10 Things I Learned in France
Ah, the French countryside. It smells of poo.
We arrived back yesterday from France, having borrowed my sister's car (I am not a vehicle owner) and made our way to a chateau, situated in a small village in the South of France. The chateau is run as a by-appointment, one-set-of-guests-at-a-time Bed and Breakfast by a friend of ours who spends her northern winters teaching English in New Zealand.
Travel, it's said, broadens the mind. So I thought it would be apt to draw some conclusions from this week's trip to (and throughout) France by car - so that you may tease out some general life lessons...
1. France is big
We arrived in Calais, and expected a 12-14 hour drive from the tip to the base of the country. Instead, we made it two 12-hour drives, with a reluctant but much needed camping stop. Most of our drive was accompanied by the heady aroma of fresh farm manure.
In our planning, we had specifically decided not to include Paris in our travels... and yet we saw the Eiffel Tower. Twice.
In fact, our ability to get lost was actually on a heroic scale. We were trapped in orbit around Saint Germain En Laye for a good few hours. I'm convinced the only reason it's populated is that people simply became stuck and decided to settle rather than keep driving around and around looking for an exit.
I'm not joking about this: we were quite remarkably stupid, geographically speaking. We navigated a grand total of 4 miles in the space of two and a half hours (2.30 to 5.00pm), and negotiated a particular roundabout a number of times of which I'm uncertain, except that it was in the double digits.
My sister offered the wisdom that when travelling, one should first pack, and then subtract half - and budget, then double it. I would add to that that one should find out how long it should reasonably take to get to a place, and then multiply that by a factor of two.
2. France is not a motorway
We decided, for purely budgetary reasons, to avoid the toll roads in France. This meant following the roads indicated by green signs (les routes nationales) rather than those indicated by the blue signs (les autoroutes).
This, naturally, was the much slower option - but also by far the most interesting. It ruled out speeds of 130km/h (as permissible on the A-roads), but it threw up many interesting distractions: cafes, boulangeries, landslides, rivers, dead-ends, impassable tractors, road-hogging cyclists, runaway donkeys (really) and the frequent smell of farmyard poo.
3. Teenagers are a predominantly background phenomenon
Having decided to take an additional female 13-year-old, over and above our usual complement of just the one male, we had anticipated some friction on a journey of this length. We had contingency plans, distraction ploys and a variety of threats and bribes up our sleeves, in case we needed them.
We were also mindful of keeping the two of them entertained for long stretches of non-car time without computers, television, or other English-speaking peers.
However, it turns out that when you put a teenager in the back seat of a car for 20 hours at a stretch, that teen will sleep for 16 of them. Or listen to Disturbed on the mp3 player at great length.
Outside of the car, simple things such as mucking about in a river can keep a 13 year-old occupied for many hours, while you go about more important matters such as picnics and books. For just over 2 Euros, a bamboo stick with a bit of string on the end made for a fishing expedition that could have been the stuff of Hemingway.
4. Semiology is not universal
We had some initial difficulty deciphering the signs in France - and not merely because our collective French vocabulary could be best counted in tens, rather than hundreds or thousands of words. Some of the visual-only signs were mysterious too.
Jake took this one to mean 'The overwhelming aroma of fertiliser in the French country air will give you a splitting headache'.
Also, arrows do not have the same directional significance that they have in English-speaking countries. A sign saying 'Barjac' on an arrow-shaped sign that points to the left means that you should continue on ahead to get to the town of that name. The arrow itself is not significant. It is just the shape of the roadsign. There is no need to deviate from your present course.
This took some figuring out.
5. French people must get sick of baguettes
In France, we ate bread. Sometimes we ate bread with cheese in it. Sometimes we ate bread with tomatoes in it. Sometimes we ate bread with tapenade in it. Sometimes we ate bread with garlic in it. Sometimes we ate bread with chocolate in it.
The bread was good. And it was abundant. We were less excited about the bread by the time we got back to Boulogne than when we first arrived in Calais. Natalie's expression at the prospect of this pain gradually gave way to a pained expression.
Or was that the poo-smell?
6. French people are very nice
This will no doubt surprise my British readers, as the French have a hard-won reputation that tends to the opposite of this. However, if you accept your role as the stupid foreigner, do your best to communicate in something that approximates your 4th form French, and adopt an 'all hope is lost' expression, then French people will do whatever they can to help speed you on your way - or at least get you out of their shop.
Twice, after such conversations, complete strangers hopped into their cars, presumably so that we should follow them and learn the correct path. The man in Paris went to extraordinary lengths to be helpful - dodging through traffic, cutting us off so we wouldn't head down the wrong street, and generally waving and gesticulating in the direction of the way out of town.
The man in Grez-Sur-Loing was much harder to keep up with, but eventually he stopped and pointed enthusiastically at the main street that would take us away from his little hamlet.
The lovely women at the Credit Agricole in St Ambroix bent over backwards to make sure that we could change our strange English livres into real Euro money. There were phone calls to Post Offices in towns that were a good few villages away, just to make sure that they would take us and our currency. Or at least take us away...
It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn that the French call traffic lights les feus (fires) or the tricoleurs. After asking directions, I was always half on the lookout for a burning building or a national flag of some kind.
While this may be seen as generally unhelpful and time-consuming (do you know how hard it is to find a housefire in Nemours?), it wasn't a deliberate sort of unhelpfulness. Our Gallic friends were acting in good faith. Our minimal understanding of colloquilal French was to blame for our misguided behaviour. It's surely only natural to want to act inappropriate and nouveau-riche at the site of an arson, when told to turn gauche at the next fire.
7. Hollywood lies
Scorpions are not 8-feet long and nor do they have stings that are instantly fatal. However, they do like to climb up the bedroom walls of 15th century stone chateaux, they are very hard to kill with a jandal, and they are very fast-moving and expert hiders when only partially dead.
France also has bats, mysterious grass-dwelling creatures that sound like Disney-movie rattlesnakes (but may well have been amorous cicadas), and strange river-wasps that float past and sting unsuspecting foreigners on the stomach, before drowning themselves further along the current.
8. The French enjoy public art
I think this bears mentioning: the function and tone of public art in a country speaks volumes about that nation's psyche. Fountains at street level - that is, sprays of water that simply rise from the ground in the middle of the road where a roundabout should reasonably be, rather than constrained in a pool of some kind with raised edges and borders - are not uncommon.
The photo above is of an uncommonly beautiful and yet incredibly macabre sculpture in which an emaciated, skeleton-faced demon figure raises his rusted supermarket trolley to the heavens, while in the process, jetisonning the baby that was previously in that trolley.
Someone on the council harbours revolutionary thoughts, and some sculptor has carved a niche ('scuse the pun) in death mask zombie demons fit for traffic islands.
9. The French embrace all cultures
I had a morning to myself sitting around the chateau and doing nothing in particular, while the others attended an antique fair in Barjac. So in exchange, I took the two teens off to a fete in St Ambroix in the evening. Fair swap.
Natalie won a stuffed toy by pulling the right piece of string, Jake won a deck of tarot cards for shooting at balloons, and the most culturally-inclusive parade made its slow way down the all-too-small medieval main street. In fact, we spectators were encouraged to walk down the street to view the parade in its entirety - because once the marching band and baton-twirlers had made their way to the end of the road, there was no more room.
The photo above says it all: these people are representatives of the bagpiping guild of the local judo club.
10. Wine is cheap and abundant in France
Every square foot of land not given over to the growing of lavender or sunflowers, or the holding of markets and parades, is reserved for the cultivation of wine.
As a result, wine can be found in enormous quantities and at very reasonable prices. For the purposes of scientific curiosity, I purchased a bottle of supermarket wine at the Euro equivalent of 50p. It was locally produced, looked like an expensive import (or at least, had a label that was in French) and was otherwise indistinguishable from other wines twice that price.
I don't recall its exact flavour, but it must have been drinkable, because I don't have it any more. However, I did learn on the train on the way back from London, that I seem to have lost a day.
They may have bombed the Rainbow Warrior, tested their stinking nuclear warheads at Mururoa and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory at the World Cup, but they do throw a good holiday, the French.
And I can certainly recommend Brit/Kiwi citizen-of-the-world Mary Gee's Chateau d'Avejan in Provence as a place to experience it all from. Drop her a note at mary.gee@free.fr.
The drive down may be accompanied by the scent of growth-enhancing agrarian waste product, but the stay will be filled with the aroma of home-baked food, fresh air and history.
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Matt Mollgaard wrote:
