Gratitude Monday: les Français

It’s Bastille Day. So guess the subject of today’s second Gratitude Monday post.

I’ve never understood the rationale behind some people—even people with multiple university degrees (I’m not going to go so far as to conclude that they’re actually educated people)—ragging on the French.

Some of them are like Tea Partiers who can’t talk about Wheat Chex without blaming President Obama for the milk going sour. Whenever I hear that sort of desperate reach kind of thing the first phrase that comes to my mind is, “compensation issues.”

Yes, some Frogs can be attitudinal—just like New Yorkers and Seattleites. They generally do it with more panache than New Yorkers, and have worlds more justification than Seattleites, so I personally cut them some slack.

I’ve never been disappointed taking a trip to France. From my first one with no credit cards, riding a bicycle from Paris to Santiago de Compostela and staying in youth hostels, abandoned houses and highway rest stops, to the most recent involving comfortable hotel beds and some very nice meals—each one has enriched my perception of the world.

To the extent that I feel at home anywhere, I do in France. I will confess that they have raised the concept of bureaucracy to an art—a Baroque, over-ornamented art whose objective is to stun you into compliance with whatever whack-job requirement they have laid out for no discernible human reason. But they certainly do it with style, unlike, say, the UK, where the approach is basically, “Hey, if it was good enough for Victoria, it’s just fine for us. Get out your quill pen and sign here.”

It’s an adjustment, of course, for a Californian to recalibrate to French timetables and customs. Do not wander into a restaurant a minute before 1400 and expect to be welcomed, much less served lunch. And don’t show up before 1930 for dinner, either.

But if you can manage the time frames, and aren’t afraid to ask questions, it’s definitely worth it. (I once asked a server at a restaurant in Bordeaux, “Quel sort d’animal est une bavette?” Look: no smartphone; that means you have to get used to human-to-human interaction. Turned out that a bavette is a cut of beef rather like a flank steak and it’s delicious.)

For the record, I really didn’t care what it was, precisely—I was going to eat it regardless. I just wanted to know what type of wine I should order to go with it.

I’ve commented on this before, but I actually enjoy driving in France. Maybe not so much in the narrow-roaded towns that were built 800 or a thousand years ago, where you creep along in your rental car (or, worse: your company car from the UK, so that you’re on the wrong side of the vehicle for even the limited visibility that medieval streets provide) not entirely sure whether at the next intersection you’re going to encounter a crocodile of school children, a flock of chickens on their way to market or Asterix. That can be a little stressful.

But when you’re ready to get out of Dodge, my favorite travel indicator ever: the Toutes Directions sign:

  

Plus—out in the country, on the secondary roads—gorgeous.

I love the sense of history in France. Yeah, the French are subject to selective amnesia as much as the next nation, but coming from Southern California, chills ran down my spine the first time I stood at the edge of the medieval boundaries of Poitiers, looking across the plain in the twilight below and just faintly hearing the echoes of the Moorish armies that encamped there in 732, before Charles Martel drove them back toward the Pyrenees.

You don’t get that sort of thing on La Cienega Boulevard. Not usually, anyway. And certainly not without chemical enhancers involved.

It bites a little that this grasp of history means that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the people of Normandy know and appreciate the events of D-Day far more than the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the men who landed there 70 years ago. No—it bites a lot, and it’s an indictment of our education system that if there’s not an app for that, it’s unlikely to take hold in the brains of our easily-amused youth.

I picked up this book at the Musée du Débarquement, by Utah Beach on one of my trips. It’s the result of a 1997 school project in which the children at the Collège des Pieux, in a town southwest of Cherbourg, researched the 1939-1945 war. They interviewed their grandparents and other elders, they wrote to German and British participants and they dug into archives.

I’m not seeing Fremont High School putting together a class project like that, much less producing a 250-page book with photos and drawings among  the extremely pertinent text.

Well, I could go on, but I presume you get the picture. I am grateful for France and the French. Et vive la revolution!