Bonjour

Bonjour everyone! Thank you so much for stopping by.

Babies, toddlers and exciting new work opportunities have me very busy lately and far far away from my keyboard.

I'm sorry there isn't much new to see but I hope you enjoy diving into my archives.

Follow this adventure from the beginning in 2008 and you too can learn how you go from wishing and hoping to someday fit into Paris to making it all work!

Mary

A New President

Where do I vote? 

The French presidential election has just wrapped up and I enjoyed every minute of it. When the whole process (first round, second round, call the moving trucks a new president is in town!) takes a mere five weeks so you have the energy and patience to participate fully.

I found the whole thing to be as charming as can be.

Candidates must first obtain 500 signatures of support from local officials, then two weeks prior to the first round of voting France says, ready... set... go! And all of the candidates start their campaign. This year we had 10 candidates to choose from during the first round, right wing extremists, utopian communists, a stylish green party représentative with unusual glasses and a Scandinavian accent, a people's man who proposed eliminating public debt by simply not paying it, Hollande who is a socialist often compared  caramel pudding by the French media and bien sûr, Sarkozy, fighting hard to keep his job. What an interesting mix of characters.

Candy Coating

I prefer critical statements that come in the form of sandwiches. This is a technique I have been slowly teaching my all too frank husband. Instead of looking at our loose pile of loosely organized bankstatements mixed with Redoute catalogue clippings and grocery lists and then shouting, "What on earth Mary!? Is this a joke? You are hopeless." I would encourage him to say something like this,  "Mary, I think you are so imaginative. This particular method of filing our banking paperwork makes no sense, but I know you are a quick learner so let me show you how I like to do it."

The word for frank in French is franc or franche... very few letters away from France or French. Interesting coincidence.

Je râle. Tu râles. On râle.

Râler : v : contester, protester avec mauvaise humeur.


Râler is a very important word in French. It is simple enough to translate: to contest, protest with a bad attitude. 


 In other words to complain, bellyache, yell, grouse, moan, whine, gripe, bitch, grumble. Yet it is a very complicated concept for most Americans to embrace let alone apply to everyday life. Although I strongly dislike it I am finally learning to râler because it is a necessary evil in this land and if you want to get anything done you have to complain and cry and call and shout and if you do all of that louder and more often than the person next to you, then and often only then, you will be served. 


Thus it is with a mix of pleasure and discomfort that I am reporting to you that my efforts described in my recent post, Square Trees, which details my crusade to get a spot in a daycare, have paid off. Admittedly it is hard to say if the good news is thanks to my keen new skills as a râleuse (person who really knows how to râler) or if the fact that the city finally completed the remodel of our local daycare thus opening a flood of new spots... but guess what folks? Our little cabbage now has a spot in a crèche after 14 months of waiting patiently combined with 4 months of waiting impatiently. 

Two Lessons Involving Bread

Lesson One

If in your travels through Paris you should happen to get lost, ask directions from a person with a baguette tucked under their arm. Parisians rarely travel more than fifteen minutes from their home to get fresh bread, so that person is certain to know the neighborhood.

Lesson Two

While out wandering the streets of Paris, if you should see a bakery with a line coiling out onto the sidewalk plant yourself firmly in it. Parisians are willing to wait in long lines only for the most exceptional bread and pastry. If they are taking the time to stop and pick some up then you, the traveler, certainly should too.

Square Trees

On the surface Paris really does seem like an orderly place, filled with organized inhabitants. Parisian parks are lined with rows of trees trimmed into perfect squares, the neat, near obsessive landscaping lulls people into believing that there is structure here, that non means no, that lists are made then followed, and exceptions are rare. Polished white exteriors, daily garbage collection, potato purée pressed into neat rounds on your plate... all of these things add to the impression of order.

This impression, however, falls to pieces whenever Parisians have to wait in line. Arms reaching out, heavy sighs, shuffling sneaky feet, strategically placed market carts, innocent looking mamies claiming they thought the head of the line was the tail, are all common tricks around here that will leave you, the honest, trusting American, permanently last in line. Now, imagine if you will, what it is like to be in an "invisible line" or "waiting list".

Bonjour 2012! Bonne Année!

Happy New Year isn't just something you say to those around you when the clock strikes twelve on the 31st.  In France, Happy New Year or Bonne Année is something that must be systematically and individually wished to each one of your loved ones, cherished shopkeepers and neighbors. Much like the daily ritual of wishing your kin Bonjour, you must do it with sincerity and with accuracy, never wishing the same person twice in one year Bonne Année just as you would never, heaven forbid, tell someone Bonjour twice in one day.

Even the city of Paris gets their wishes out to the masses

Here you are far more likely to receive a Happy New Year card in the mail than a Christmas card with family news and shiny photos, makes sense in a country that prides itself on laïcité, secularism. Gregoire assures me that we have until the end of January to send out our good thoughts in card form to our French friends and family. He also emphasized how incredibly gauche it is to wish someone a Bonne Année in advance. And so since one minute past midnight last Saturday I have been sending text messages, doing a few phone calls and above all keeping careful track in my head of those who I have and haven't seen yet and wishing them a Bonne Année in person.

Keeping track is key, nothing offends the French faster than greeting them twice, as it makes the first greeting look like it wasn't important to you. We all know from my post about French Kissing that the greeting ritual here is taken very seriously. Recently I was working on set with all sorts of people I don't yet know milling about, overwhelmed by the size of the studio and the newness of my new job (more on that some other day) I was smiling my brightest American smile and greeting everyone I saw. A women walked in, we exchanged bonjours. She later walked back out then walked by our table again. Knowing how rude it is not to greet someone in this sort of environnent I smiled and offered up a bonjour. She stopped, whipped around and curtly replied "RE-bonjour you mean...". You can toss in a re infront of your bonjour which will turn it into hello again as opposed to just hello, this could be employed at the bakery for example. If you were to pick up your morning bread and greet the sales person with a cheery bonjour, then that afternoon were they still to be working when you picked up your dinner bread you would wish them a rebonjour! Give it a try, they will be delighted that your morning encounter meant so much to you that you remember it and them and thus adjusted your greeting to reflect that. This stickler of a woman reminded me of that long ago learned lesson.   

So to all of you (except of course the ones I have already spoken to since midnight on the 31st) I wish you a very Bonne Année. I think this is going to be a big year.

It's nice to be here.

Washing and drying clothes in Seattle with my parent's american style stacking mega-machines: 60 minutes.

Washing and drying clothes in our Parisian washer/dryer combo contraption: 3 hours.

Washing and drying clothes with my in-laws washing system in Quiberon: 1 to 3 days depending on the wind and the rain.

Just saying.

Grapes and Garlic

When I left Seattle four years ago the locavore and seasonal food movement was really starting to take hold. Weekly produce markets were popping up all over the place, meat lovers sought out happy meat and restaurants were dropping farmer's names like rockstars on their menus. Conscious eaters were taking an interest in heirloom vegetables, asking questions about what farmers were feeding their cows and changing the way they navigated through the continuously well stocked produce sections of American supermarkets. Eating seasonally in Seattle was a choice that required a certain amount of work, you had to turn a blind eye to the pretty red strawberries in October and head for the pears, ignore the racks of lamb in December and wait for the spring and summer months, even though asparagus was available all year round you had to figure out when the season was and only buy it then.

The French public is consistently praised for their good food habits and sensitivity to the seasonality of ingredients. Is it in their genetics? A better sense of self control? A natural born desire to respect our mother earth and only enjoy tomatoes in August? Possibly...

12 out of 20

I first became familiar with the French grading system when I was an exchange student back in high school. Sitting in the front row of my history class I waited nervously for the professor to hand back our first papers of the year, 12/20 was written in bold on the top of the page. Oh no! 12 out of 20?! That's not even a C.

Practice brioche 

And yet to my surprise, my neighbors both leaned in to congratulated me. You see, as an American (and a competitive one at that) I was obviously shooting for a 20/20. When I shared this objective with my French counterparts they giggled and said "That's impossible, even the professors don't get 20/20. No one is THAT smart."

A Room Full of Gemini

Paris is teaming with babies these days. Is it the spring? Just the natural order of things? Lamb chops for dinner and new borns in strollers? Just another month of May in Paris? Well my friends I am here to tell you that there is a lot more than happenstance going on here.

I have no doubt that those clever clever parents who gave birth this month did so with one thought in mind: May babies have the best chance of scoring a spot in the much sought after Parisian daycare system. You see daycares, or crèche in French, accept babies when they are 3 months old. This coincides perfectly with the standard 3 month long maternity leave french working women receive. The trouble is that the daycare-to-baby-ratio is way out of balance here, which means that the race to get a spot for your little cabbage is on way before they are conceived, let alone born.

The Man and Other Common Enemies

One can master all of the technical aspects of a language and call themselves fluent, but one cannot say that they are truly bilingual until they are able to tell jokes and negotiate in that foreign language. I have officially given up on French humor. Their dirty jokes offend me, their sarcasm is completely lost on me and I make people laugh by saying normal things that aren't meant to be funny at all. The ability to negotiate in French, however, is my personal holy grail and I am on a quest to obtain that skill.  

The French love to say non. No is so much faster and easier than yes, yes requires work, responsibility and follow through. Whereas a quick and simple non gets the person asking you the question out of your hair instantly.... if you aren't French that is...

The Fire Part II

So there we were, surrounded by art, breathing in oxygen and staring at our neighbor pouring bottled water into a bowl for her cat. It was all very surreal.

Our building (and our apartment) has no smoke detector and no sprinkler system which is the norm in Paris. Although people assure me that there is a law in place that will require them to be installed by 2015... as an American that is accustomed to seeing fire detectors everyone it is hard for me to imagine that this law wasn't already in place years ago. It's like stepping back in time to an era when people thought cigarettes weren't bad for you and that seat-belts were a nuisance.

The Fire Part I

Just when I thought I might be running low on new and interesting Parisian experiences, the universe delivered us a doozy.

Two weeks ago our apartment building caught on fire!

It's was 2am and I was up feeding Colette. Laying in bed we heard our neighbor making noise through the incredibly thin wall that separates our bedroom from his living room. He often makes noise around this time as the bars close at 2am and he is young, silly and unemployed so hearing him shout and stumble around on a Tuesday at 2am was par for the course. But that night we detected a hint of panic in his voice and heard him shouting about a fire... at that point we assumed he drunkenly burnt his toast and maybe accidentally caught his sleeve on fire so Greg pulled on his pants to go next-door to see if he could be of help.

As Gregoire entered the living room he saw smoke streaming into our apartment through the gap between the front door and the floor...which is fairly large given our building is slowly sliding down hill.  He touched the door and it was hot so he hurried back to the bedroom and informed us that it was more than toast that was on fire!

Hello Tasting Table!

Dear Tasting Table... thank you for visiting! As promised below you will find a few of my recent food photos. While you are here please allow me to point out a few of my favorite posts. You might enjoy reading about French Kissing and American Sandwiches or learning about French medicine in my post called Sprinkles, Seltzers & Suppositories. Should you have more time, I would encourage you to read about my trouble with Turkey, tips on riding the metro and my upsetting adventures as a receptionist in Paris.

Dear readers... this is just a short aside. I am applying for a job as a food editor for the fabulous website www.tastingtable.com. I would like to show them a few of the photos I have taken oven the years and I thought what better place to post them than here?! So enjoy and rest assured we will be back to the regularly scheduled How to Marry a Frenchman program soon.

The Mamies of Montmartre

For the first few months of Colette's life I was nervous about leaving the house. I would hover above the changing table hesitating about what she should wear. The long sleeved onsie or the short sleeved one? Pants? Socks? The wooly hat or the sun bonnet? Would she be too hot? Too cold? I would end up  jamming several additional and almost always unnecessary accessories into my purse then finally head out the door.

One might attribute these jitters to new-mommy-syndrome and concern about the well being of my new baby but in fact it was a fear based reaction to the glaring (thus caring) grannies of Montmartre. My neighborhood is a mecca for old people. Lord only knows why, considering that there are more steep slopes, craggily cobblestones and steps in our part of town than in any other arrondissement, but be that as it may, Montmartre is packed with Mamies, Grannies. The Mamies of Montmartre have appointed themselves as the monitors of safety. They roam the streets, markets and parks looking for unsuspecting young mothers who may have misjudge the meteorological micro-climate of Montmartre or underestimated the infinitely delicate nature of their child's tender neck skin, and they pounce.

I was attacked once while doing my shopping. There we were, Coco in her sling and I looking over the selection of oranges at the vegetable stand when out of the corner of my I a see a sweet old lady saddling up to us. It all starts off well, she brushes Coco's cheek with her nobly finger and tells me what a beautiful child I have made. But after a few minutes of cooing and ooing and ahhing she strikes, "Bit of a breeze today [raises her eyebrows and sighs as she looks disapprovingly at Coco's obviously too thin cotton onesie] don't you find it breezy?"With her one sing-songy question she clearly called into question my ability to parent and alerted all other grannies with in earshot to the problem.

A How to Marry a Frenchman Party!

Let's have a Party! 

For any of you who are currently in love with a Frenchman, thinking about falling in love with a Frenchman or at some point were in love with a Frenchman and in Paris on December the 7th... please join me for a little meet and greet party. 

Where: La Fourmi (bar/café) 74 rue Martyrs 75018, Metro Pigalle. 

When: Tuesday December 7th, 6:30pm
NEW TIME! We've moved things up to 6:30.  

Why: Because I would love to meet you guys and kick off the holiday season! 

RSVP by leaving a comment. 

Sprinkles, Seltzers & Suppositories

My preferred form of medication is liquid gel caps, like dayquil. Brightly colored, small, easy to swallow, flavorless and fast-acting these little pills make taking medicine a treat. The French and I appear to disagree on this point.

Never in my life have I been given such an odd assortment of powders, sprays, beads and waxy torpedo shaped tablets than while I was in the maternité. I had a natural birth mind you, but that doesn't mean you don't get a few things to help you along and more than a few things to help put yourself back together.

During the birthing process I was given Fleurs de Bach which a tincture of wild flowers soaked in cognac. As I was laboring away Sylvie offered me some and explained to me that this potion is designed to soothe you in times of emotional distress, "Like when you have just been in a car accident or when you are giving birth for example..." Perfect! I'll take mine on the rocks with a brandied cherry s'il vous plaît! Unfortunately this stuff is administered in a far less sexy vessel, a little rubber topped eye-dropper that gives you one tiny droplet at a time under your tongue. The French believe that the soft fleshy tissue under your tongue is one of the best places to administer medicine because is absorbs things quickly.

A Mushy Moment

It's Thanksgiving week and in our family on Thanksgiving day, before we sit down to eat, we go around the table and say what we are thankful for. I have plenty of new things on the list of what I am thankful for this year, a healthy happy baby girl certainly has a spot on there. But also for the first time this blog has made the short list.

Since my arrival in Paris three years ago it has been a struggle to find my footing and find my voice in this foreign land. Sharing my stories with all of you has been a wonderful creative outlet and reading your comments and emails has helped me feel connected.

So what I am trying to say here is thank you to you my readers! Thank you for your time, thank you for your comments, suggestions, stories, spelling corrections and all the rest. This year I am thankful for you.

So, what do you do?

As I slowly master the art of typing with one hand, you may notice that the next few posts come out in bits and snip-its. Bear with me. 

When in America and at a cocktail party or BBQ and you are meeting someone for the first time, one of the classic get to know you questions is...

"So, Bob, what do you do?"

"Well, Jim, I am in waste management."

"How interesting Bob! You know, I have always been curious about why we can recycle plastic bottles but not the plastic caps..."

And voilà! The conversation is launched.