Is That Your Final Answer?

When Dave and I told our friends and family that we were going to live abroad, most of them were very excited for us, and a few were openly envious. I imagine that each person had a different mental image of what it would be like to live in the south of France, ranging from sun drenched summer evenings sipping wine on beachfront terraces to being hideously and shamefully dressed down by arrogant French waiters.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. In my ongoing effort to provide an honest and unflinching glimpse into our experience of life in France, today I'm going to attempt to answer the top 3 questions I get asked by you, the folks back home. I exchange email or regular mail with many people in the States, and thanks to the wonders of the internet (insert cynical joke about bandwidth here), I'm able to chat real-time over AIM with many of you as well. Over time, patterns have emerged regarding the kind of information you're most interested in, so I'll take the opportunity to address those inquiries here.

Without any further ado, the number one most common query from you, the folks back home, is:

What time is it there?

For reasons I hope are obvious, this is not a taxing question for me. I almost always know the answer and because we're living in a Marvelous New Millennium™ you too can play along with our home game! France is 9 hours ahead of Pacific time. Always. If you're in California (as most of our family and friends are), add 9 hours to whatever time it is for you and you know what time it is for us. Or, if you want to get really fancy about it, subtract 3 hours and flip AM and PM. France follows daylight savings time (although nobody in France can give me a good reason for this, the same way nobody in the US can), so the "ahead by 9 hours" thing is always accurate. For those of you in time zones other than Pacific, I'm sorry, but you'll have to get out a calculator, because my first question for you is "What time is it there?"

Sometimes, just for fun, Dave and I like to give people the wrong time when they ask. We'll be chatting with someone at 8:00 am California time and after we go through the superficial "Hi, how are you? What's new?" routine, there's a pause and we can just hear the wheels turning.

"So what time is it there?"

Often we'll say something like "Oh, it's 9:47" just to see what happens. Try it with your friends! It's fun!

OK, so we've covered temporal issues. I hope that helps, although exactly what insight it will give you into life abroad, I don't know. The second most commonly asked question about our life here in France is (drum roll, please)...

What's the weather like?

The weather question is a little trickier, although France has an abundance of windows, so I've never been stuck for an answer on this one either. For the most part, the weather in the south of France is very much like the weather in the San Francisco Bay Area - only a little moreso. A little more humid in the summer, a little more chilly in the winter, a little more rainy in the spring. But basically the same. Dave and I gave up our language, our culture, and Frito-Lay corn chips for the chance to live abroad, but we weren't dumb enough to sacrifice good weather. For current conditions in Montpellier, click here. Of course, the temperature will be in Celsius, so good luck.

So the time and the weather are gimmes. I can check my watch or look out the window. The last question is the hardest, mostly because it changes almost constantly.

What do you miss about the States?

What I miss about the States depends on what's going on at the moment I'm asked the question. When I get the munchies at 11 PM, I miss 24-hour supermarkets. When someone asks me how tall I am, I miss the imperial system of measurement (for your information, I converted my 5 feet, 6 inches of height and it turns out that I am 1.67 milliliters centigrade). When I drive somewhere, I miss people who STAY IN THEIR OWN LANE! That's a hard one to get over. I didn't mean to lash out. Thank you.

But these are all fleeting things - generally I don't think about them for more than a few minutes at a time (if I thought about the whole inability-of-French-drivers-to-stay-in-their-own-lane thing for more than a few minutes at a time, I'd need immobilizing doses of calming psychoactive drugs). On the other hand, there are a few things that I don't miss about the States and cannot imagine I ever will miss. In no particular order, here are some of them:

1. Paul Harvey. Very few people know this, but I despise Paul Harvey with a passion that borders on maniacal. Don't ask me why. The man just gets on my nerves like a cheese grater on the tender skin of the back of your hand. If you don't know who I'm talking about, count your blessings. He's that guy on the radio who tells those "The Rest of the Story" anecdotes. I don't want to hear the rest of the story, dude. I didn't even want to hear the beginning of the story. My father and I used to commute to work together, and on the days when he drove, Dad took great pleasure in watching me retch and gag while Paul Harvey drew out a story to the limits of human endurance. It says a lot about my paternal relationship.
2. Noisy restaurants. Dave and I have gotten to the point where we can pinpoint North Americans and Germans in restaurants by their vocal decibel levels, even when they're speaking French (it'd be a little too easy if they were speaking English or German, I realize that). French people keep a "sound space" around themselves, rather than a physical space bubble, like Americans do. The French get about 5 inches from you in lines, but they speak quietly enough that you can't tell they're there by their voices. They don't shout into their cell phones, either.
3. Christmas decorations before Halloween. We started seeing Christmas decorations here the last week of November. And the French don't even have Thanksgiving to tip them off! Somehow, they just know it's ridiculous for kids to see Santa Claus in every other store window when they're still trying to figure out their class schedule.
4. Traffic jams. Duh. I hear the traffic in Paris is every bit as bad as Bay Area traffic, but despite what Montpellier's mayor would have us think, Montpellier is a far cry from Paris. This isn't to say that driving in France is a cakewalk, or even that much fun, but at least when you drive around here you're moving instead of inching toward your destination grinding your teeth at a Paul Harvey broadcast.
5. Artificially jacked up wine prices. In America, wine is a luxury. In France, it's a sacred right. Oh, you can find pricey wines here, to be sure, but there's an enormous variety of very yummy vins de pays (country/table wines) for under $2 a bottle, and a huge number of inexpensive appellation wines, as well. Dave and I recently bought a full case of various wines for under $100 - and this was a case where every bottle had won an award. At an average of $8 a bottle, these were actually relatively expensive choices for us!
6. Tasteless, under-ripe produce. I don't want to get on a food jag here, but French produce is really something to behold. Comparing French tomatoes, grapes, cantaloupes and oranges to their American counterparts is impossible. The French distribution system is much smaller than in the US, such that what you buy locally was grown locally. And they don't grow so many fruits and vegetables out of season. When it's time for the grape harvest, there are grapes everywhere. You gorge yourself on the sweetest, juiciest grapes imaginable. And then it's not grape time anymore.

Every day I live in France I compare what I've known all my life to another way of doing things. Sometimes it's confusing, frustrating, even infuriating. Other times it's eye-opening, surprising, refreshing. As I learn more about the French way of life, I learn more about the American way as well. That is one of the greatest opportunities we have in living abroad.

By the way, before you ask, it's 9:47.

- KNP Dec 19, '00

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