Living in France changes your perspective.
I was talking about pumpkin pie with my French wife one evening. And we got hung up on a previously unidentified Franco-American difference. Danièle only knows pumpkin as something she buys raw at the marché. I only knew pumpkin as a paste that comes out of a can. For confirmation I reached for my cooking Bible, the Better Homes and Garden Cookbook. Sure enough every recipe I could find involving pumpkin started with canned pumpkin.
That's what this blog is about, the little differences between living in the US and living in France, like where pumpkins come from.
I'll leave it to the great philosophers and sociologists to write about the grand differences--America's myths of the open road and the Western frontier, its love of guns and violence, its easy friendliness, dynamism, and naiveté, and so on, or France's myths of being Cartesian, the superiority of French culture and the French language, the integration into French society open to all its citizens, and so on. I don't pretend to the wisdom or experience to appreciate the differences on that scale. However there are others, and if you want to spend any time here, it's good to be aware of them. So I propose to write about the little things that the books on cultural differences don't cover.
France is a great place to live--I'll come back to this as we go along. But it is different from living in America. Americans know France about as well as the French know America. [chuckle] That is, both have enormous holes in their understanding of the other. What we know of France comes mostly from Hollywood movies, superficial coverage on TV and in the papers, and books by humorists. What France knows of America comes mostly from Hollywood movies, lengthy stories on TV and in the papers, and books by intellectuals.
The prejudices and misunderstandings on both sides are staggering. I was once introduced to a French lawyer as an American. She looked me up and down and said, 'But you're not obese!' You know, it's true, over 50% of Americans are overweight or obese. That leaves more than 125 million who aren't!
And it's amazing how many Americans believe they can move here and take up life as if they were doing no more than moving across America. We have this romantic idea that France is like America, only better, what with the joie de vivre, good wine, and all. On some visceral level we understand that living in Beijing, New Delhi, or Cairo is going to be really different. The people look different, they dress different, the smells are different. If we've got enough sense to knock two stones together, we expect cultural shock and a period of adjustment. But France, come on. They look like us--for heaven's sake they wear Levi jeans. The French McDonald's are the most popular in Europe. And we use their perfumes, look up to their couturiers, and drool over their actresses.
Well, it just isn't so. France is not America, only with an accent. They've had over two thousand years of history to develop a culture, style of living, customs, government, and institutions that are different from America's. The US has survived one civil war and is still working on the aftermath. The French have spent hundreds of years forming a country out of chunks of this and that and trying to hold it together--one of the reasons all the main roads in France started in Paris is so that the troops could easily get to the place where a rebellion or invasion, either one, was going on, i.e., to help hold the country together. That marks a country in ways Americans don't easily appreciate.
And I've already broken my promise not to write about the big subjects, but to stick to the little differences. I'll try to do better.
I've lived in France for a couple of years, seduced into changing my life by love for a lovely Frenchwoman. Home used to be Houston, Texas where I was a software developer for twenty years, first as a singleton and then as president of my own company. Eventually I sold the assets of my company and went to work for the acquiring company. When I started coming to France, I hoped some of my work would follow me here. When it didn't, I retired.
Danièle still works which gives me the time to hang around as I've always wanted to. And that's made it easier to notice the little differences that make living here interesting for an American.
A bientôt,
Harvey
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