Back in the USA

After a whirlwind tour of Europe, we are back in the USA.  On June 1, we dropped our car off at the docks (for delivery back to the USA), pushed a year's worth of luggage through the airport and flew from Amsterdam to Washington, DC.   At first it was bewildering to be back in the USA. Our rental car was gigantic, the road signs were confusing, all the roads seemed to be under construction, and the drivers were maniacs. And you had to get in a car to go anywhere. On the other hand we quickly got used to bottomless cups of iced tea and all kinds of comfort food and it is possible to eat a full meal in less than an hour. I think that I have had a hamburger and Bronwyn has had a milkshake every day since we have been back in the USA. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that we noticed obese people everywhere we went.

Ruthie and William give us a puppet show

We spent a couple of days with the world's most adorable grandchildren (and their parents) in Annapolis before driving 300 miles to the Charlotte area.  The catch was that our house in Charlotte is still rented and our lake house was gutted while we were in France. The plan was to sleep in our travel trailer until we could move enough furniture into the lake house to make it habitable. Fortunately, we abandoned the plan and our friends felt sorry for us and took us in until we could get our house habitable.

After nine long days of moving furniture, cleaning, unpacking from France, going through stacks of mail, getting American cell phones, arranging insurance, relicensing vehicles, visiting doctors, and packing for another trip, we are on the road again. We are headed to Alaska with our truck and travel trailer.  There have been a few glitches (such as a trailer tongue jack and a shattered window two days before our departure), but after some hasty repairs (a new jack and improvised window cut out of Plexiglass we got on the road almost on schedule. You can follow our new Alaskan Adventure at http://gaskinsalaskanadventure.blogspot.com.   Stay tuned to find out if Bronwyn continues to put up with her crazy husband or leaves him on the side of the Alaskan Highway as bear food.

Dining in France - Part 1 (Restaurants)

The French take an enormous amount of pride in their Food and French cooking is generally excellent. For Americans, the more controversial aspects of the French dining experience are the hours when food is served and the pace of the meal. In this blog entry, I will focus on eating at a restaurant (as opposed to a Bistro, Bar or Brasserie, which also may serve meals) because it is where we generally found the best food for the best price. In a later blog, I will talk about the pleasures and pitfalls of eating in a French home.

At a restaurant, the hours when food is served are limited and the pace is generally relaxed. Lunch in a restaurant generally requires slightly less than two hours and dinner generally requires about three hours. Restaurants are generally open from noon until 2 pm and from 7:30 pm until whenever the last diner finishes.

When we first arrived in France, I frequently found myself impatiently trying to catch the waiter's eye to get the next course of food served or to get the bill. Like many Americans, I suspected that the waiters were purposely ignoring me and giving better service to their French patrons. Now that we have been in France for a few months I rarely find myself impatient for the bill. I more frequently find that I am surprised that it is midnight and we have not finished yet.

Outside of the tourist areas of Paris, it is rare to see a table turnover during the evening. This may seem crazy to Americans who are used to wolfing down a meal in less than an hour to make the table available for the next seating. Of course, many restaurants will be closed on Sundays.

If you want a meal between 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. outside of an urban tourist area, good luck. When I was bicycling through the Loire Valley and wanted to ride my bike back to my bed & breakfast before dark, this created problems. On one of my bike trips I resorted to McDonalds out of desperation for a meal on a Sunday before dark. Even at 5 p.m., I had difficulty convincing the staff of a McDonalds to fire up their grill to cook me a hamburger.

Before you enter a French restaurant be aware that there are several French words that sound the same as a word in English, but mean something very different. "Menu" does not refer a booklet of the food choices, but refers to an inclusive multi-course meal. If you ask for the Menu, they will assume that you want the standard inclusive multi-course meal. They will not know that you are asking for the booklet listing the food options, which is "La Carte." In smaller restaurants, it is typically for the food options to be written on a chalkboard that is on the wall or moved from table to table.

We have found that almost all French restaurants have a "Menu" or "Formule" option, and many restaurants have multiple menu options depending on the number of courses that you want to eat. The menu options are generally local, fresh, excellent and a good value. If you are traveling with children, be aware that most restaurants, even very nice restaurants, have a "menu enfant," which generally consists of a drink, main course, and dessert at a very reasonable price. A child will typically be served their main course very quickly and long before the adults are served.

While we are on similar sounding words, let me mention a few more:

• "Salade" by itself refers to lettuce. If you order a burger with "salade" don't expect to get a green salad on the side. Expect that there will be one piece of lettuce on your burger.
• "Filet mignon" refers to pork rather than a tender cut of beef.
• "L’Entrée" refers to the small food plate before the main course. It is not the main course. In some restaurants you will also receive a complementary "amuse bouche" before the entree to wake up your taste buds. If you have ordered wine, this is probably when the first bottle of wine will be served.
• "Le plat" - Nope! This does not refer to your plate. This is the main course. Sometimes you will receive both a fish course and a meat course. Note that you will probably be asked if you want a different bottle of wine served with the main course.

L'Apéritif - The first thing that you are likely to be asked by the server after you have been allowed time to get comfortable is whether you want an apertif. If you are feeling French, order some champagne. If you order a mixed drink be aware that the French version of a cocktail (such as a martini) may be very different than the American version of something with the same name. We generally skip the apertif and order "une carafe d'eau" (a carafe of tap water) when we we are asked what we want to drink. (The tap water is perfectly safe to drink in France and we have never been charged for tap water.) Sometimes, if we are feeling rich, we might order a bottle of "l'eau avec gaz" or l'eau pétillante (fizzy water).

We also let the waiter know that we will be ordering wine once we figure out what we are eating. Choosing a wine in France is not easy. We have found relatively few familiar wines on French wine lists. Generally, we have asked the server's advice on what might go well with our meal. The servers seem uniformly pleased to be asked for their advice and seem happy to have an extended discussion of the options. In the end, we have enjoyed trying the local wines that are not well-known in the United States (such as the Gamay wines of the Anjou region where we live). For the most part, the local wines seem to pair well with the local food specialties.

A typical French restaurant meal consists of three courses: l’entrée, le plat, and le dessert. At lunch (petite dejuner) it is normal to pay 13-15 Euros for a three-course meal. For dinner (dejuner), it is normal to pay a little more. Wine, of course, is extra. In fancier restaurants you may be served additional courses including a salad course after the main course, or a cheese course immediately before the sweet dessert.

In my family, which hails from the western United States (Idaho), it is not uncommon to serve coffee with the meal, and in the eastern United States it is common to have coffee with dessert. However, no matter how hard we try, we have never been able to get a French restaurant to serve coffee until after dessert. There is one slight exception to this rule, some restaurants have a dessert labeled "cafe gourmand"
Coffee

Doggie Bags

Getting the Check

In a French restaurant you will have to ask for the check, but the process can not be rushed. When we first arrived in Paris, I found the process of trying to get the bill for the meal to be a frustrating and exhausting experience. I would vainly try to get the server's attention and sometimes pantomine that I wanted the check, but nothing that I did seemed to speed up the process. All that I succeeded in doing was to raise my own stress level, to annoy the server and to embarrass our neighbors. In general, you will never get your check until everybody at the table has finished their meal and any post-dinner drinks. In small restaurants, you may need to get up from the table and go to the bar or cash register to ask for "l'addition s'il vous plait" and pay the bill.

Tipping

The servers in a French restaurant are generally either the owners of the restaurant, or receive a decent salary. Servers do not depend on tips for their income and a large tip is generally not expected. We received a variety of different advice on tipping in France but generally it seems to be agreed that you should generally tip 50 centines to 3 Euros per person and that you should not tip more than 5%. In some parts of France, it seems most common to leave no tip although many restaurants will have a tip jar near the cash register for loose change.

Other Tips

• Speak softly - Americans are notorious for being loud. Although the tables in a French restaurant are likely to be close together, you will rarely overhear the French people at the next table because they are courteous enough to speak quietly. The French would prefer not to overhear your conversation so speak quietly. 
• Smoke - Smoking in a restaurant is still common in France. It is difficult to completely eliminat the chance that you will be seated by a smoker, but if you don't like smoke, don't site outside because that is where the smokers tend to congregate.
• You won't get a bread plate. It is OK to put your bread on the table.

The Wealth of France

Versailles

France has been a wealthy country for centuries. The evidence of France's past wealth is everywhere. As you ride through the countryside it seems that there is a chateau around every corner.  In every city there seem to be amazing cathedrals and mansions. All of this causes me to wonder: "how did France accumulate so much wealth?" Does France have an unusually large amount of mineral resources? Has France avoided the wars that have impoverished other countries?

Clock at Versailles Palace

Surprisingly, France does not appear to have an unusually large amount of mineral resources and it seems to have more than its share of wars - war with the Romans, wars with the Visigoths, wars with the Celts, the Hundred Years War, internal religious wars, the French Revolution (which was sort of an ongoing civil war), Napoleon's wars with most of Europe, multiple wars with Germany, and colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. Not only was France almost constantly at war, but it was on the losing end of many of these wars.

France had a colonial empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, including large portions of North America, but unlike Spain, Portugal and England, there is very little evidence of colonial wealth today.

Where did the wealth come from? Certainly France has some very productive agricultural land, but many parts of the country do not have rich soil. Nonetheless, the French use this rocky soil to grow one of their most valuable crops - wine. France has also managed to market its fashion and art culture, but the most common evidence of wealth does not seem to come from these sources.

Mansion in Toulouse

Perhaps France does not have more wealth than other countries but the wealth was unevenly distributed, which allowed the construction of massive cathedrals and chateaux, but left the masses in poverty. While this was probably true in the past, today the wealth of France seems to be remarkably evenly distributed. I've been taking language classes with illegal refugees and immigrants and the French system makes sure that even these uninvited newcomers live better than the working poor in the United States.

One of many chateaux in the Loire Valley

The current wealth of France is less obvious than the Palace of Versailles and the Loire Valley Chateaux (culture, great food, etc.), but nonetheless real. It is difficult to measure the intangibles. Perhaps the best measure of a country's wealth is the number of foreigners who choose to live here. Not only does France have a flood of refugees from Africa and the Middle East seeking a better life in France, but the country is full of Americans, British, Canadians, Swedes, Germans and many other nationalities who have chosen to make France their home. There must be something right about a place that attracts such a wide spectrum of people.

Fixer-Upper Chateau for sale

Ultimately, I don't have a good answer to the question of why France appears to have so much wealth, but I do know that they have made a conscious choice to distribute the wealth more evenly than in the United States, and it seems to be working.  While there are the usual complaints about the inefficiency of government and high taxes, in general, people seem pretty proud of their government and the economic system of France.

Mansion in Paris

Is the Path Less Traveled Always the Best Choice?

The less traveled path beside the less traveled Le Loir River TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost (1874–1963).  Mountain Interval.  1920. Yesterday I finished preparing our tax returns and as a reward to myself I decided to take a bike ride. Although the sky was overcast and threatening rain (which seems to be normal for this region of France), I had Bronwyn drop me off in a small town near Le Mans on the less traveled river Le Loir (which is a tributary of the more famous La Loire River). I had not planned out a detailed route, but I knew that Le Loir drained into the Sarthe River, which drained into the Maine River, which passed within 500 meters of our house so all I needed to do was follow the river downstream. I was immediately confronted with a choice: I could take the tow path beside the river, or I could take the paved roads that paralleled the river. I took the path less traveled, and despite my love of Robert Frost's poem, as I pedaled through a cold rain, I spent a lot of time thinking that less traveled road is not always the best choice. It was muddy and slippery, and I nearly took a swim a couple of times on the narrow bridges over streams entering the river. Until a rain shower washed most of the mud off of me, I was covered in mud. I certainly could have made better time on the paved roads. When I got home, I was cold, wet and sore. However, after a good nights sleep, I think that maybe Robert Frost was right because I ended up seeing (through my mud splattered glasses) a lot of interesting villages, small chateaux and farms. For example, it is fascinating to me that most French orchards, unlike traditional American orchards, consist of small espaliered trees (which are trained to spread their branches like vines, making it easy to harvest the apples without machines).  Perhaps the bike trip and poem are metaphors for my time in France. Difficult at times, but in hindsight a great experience.

Espaliered apple trees along Le Loir River.

Drowning in French

Tonight we are going to the home of French friends for dinner. I feel honored to be invited into a French home, but I am scared to death because I know that I will be expected to converse in French. I spent the morning reviewing flash cards and cramming for our evening out as if I was preparing for a final exam in French. From past experience, I know that by the time that dinner is served, I will be drenched in sweat from the stress of trying to understand what is being said and the strain of trying form a couple of intelligent and coherent sentences. By the end of the evening I probably will have given up the goal of saying anything intelligent, but I still will be exhausted from the concentration required for me not to lose the thread of the conversation. (If I am not paying attention, in a misdirected attempt to be polite, somebody always seems to direct a question directly at me to try to reengage me in the conversation.) If I survive the ordeal of a "casual dinner" with friends, I also know that I will spend the night tossing and turning while internally reviewing my mistakes of grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and etiquette.

My fear of speaking French is not entirely without basis. In an earlier blog (Why Learning French is like Loving a Beautiful Woman),  I confessed that my French teacher gave me a passing grade in French only on the condition that I never disgrace the French language again. My French teacher was justifiably concerned that my butchery of the French language would cause and international incident or otherwise sully her reputation. One of my goals while living in France was to prove her wrong. I dreamed of knocking on her door and speaking fluid French. This is unlikely to happen.

French immersion class in Paris

I had hoped that living in France would somehow make it easy to learn French and prove that my previous failure to learn French was mainly due to a lack of effort. Unfortunately, learning French at age 57 has not been as easy as I had hoped it would be. I feel like I am drowning in French. I am flailing my arms wildly in a sea of French verbs (in 14 different tenses), French vocabulary, and French pronunciation, not to mention a dizzying cloud of exceptions to every rule. A three-week immersion French class in Paris and five subsequent months of traditional French classes at l'institut municipal d'Angers made me more cognizant of the many ways in which I am butchering the language. My difficulties learning French have prompted me to spend many hours pondering the best way to learn a foreign language. Surely there has got to be a better way!

For my first month in France, I took a half-day immersion French class. Immersion French was definitely more fun than traditional French classes, and it was easy to develop bonds of friendship with other upper middle-class tourists (from the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Mexico, Argentina and Mexico) who were all just trying to learn tourist French. Initially, I felt like the classes produced great results because we spent our time in class actually having conversations with each other in French rather than doing verb conjugations in workbooks. The problem with the immersion classes was that there was little continuity from day-to-day or week-to-week. The students changed daily in accordance with each person's travel plans. The instructors and classes were constantly being reshuffled to accomodate the changing student body. A new instructor on Friday might unknowingly repeat the same material that we had learned earlier in the week. Due to the influx of new students arriving each week, we tended to cover the same basic material and expressions repeatedly.  As a result, we never seemed to learn enough to move up to the next level. 

French immersion class in Paris

When we moved to Angers in September, I decided to resume French classes. For the past five months I have been taking French classes three days a week at l'institut municipal d'Angers. The good news, which would shock and surprise my Junior High School French teacher, is that I am probably one of the two best students in my classes. I do my homework, I pay attention in class, and I take copious notes. (I did none of these things in Junior High School.) I typically spend 4-6 hours preparing for each class. I complete the assigned pages in the workbooks, I anticipate related questions that will be asked by the teacher, I prepare flash cards, and I review prior assignments. This hard work has produced good results in the classroom, but in casual conversations my progress is less obvious.

The bad news is that I continue to be unable to engage in any sort of normal conversation with anybody in French. All of my hours filling in workbooks and reviewing flash cards have not enabled me to communicate with the average person on the street. When asked in class to conjugate the verb pouvoir in the future simple tense, or transform a paragraph from present tense to passé composé, I am a wiz, but figuring out the proper tense and conjugation on the fly in normal conversation is completely different. Similarly, if we are assigned to read a passage in French, it is possible to anticipate likely questions and be prepared to respond. However, conversations on the street are less predictable. Anticipation of an upcoming social encounter in French causes me to worry incessantly.

Social events where we are invited into a French home and expected to make polite conversation in French are particularly uncomfortable for me. I find myself bathed in sweat as I struggle to remember basic French etiquette, to construct rudimentary sentences in my head and to instruct my mouth to utter the words in way that sounds like it might be French. If my concentration lapses for an instant, I tend to lose the thread of the conversation. Usually, by the time I feel ready to say something, the conversation has moved on (so I say nothing). When social awkwardness forces me to say something, my utterances in a thick American accent are usually met by baffled looks. The more that I try to carefully enunciate each individual word, the less my words sound like French because French words only sound right when all of the words run together. After the French speakers make a few attempts to decipher what I was saying, which usually results in me pulling everybody else around me into my drowning pool, the victims of my verbal flailing typically pretend to understand what I said and quickly find a graceful excuse to move to a different part of the room while casting looks of pity in my wife's direction. I am sure that they wonder how my wife can communicate so well in French and yet be married to a complete idiot. Dinner table conversations can be particularly painful and exhausting because my neighbors have no easy excuse to move to a different part of the room.

My agony does not end when the social event ends. As I lay in bed at night, I review the conversations in my head and break into a sweat as I realize that I accidentally pronounced a seemingly innocent word in a way that sounds like coarse sexual expression, or committed some other faux pas. As I replay the video of the evening in my head, I relive the awkward silences and embarrassed expressions a thousand times as I try to decipher where I went wrong. 

As a result of all of my angst, I have come to three conclusions (really an excuse and two conclusions) about learning French:

1. First, the excuse. My old brain and ears simply do not seem to hear some of the critical sounds that the French use in ordinary language and that the French use to discern the difference between different words. To the extent that I can hear the sounds, the muscles in my mouth seem unable to create those sounds in a way that the French recognize. This excuse is not quite as pathetic as it sounds. There actually is some scientific basis for the idea that your brain prunes the neural pathways that would allow your brain to discern the difference between sounds used only in French, but not in English. This is why older Japanese, who have never been exposed to English, are notorious for their inability to distinguish "lock" from "rock." When they were young, their brains never needed to distinguish the "l" sound from the "r" sound because they were only exposed to Japanese, therefore their brains pruned away the neural connections that enabled them to distinguish the sounds. Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem. The science suggests that teaching people to hear the different sounds of a new language through immediate feedback before attempting to teach them vocabulary and grammar enables people to learn to distinguish the sounds necessary to understand and to speak the language.  But that is not the way that French was taught to me. (See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-teach-old-ears-new-tricks/.)

2. To learn to speak French well, you have to be willing to speak French poorly. I know that this is true, but I have difficulty exposing myself to potential ridicule. It was instilled in me from an early age that if you do something, you should do it properly. This philosophy enabled me to be successful in school and in my work. Unfortunately, the techniques that I used to be a successful student and lawyer (hard work, over-preparation for every conceivable contingency, and a desire to do the best job possible) work well in the classroom, but seem to work against me in normal day-to-day interactions.

My desire to be successful in speaking French causes me to avoid situations where I know that I will do poorly. I would rather study the material until I am ready to perform well than demonstrate my poor French by actually speaking French.This may be the most difficult thing for me to change. Unless I can learn to accept that speaking French poorly is a necessary step to speaking French well, I will always choose to study my workbooks and to attend the traditional French classes, where I appear to be successful, rather than actually trying to speak French in everyday conversations.

3. Both the immersion method of teaching French and the traditional teaching style have drawbacks. The immersion approach made it easier for me to accept my ineptitude and to dare to speak poor French (because most of my classmates were almost as inept as I was), but unfortunately the program was not designed for a year-long resident of France. In the immersion program, I quickly reached a low plateau of knowledge that I could not escape.

On the other hand, the traditional method, which focuses on book learning about grammar and vocabulary, may work well to teach immigrants the French that they will use daily for the rest of their life, but it probably is not the teaching style that is best for somebody who just wants to be able to communicate during a one-year stay in France. In my traditional classes at l'institut municipal d'Angers, we rarely converse with each other in French and we spend a lot of time learning to correctly spell a lot of verb forms that all sound the same (e.g., mangerai, mangerais, mangerait, mangerez). We also spend a lot of time learning tenses of verbs that are primarily used in literature, but not in common speech. The truth is that I rarely write anything in French and when I do, I am normally using a computer with a French dictionary that corrects my most egregious grammar and spelling errors. For a visitor to France, oral communication is much more important than the ability to write perfectly. If I was redesigning the program, I would ask the teacher to spend less time conjugating verbs, learning the intricacies of French grammar, and reviewing the workbooks, and more time having the class speak to each other.

Of course, I can't really blame the teaching method or the teacher. My classmates at l'institut municipal, many of whom are mostly poorly educated immigrants from Somalia, Ethiopia, Turkistan, Tajikistan, Indonesia, Syria, Iraq, and various eastern European countries seem to be learning to communicate in French faster than I am although most of them do not do their homework, rarely conjugate a verb correctly in class, and are generally confounded by the teacher's questions relating to conjugation and grammar. In fact, many of them have not purchased the workbooks that we plod through in every class.

My classmates are learning French faster than me although some of them face challenges that appear to be overwhelming. For example, although there are lots of French-English dictionaries in every bookstore, and many software apps to translate from French to English or English to French, these translation tools are difficult to obtain for the native languages of many of the immigrants and I am told that they are often inaccurate. Furthermore, I am not sure that some of my classmates could read the dictionary translation if it was available and it was accurate. I suspect that some of my classmates are illiterate in any language.

Nonetheless, most of these immigrants have learned to speak a pidgin-French that enables them to communicate fairly effectively with the French. Learning French has been necessary for them because most of them do not speak another language (such as English) that can be used as an alternative way of communicating with the French. I've asked my classmates how they have learned to speak so well, and their usual response is that they have no option and that they watch a lot of French TV. My teacher claims that many of immigrants come from cultures" that place a much higher emphasis on oral learning than written learning. While their version of French may not be pretty, it works, and they certainly are better at communicating in French than I am.

What would I do differently if I had it do over again?

I certainly know a lot more French today than I knew 9 months ago, but in hindsight, I know that I would be much better at communicating in French if I had done the following:

First, I should have familiarized myself more with the sound of French before I waded too far into the deep pool of French grammar and vocabulary. It doesn't do me any good to know how to conjugate a verb or to have an extensive vocabulary if I can't recognize the words in normal conversations and I don't know how to pronounce the words in a way that others can understand. To correct this deficiency, next time I would listen to more French radio and watch more French TV shows and movies to develop an ear for the language. Although I watched all of the Pink Panther movies and tried to emulate Inspector Clouseau, perhaps Inspector Clouseau was not the best role model. Most importantly, next time I would find a person or computer program to help me hear and discern the differences between sounds that are used in French, but sound similar in English.

Second, I would try to find classes that involved a combination of the immersion method of teaching and traditional method that focuses on grammar and vocabulary.

Third, and most importantly, I would force myself to spend more time informally speaking the language, no matter how painful it was, even though that runs contrary to my desire to not do something unless I can do it well. Although a certain amount of traditional grammar and vocabulary is essential, if I did it again I would take less of the traditional formal French classes, which are designed for people who want to master the written and spoken forms of the language, and spend more time seeking out native French speakers who are willing to spend a couple of hours each week talking to me in French in return for me helping them with their English.

It is difficult to teach an old dog new tricks. We will be leaving France in two months and it may be too late for me. Perhaps others can learn from my mistakes.

Time in France

Bronwyn's physical therapist told her today that he cancelled last week's appointment because he took the week off so that he and his wife could go to the movies that are being shown in town as part of a film festival. I don't think that this would happen in the U.S. - cancelling all of your appointments so that you could spend the week seeing movies.  If it did happen, I don't think that any red-blooded American with a full dose of the Protestant work ethic would dare admit that he took the week off to go to the movies.  This is just one example of how the French seem to put a different value on work time and leisure time than Americans.

The French seem to fall somewhere between the Spanish and Italian perspective on work and time, and the German and American perspective on work and time. While there is no doubt that the French value doing their work well (even the bureaucrats in the building across the street from us routinely work until 8 pm), hard work is not put on the same pedestal as in America. The French take lots of days of vacation, and it should not have surprised us that somebody would take the week off to see movies.

Privacy in France

Sign on French bathroom with different
sections of the same room for men and women

In France, expectations of privacy are very different than in the United States, and in many instances seem contradictory to Americans. For example, it is not unusual to encounter unisex bathrooms in a public place with men using urinals on one side of the bathroom at the same time that women are using a toilet or washing their hands at a sink a few feet away in the same room. Moreover, it is not uncommon to see a man making little effort to conceal himself urinating on the side of the road. Similarly, nudity or partial nudity is more common in France than the United States, whether it is on the beach, in clothing stores where people are trying on clothing, or in the media. Apparently, normal bodily functions and parts of the human body are not areas where the French expect a lot of privacy. It seems to be assumed that the obligation is on you to protect the privacy of others by not looking.

Outdoor bathroom in French park
(only partially screened from public areas)

Displays of affection seem to be viewed as a necessary bodily function because public displays of amorousness that would be considered completely inappropriate in the United States are very normal in a park, in a train station or on a public sidewalk. But don't take a picture of others expressing affection; a French court ruled that it was an invasion of privacy to take a picture of British royals kissing on the deck of a yacht.

Walls and gates along the street where we live

The French seem to have particularly high expectations of privacy around their family and their homes. Most homes are surrounded by high walls that block any view of the grounds. You never know what is hidden on the other side of a wall or gate. It could be a grand mansion with a carefully tended garden or it might be an old decaying house that has been broken into cheap apartments with rotting shutters and a courtyard full of weeds.

 

Joan raising the roll-up shutters in the morning.

Most homes (including apartments) have working shutters that are closed each evening and opened each morning to keep out prying eyes. Modern homes and apartments typically have roll-up shutters that can be raised or lowered from the inside with a switch or a handle. In the evening, you don't have to look outside to know that the sun is going down because you can hear all of the shutters closing.

Apartment building in the morning
as residents raise their shutters

All the shutters closed for the night, but they will be open
in the morning.

Unlike Americans, the French also are careful to keep their conversations private from people around them. Although restaurants, tend to be small, with tables packed closely together, it is very unusual to hear even bits and pieces of the conversation at an adjoining table because the French are careful to keep their voices low. You can always tell when there is an American in the restaurant (or train station or other public place) because you can hear their conversation across the room. Even at home, the French seem to be quieter than Americans. We have stayed in several apartments in France, and our house shares commons walls with neighboring homes, but we have rarely heard our neighbors. 

French norms of acceptable conversation and behavior are also significantly different than in the United States. In general, unless you are a close friend or family, it is inappropriate to use a person's first name, use familiar pronouns or ask about their personal life. It is considered an invasion of privacy to ask an acquaintance what they do for a living. It is like asking them how much money they make. However, spirited discussions about religion and politics seem common.

Another area of difference relates to the role of the government in protecting privacy. Tough privacy laws (with civil and criminal penalties) protect the personal life of all French citizens, including politicians and public figures. Basically, it is a violation of the law to write about or take pictures of the personal life of a French citizen without permission, even if the behavior occurs in a public place. Thus, courts have ruled that it was illegal to write about extramarital affairs of the President of France and that it was illegal to take a picture of a British royal sunbathing. However, most French seem to be unconcerned about changes to the law that allow electronic surveillance, monitoring of email or searches without warrants. Of course, like many in the United States, the people who are unconcerned about government invasions of privacy seem to assume that the government will only invade the privacy of terrorists and illegal immigrants. Perhaps the French trust their government more than Americans.