Foreign Perspectives

The really odd thing is that both America and France tend to think in similar ways ie Americans consider only America when they do stuff and likewise France only considers France when they do stuff. So, for example, almost all Internet directories have a “regional” heading to hold everything not in America and in France you still get chip readers only accepting French cards. Likewise both countries pass laws that they consider to have worldwide applicability eg look at the global hassles we now have from American passport requirements and the nonsense of France banning junk e-mail.

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.

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.

In common with most things in France, the dead hand of government is evident here and shops are only allowed to have sales on set periods each year so the “Boxing Day sales” can’t start until January 10th and will end on February 17th (up to the 20th in some Departments). It is, of course, typically French to have overlly strict government regulation where much less is required and, of course, to ignore everything outside France. Amazon France seems to get away with ignoring the limitations on sale dates although I imagine that’s only because the French regulators haven’t gotten around to looking at the Internet site yet.

Unfortunately, that date means that each year the shops locally lose a considerable amount of business as many Spanish come here for their Dia de los tres Reyes (day of the three kings) on January 6th. In Spain, January 5th is effective Christmas Eve and the children receive their presents on the 6th (though globalisation means that they generally get presents on Christmas Day too these days).

One of the things that we did ourselves, in common with a considerable number of French who live around here, was to check out the pre-Christmas offers in Spain. Among several things that we bought there was the lovely little Nikon S10 (the updated version of the S4) for EUR 299 vs the £405 (about EUR 600) that Jessops in Belfast were asking for the outdated version. Of course, that means that we paid the slightly lower Spanish taxes rather than the French ones and naturally such practices mean that the French customs people create a massive backlog of cars at the border point with a view to illegally attempting to recover the French tax from people. In fact, the French government seem to be the only one on the continent that’s ignorant of the fact that no additional tax is payable on personal imports from another European country.

So, sorry if you were looking forward to some Boxing Day sales in France but at least you’ve not long to wait now.