Foreign Perspectives

For instance, if you go to most Christian countries in the world in the run-up to Christmas you’ll see little nativity scenes in the streets and shopping centres. Not so in France. Here the decorations are devoid of any religious symbolism. In fact, it seems to be entirely aimed at helping the shops sell more. OK, there’s a whole lot of marketing going on in other countries at this time too and perhaps the Christian message doesn’t get such a high profile as it should but at least in the other countries you do get reminders of the meaning of Christmas through the decorations in the shops and the nativity scenes put on by everyone.

Here in Catalonia that seems particularly odd because just across the border in the Spanish Catalunya all those symbols are in evidence everywhere as you can see from this nativity scene in one of the shopping centres.

That absence makes for a certain lack of Christmas spirit too. In other countries, the post office work flat out right up to midnight on Christmas Eve and don’t leave anything in the sorting centres if they can possibly avoid it. Here, they couldn’t care less and Christmas presents often aren’t delivered until a week or more after Christmas Day. As always, France get these things the wrong way around: in Spain we were given a calendar to say thank-you for choosing to eat in the Dong Xing restaurant in Girona yet in France the postal workers are quite insistent on you buying their calendars for a service which they clearly don’t follow through with (consequently Wendy’s decided that she will be equally insistent on not buying it next year).

In Belfast just about every shop window has a “help wanted” notice. In France, I’ve yet to see one.

How does that square with the 35 hour week in periods coming up to the likes of Christmas? That’s a very good question as clearly the shops are considerably busier over the pre-Christmas period than they are normally. In Belfast which doesn’t have the 35 hour limitation and few limitations on overtime, they still want more staff over peak shopping periods yet France doesn’t seem to require them or at least doesn’t advertise the vacancies. There certainly are vacancies though, but what happens in some shops is that the queues just get longer and longer. Even in normal times, we have twice abandoned our trolley in Leclerc after seeing a 45 minute plus queue for all the checkouts; I wouldn’t even consider going there at this time of year.

Other services similarly slow to a crawl. The French post office received orders from Amazon on December 12th yet hadn’t managed to deliver them by December 23rd.

Perhaps you are thinking that the jobs are advertised at the equivalent of job centres? They may be, but it’s not possible to register with those centres over this period as the interviewers in ASSEDIC who are the gatekeepers to these centres don’t seem to turn up for work themselves.

So unlike in the rest of the world, there doesn’t really seem to be much in the way of Christmas employment. Even the Santas just move from their normal office so that’s not even an extra job!

That applies to pretty much everything in fact. In a French supermarket, you get French cheese. In a UK supermarket you get UK cheese, Swiss cheese, German cheese and, of course, French cheese. Whereas even the largest French supermarket has only a tiny “ethnic” foods section, a typical UK supermarket doesn’t have an ethnic section at all because the food in the aisles is from everywhere. There are hardly any Australians living in Belfast yet it’s possible to buy Vegemite in Tesco; in France you’d need a really major supermarket to stock it.

Some would say: why shouldn’t it be French food in France? Well, obviously you would expect to have more French food in France than anything else but in every other country in the world you seem to get a reasonable representation of a selection of other cultures. The closed mentality in France makes that the rare exceptions to the “France only” rule very pale in comparison to the equivalent elsewhere.

As usual with French events, all the publicity is in French and there’s little distribution of it outside the local area so it’s a great opportunity to see a good rally without the usual crowds.

This year the route of the Fenouilledes Car Rally starts on Saturday in Ille-sur-Tete, heads up into the mountains through Belesta and Pezilla where they loop round through Rasigueres, Panezes and Latour de France finally turning at Estagel and heading back over the hill to Millas and then towards Ille-sur-Tete. The Sunday route is similar but goes through Ansignan after Pezilla, descending into Maury before once again crossing the hill at Estagel towards Millas and finishing at Ille-sur-Tete. There’s a map of the route Fenouilledes Car Rally Map 2006 and some photos of the key points on the route at Key Points on Fenouilledes Car Rally 2006 with complete details of the stages at Stage Details for Fenouilledes Car Rally 2006 and the participants at Participants in Fenouilledes Car Rally 2006.

By co-incidence, Auberge Mas Camps is in one of the better places to watch the race and have been fully booked by the rally organisers, ASA-Roussillon.

All being well, I’ll get some decent photos for a later posting.