Foreign Perspectives

Before you get here, you should try to encourage your kids to enroll in French classes where they are available. If you’re near a large town or city you may be able to enroll younger children in French language playgroups and the like. One thing that you shouldn’t do is to speak French to the children yourself as this way they’ll pick up your French accent: we’ve heard many British children who’ve been here for some years still saying BON JURE rather than BO ZHUR simply because their parents spoke French to them from the start. Take particular care that playgroup leaders are native French speakers.

When they get here, if you can, you should enroll 2 to 11 year olds in a French school (more on education later) and 12 to 18 year olds in a bilingual school. I recommend bilingual so that your children can keep up their fluency in English as well as French; we’ve touched on this aspect several times in the past which are worth reading to see the kind of difficulties you can find with French language schools for older children.

Next week is our final section on languages: the local languages in France and what to do about them.

This series is available in reference form on our Living in France pages.

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.