Lunch

I used to be very happy with a sandwich at midday or thereabouts. It was better if the bread had grains or a bit of character as the white plastic-bagged square slices only hold appeal for me when freshly toasted with margarine and vegemite. I wasn’t particularly fussy about what I ate between breakfast and dinner although I knew when I had got lucky and was served up a proper sandwich, usually by my husband. Then, it had good volume, flavour and colour and was definitely always more calorie laden than my restrained attempts. Often I would realize mid-afternoon that I had forgotten to eat anything and then would ravenously scavenge around for nuts, fruit… ok, chocolate, biscuits, cake.

So, what has changed? Why now do I find it normal to sit down at lunchtime and consume an entrée, main course, cheese, dessert with wine and coffee? And have I put on weight in the process? First question, easier to be objective, the second will just have to remain a well-guarded secret. Suffice to say that a book has been written about how French women don’t get fat.

The first step towards the change happened on day 4 after our arrival in France. The children had all headed off to their first day at school, still feeling a bit jet-lagged and decidedly nervous about what was to face them with new pencils, papers and folders in their school-bags but no lunch box. They just don’t exist here. In fact I struggle to come up with a word to describe the phenomena, usually resorting to ‘boîte à pique-nique’.

So, naturally, we said that we would pick them up for lunch. We wanted to make sure that the first morning hadn’t been too traumatic and were eager to enlighten the guilt burden that we were carrying concerning having wrenched them from their well-loved Australian schools and friends into the foreignness of French schooling.  We thought that a fresh little salad, followed by pasta and crunchy French bread and then little tubs of cold pudding, the latter pre-prepared from the supermarket, would do the trick. As we were walking distance from the school and freshly off the plane my husband and I also enjoyed a glass of red wine picked up from the wine cellar on the way home. At that stage we thought that we were getting a right royal bargain, only paying 12 euro for the bottle. We laugh now to think that the supermarkets have a big selection at a fraction of the price without the need to undergo an intimidating interrogation about one’s personal preferences from said wine cellars. Reasonable table wines can be had for just 3 euros. But, I digress from the lunch. Once had and enjoyed, both the lunch and the wine, it was a pleasure to be re-served.

The second factor in our changed behaviour came in the form of hand written personally delivered invitations for lunch – yes, our children were regularly invited out for lunch. The two hour window of opportunity, between 11.30am and 1.30pm on school days, gives the children and their families the opportunity to travel home for lunch, take a real break from school, eat and then not want to return. It also gives them the opportunity to be social and in our case the opportunity for the host family to practice their English.

What we didn’t think about was that acceptance came at a price – that of the return invitation. Knowing what ours had eaten when out we simply could not serve up freshly cut homemade baguette with ham, cheese and tomato, perhaps a touch of mustard or mayonnaise and a little side salad. No, it was necessary to plan, shop for and cook a proper meal. What stress, as our newest guests turned out to be unintentionally very French. They were always most polite but hard work all the same, declining some courses and picking at others. Clearly we did not know what the rules of dégustation were and had to find out quickly.

Here is an attempt at deciphering the lunchtime etiquette which was learned by asking the tough questions of my few French aquaintances:-

• Bread, yes always – but definitely cut – not torn
• Water – always, no need for juices or fancy drinks
• Salad – served before or after the main course. Before if it is an entrée and after if it is an accompaniment.
• Size of salad varies according to whether it is served before or after.
• Extra bits and pieces, such as corn, cucumber and tomato in the salad are acceptable if entrée size, it is usually plain if served as an accompaniment.
• Plain salad as an entrée is also fine depending on the heaviness of what is to follow.

Are you following?  Let’s continue…

• Main course could be a piece of meat on its own but woe behold anyone who dares serve it up without a sauce.
• Dessert can be a tub of yogurt or a piece of fruit. It does not have to be fancy but a little homemade apple tart with cream or ice cream would similarly go down a treat.
• Cheese comes before dessert – the French are just incapable of eating anything else once they have eaten their sweets. This last fact I already knew having accompanied a French school trip to England twenty years previously. My French colleague had had to wade through an English high tea of shortbread, sweet sandwiches, savoury biscuits, cheese and cups of tea at 5pm. She had no idea whether she was eating afternoon tea or dinner and politely picked at just a few dry Sao biscuits and cheese and went hungry until the morning.

It is hard now to imagine life without our multiple-layered languorous lunches. Initially, we would somewhat guiltily hide the fact that wine was always on our menu, or justify our consumption under lame pretexts such as 'we are on holidays,' 'we are living like the French,' 'it is so very cheap' or even 'why not, the sun is shining' until we realized that we were not alone. On the ski slopes, in the cafés and restaurants, camping grounds, autoroute parking lots and family kitchens all over France time is devoted to sitting down together and properly eating and drinking, not just consuming at speed. 'Santé, alors.'

My son now asks if what he is being served is an entrée or main meal. We used to smirk indulgently behind our hands but now it seems like a sensible question. And the right answer, 'entrée, but please help yourself to seconds anyway.'

Le Café de la Place

Even before we lived in Menthon-St-Bernard we would occasionally stop at its Café de la Place on the way home from dropping the children at school. Having been up since 5.50 am and then often having had to battle to get the children out the door in the dark plus intensely cold weather conditions and the traffic we could justify a little early morning pause before heading home to the days isolation.

It is always a bit intimidating the first time you walk into a building that is clearly a ‘local’, and our first time in the village café was no exception. Heads turned to look my husband and I up and down, both those who were half-sitting on the tall metal stools, half-leaning on the counter and those who were sitting at the very few but closely packed wooden tables and chairs around the edges of the room. There was a big screen television on the back wall, constantly playing the top 50 songs loudly. It conveniently covered the momentary drop in conversation. We noticed that amongst the crowd there was a gendarme in full uniform chatting casually and several men in bright orange safety vests. The gendarme was having coffee but on the counter there were several half-empty liqueur glasses. As we settled ourselves discretely on the sidelines we watched the orange-vest-clad messieurs finish their alcohol and then walk to the car park where they hopped into their big work trucks and drove off, presumably to handle more heavy machinery. It wasn’t the first time that we wondered about the occupational health and safety practices in France.

But, the cafe had character, a cute name, was warm and we were accepted if not warmly welcomed. So, we went back.

It sits a little back from the main road behind the old stone village fountain that looks like the one that Jack and Jill used to tumble down from in the storybooks of my childhood. No handle to pull up a bucket on a rope but a peaked roof, clear fresh water and low circular stone base. The cobblestones around the fountain lead to the bakery on one side of the café and the newsagent, which stocks all things to do with smoking, so is called le tabac, on the other. The chemist completes the commercial roll call and with its large garish green neon sign lighting up the main road half way to Annecy it unfortunately upsets the natural balance of the square. Actually, it isn't a square at all as the road has cut off one corner but there really is no better translation of the French word ’place’. Every morning in front of the café a blackboard is chalked up with the set meal of the day.  There is a menu but with the blackboard option comprising an entrée, main course, dessert, carafe of wine and coffee all for 12 euro 50 most don't bother reading it.

Last year the café underwent renovations and a big red awning was added to make the outside terrace shadier in the summer and give a bit of protection from the rain and snow in the winter. It has big glass windows from calf height up and being an old building, inside it has exposed stone walls, a wooden paneled ceiling, wooden floors and is quite poky. The awning has only accentuated the darkish ambience of the interior.

By rights it isn’t the sort of place that usually attracts me. So, why did we keep stopping there? No doubt we were looking for somewhere that made us feel like we belonged. To that point we had had very few feel-good moments since our arrival in France and we were spending most days fighting uncomfortable administrative battles. We needed a bit of cocooning.

‘Un café double et un café au lait’ became our standard order. What a shame that the day my husband hopped next door to grab a newspaper and asked me to order for him, not a 'café au lait' but a 'chocolat chaud', the waitress saw me come in and called out "the usual?" "No," I replied, crestfallen and felt sure she would never ask us that question again.

We’ve been back at different times of the day, including to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Meals were not being served so my husband and I had a glass of champagne each instead. Stupidly, I knocked my glass over and broke it so handed over a tip at the counter as I indicated my broken glass. Strangely enough the publican, an enormous guy with a mirthless disposition smiled at me. Were we once again making progress? Did we perhaps just have to show that we were real humans filled with all the usual faults and deficiencies and not just cash happy English speaking tourists passing by and sending loud waves through the peaceful routine-oriented community? Quite possibly, or was he just amused at the unnecessary money outlay which perhaps only served to confirm his previous theory?

Bonne Année

Happy New Year Cake. Miam !

The New Year. Who knows what sort of year we will have. Here’s hoping that we will fill it with wonderful moments and lots of family laughter. We stayed up until midnight so that we could let off our legal-in-France fireworks and in equal parts I felt happily juvenile and clandestine sheltering on the balcony whilst my husband went down to the lawn to officiate our proceedings. It was drizzling, not enough to prevent the fuses from igniting but enough to complicate the procedure and add an extra element of danger. He hid under my pearly pink golf umbrella with the lighter and a firework until there was a flame and then bolted backwards, removing the umbrella just in time to stop him emulating Mary Poppin’s graceful umbrella-flying feat.

When we started the quiet was tangible. An occasional car passed in the street and a man was out walking his dog but the majority of shutters were closed and lights appeared to be out. Out of respect for the calmness we attempted to be quiet, but the only fireworks that were compliant were a couple of pretty, gyrating crackers with quickly extinguished bursts of light, the rest were impressively loud, many flying through the wet branches of the tall pine trees and exploding loudly in the sky above. Several ricocheted back down to the ground and others appeared to chase my husband in a manically vengeful dance. He was rediscovering the forbidden pleasures of his youth and my son, having never seen fireworks up close was reversing the adult-child relationship, calling out several times to his father to be careful. After a few too many close calls and with his level of anxiety building my son's tone changed, ‘That’s enough now, Daddy!'  ‘Just one more,’ said several times over, came the busily engrossed parental reply.

With the promise of more fireworks the next night we persuaded my husband inside only to search in vain for what we had felt sure would be spectacular Parisian fireworks on the television.  Cabaret/talk shows were the go. Yearning for something less 'Gallically' serious or at least that we could understand without extensive prior French entertainment history, we hunted down one of our favourite Eddi Izard comedy routines. It gently mocked the simplistic uselessness of the phrases learnt in French class at school and the exaggerated ‘souris est sous la chaise’ and 'singe est sur la branche’ were as puerile as expected and effortlessly succeeded once again in producing out-of-proportion mirth. As always Izzard concluded that the only way he was ever going to be able to fluently drop these memorized, beautifully pronounced schoolboy gems casually into conversation with a gaulois puffing French man was to go to France with a chair, a mouse and a monkey and stroll around heavily wooded areas. Look it up. Be prepared for laughter.

Chinaillon

Our last two New Year’s Eves here in France have been slightly more eventful. Last year in the afternoon of the last day of the year we stumbled across a poster advertising a family celebration starting at 6pm in the small ski station of Chinaillon near Le Grand Bornand. The timing was perfect for us as we were hosting dinner with my sister at 8pm. Carefully we drove up the icy roads, expecting to find a few lonely strays in the street but struggled to find a carpark due to the large numbers present and nearly missed the downhill flame descent on skis. The flames snaked their way down the slope opposite the village, shining vividly in the darkness of the evening. Free hot wine was being served in the street and a DJ, perched on a platform above us, exhorted us all to get warm and dance to a selection of pop and French traditional songs. It didn't matter that we didn't recognise half of the tunes, we were swept up anyway into the spontaneously formed human circles, arms linked following as best we could the intricate dance steps performed with complete assurance despite the crowds, icy roads and free-flowing alcohol. The short festival culminated in a spectacular fireworks display on the hill opposite which, in short bursts, lit up the snow covered slope, the spire of the church and the clusters of miniature-looking chalets.

The year before, we were very newly arrived in Annecy and did not expect to know enough people to be invited out. Circumstances lead to us having a perfect evening lakeside around a bonfire and with new friends. Our troubles began when we headed home at three o’clock in the morning and found our house locked, as expected, but bolted internally, preventing us from using our key to get in. Our 16 year-old niece visiting from Australia was ostensibly babysitting. Boy, she must either have been taking revenge for not being out at her own New Year's Eve party or have been in a very deep sleep. No amount of yelling through the keyhole into the downstairs corridor just under her bedroom, throwing rotten quinces up at her window from the ground around the tree in the garden or ringing her mobile number roused her. We kept at it for an hour despite the freezing cold and eventually, out of fear of reprisals from our village neighbours, my husband and I retreated to our car where we fell into a half-prone deep slumber still dressed in our coats, bonnets, gloves and scarves with the engine and car heater on. 

Around 6am my husband tried again with grim determination and the more conventional method of knocking loudly on the front door. This time he got a response but no remorse or sympathy from the well-rested one as we trudged silently through the house straight into the warmth and comfort of bed. I’ve had late celebrations before and not got to bed until later than on that particular morning but never before have I had to sleep in the car in the carport, dreaming of the inaccessible luxury of my bed only a few metres away. Happy New Year indeed!

Those Quinces !

On Being French

In French schools, students are graded constantly and the same curriculum is taught the entire country over. Four thirty in the afternoon and standing patiently at the locked school gate for my children to be released along with the other captive collegians I risked mentioning in passing to the female teacher supervising the footpath fraternising that the curriculum did not seem to have changed much since I was last here teaching some twenty years before. In a moment of unexpected but refreshing candour she replied that it was probably more like two hundred years with no change.

There is a mark accorded out of twenty for most pieces of work that the students complete and parents and children alike constantly compare their ‘moyenne’ or average overall mark. In some schools, if a student is not doing well, there are 'soutien' or support classes but in most cases the classroom teacher is not expected to cater for the different ability levels in the classroom and the children are expected to just cope. If a child does poorly on a piece of work it is not uncommon for the teacher to write a straight-to-the-point denigrating comment next to the mark. Imagine the face of your crestfallen offspring faced with the one French word ‘Catastrophe,’ no English explanation needed and scrawled at the bottom of a written assessment task complete with exclamation mark, and you have some idea of teacher feedback practices. The idea that a child might respond to praise or to a warm relationship with the teacher is not the norm.

I went to a parent-teacher interview yesterday afternoon to discuss this exact point. I was on time and my daughter showed me up to her teacher’s classroom. He was chatting to another teacher when we appeared and made no real effort to come and greet us so we waited patiently. When he did come out into the corridor he did not introduce himself, shake hands or engage in conversation. He indicated that the meeting would take place downstairs and headed off with us in tow.

Before sitting down I introduced myself using my first name and put out my hand to be shaken. He mumbled back his full name as he took my hand although I suspect he would have been shocked if I had actually dared use it.  There was no animosity or impoliteness from either of us but he did look surprised at the frankness with which I spoke. He came across as someone sure of himself in his role of teacher but not a self-confident man. It wouldn’t have shocked me to read a poster on the walls listing the rules of the meeting, number one being ‘you are talking to a school teacher and so he has superiority and his methods and practices are not to be questioned.’ Of course I did though, question him, and with the assurance of a perfect, unarguable answer he replied ”But you are in France, Madame.”

As a justification this answer seems to be all that is required, not just in a school context but everywhere. I loosely recall a newspaper article that my husband and I were discussing wherein a Frenchman had become unruly on a flight after having consumed too much alcohol. He refused to accept that he should abide by the rules for all passengers and be served no more alcohol. His argument to prove that rules shouldn’t apply equally to him “But I am French.”

On holidays recently we stopped to visit the castle of Chambord.  Arriving mid-morning we thought that it might be nice to have a coffee before going into the castle. There were several restaurants and cafes to choose from and the owner of one was out the front getting ready for his lunchtime service. Some instinct made me ask if it would be possible to order just coffee before we sat down and made ourselves comfortable. “Of course not, I am far too busy and have got too much to do before midday.” He was speaking French but my English translation would be something like, “I am French, you are not, what were you thinking?” We went next door.

Many a similar story abounds in the travel folklore of arrogant Parisians and unhelpful and disdainful Frenchmen. Why is this so? I live here and have many good friends who are French but until you can prove yourself as someone of interest, which is particularly hard if you are an English speaker, you do risk being brushed off with a “But you are not French” haughtiness.  Smiling does help, as does persistence, developing a thick skin and dropping as early as possible into the conversation that you are from Australia.

Funnily enough I was once the target of ‘being French’ discrimination. My sister, visiting from Australia and speaking English to the sales assistant in Galeries Lafayette, a mildly up-market department store, could not have been better served. She was offered gift-wrapping and a smile. I was up next and spoke French. I was offered neither a smile nor coloured-paper and ribbon. When I asked if my gift could be wrapped I was told that I would have to go and line up at another counter. I would have liked to slap down on the counter my written assessment and mark out of twenty for her. She wouldn’t have made the moyenne.

Le malheur des uns fait le bonheur des autres

Still no snow and it is the first of December. On this day last year the children were hurtling down the road next to the house on their toboggans in seventy centimetres of soft fresh snow. Then, I watched with video camera in my hand and heart in my mouth as amidst shouts of joy they veered away from the bridge at the bottom of the hill at the very last minute avoiding toppling into the icy river. In fact there was so much snow that once again it was causing havoc at airports around Europe. My husband, on his way back to France from Australia, was stuck in Abu Dhabi awaiting news of whether his flight to Geneva would be allowed to take-off. At our end, the children and I were monitoring the Geneva airport site constantly trying to get the latest news on whether or not his plane would be allowed to land.

It turned out that his plane was re-routed to Milan where, upon arrival, the passengers had a choice of waiting until flights were able to land in Geneva, trying their luck with another plane to another airport or taking a bus to Geneva. My husband chose the third option and then spent ten uncomfortably cold hours in the bus as it wound its way around Switzerland through hand-size flakes of falling snow.  He was hungry, too, and could only dream longingly of the Tim-Tam biscuits, which he was bringing back to our children as an Australian treat, but which were tantalisingly just out of his reach in his luggage in the hold. On the bus with him was a young Australian couple who were doing their best to keep their baby and toddler calm. There was also a young man in his early twenties who asked to be dropped off at the side of the road on the outskirts of Lausanne. He disappeared into the pitch-blackness of the eery homogeneity of the night wading through waist-high snowdrifts and weighed down by his back-pack. We hope he made it to where he was trying to go.

Dropped of at Geneva airport at 2 am, my husband then tried to work a little and sleep a little just to pass the time before attempting to get on the 6 am bus down to Annecy. The security guards in the otherwise empty airport smiled encouragingly at him as they passed doing their rounds but were unable to relieve the discomfort and tiredness of two consecutive days travelling without a break. More bad luck when he went to get his bus ticket from the bus station at just before 6 am to find that the first bus out had been cancelled, as the autoroutes were considered too dangerous to navigate.

I got a call from him around 8.45 am just after I had walked the youngest two up the snow-covered road to the primary school.  A snowplough had cleared a 2 metre wide path from the front gate of the school to the classroom entrances. The rest of the playground was a labyrinth of ice sculptures and igloos made by the children the previous day. Most were in ski pants and jackets as they had been told that they would not be allowed to play in the snow if they weren’t wearing ski gear. In Australia I fought hard to bring in a ‘No hat, No play’ policy for the summer months in the school that I was working at back in the early 1990s. What a contrast! But what a joy to have eager, affirmative responses to set school uniform guidelines.

I tried calling the bus office in Annecy on my husband’s behalf, as he still only had a smattering of French and they assured me that there would be a bus from Geneva mid-morning.  Thankfully, this turned out to be true and after another couple of hours in the bus he was back in Annecy. Our own car was completely snowed under, so a taxi ride from the bus station to home completed his long exhausting journey.

There is a French proverb which sums up these two days: ‘Le malheur des uns fait le bonheur des autres’ or in English ‘One person’s unhappiness is another person’s happiness.’ At the same time as the snow was making life miserable for many, including my husband, my children were in seventh heaven rolling around in it at home. But it was my oldest daughter who was the happiest. Her bus into school was cancelled and there were no expectations that she find an alternative way of getting there. I think her translation of the proverb would be ‘Lots of snow, no school-everyone happy!’

As for snow this year, we wait in eager anticipation. It might be tomorrow.  The snowplough did drive up our street as we were eating lunch, which is a sure sign that the men at the town hall have been given the word that snow is on its way. Plus, one of the Mums from school told me yesterday that it was definitely going to snow, as she had smelt it when she opened her windows in the morning. She might be right.