home”? What will you do if/when you decide to move back to the UK and they don’t want to move to a “foreign country”? Because, if you’re talking 10 or more years, it would be a foreign country to them.

So how French do you want to be? How French do you want your children to be? How French do you want your grandchildren to be?

They’re not easy questions to answer, but you should think about them.

Arnold