amazon

My First Month in France

Posted by

2

This is part of a series of articles about the final days of preparing for moving to France and what happens when you get here, and those articles are part of a promotional series launching our new book, 29 Days to France, a book that all the writers wish they had had before we started our French adventures.  It’s now available for preorder, and those preorders come with a free 15-minute Q&A personal session about your French immigration plans.  Click here to learn more.

You can find Luke’s first article in this series, about his first three months in France, here.

By the end of my first month in France I had experienced a good deal of the classic signs of culture shock, including strange food cravings, wild mood swings, and the ability to sleep more hours a night than I thought humanly possible.

But I was also making progress in this new world. I was no longer getting lost a few blocks from my own apartment. My ability to open doors was improving. I could more or less manage the bakery and went every morning for my croissant and daily bread.

My furnished studio had an impressive coffee maker and an electric kettle, but neither a stove nor microwave. There was instead a tiny oven with the outward appearance of a microwave (if we were making them for dwarves), and it didn’t seem to get very hot. What its purpose was I had no clue. I mostly used it to melt butter.

Having arrived at the planetary center of culinary excellence, my diet for a long time consisted almost entirely of baguettes and ramen. There were beautiful fruits and vegetables at the grocery store, but I observed that you had to take your produce to a guy behind a special counter to have it weighed. That was obviously far too terrifying to contemplate, but the internet informed me it took at least three months to develop scurvy and it was probably that long before I ever ate a nutrient. It took me a good month before I even had the courage to buy a crêpe from a street vendor.

Once again showing my naiveté, I decided to rent a car for a few days in order to get some things I thought I needed out in the suburbs at the hypermarché (these are basically like Walmart with the addition of a huge dead fish section). The topic of cars and driving in France could fill an entire book (Stephen reviewed an entire book just on the driver’s license issue), but suffice to say every hour in that car took about a year off my life — and I’m a car nut even by American standards. I returned it as soon as I could and was charged an extra 60 euros for an invisible scratch on the rear wheel, even though I had already bought their expensive insurance which cost as much as the rental itself. Had I understood French I might have better appreciated the beautiful French contours of this ripoff, but in the event I was just relieved the car hadn’t been totaled. I think driving in France is basically like being in a demolition derby, and navigating a French parking garage is to grapple with lunacy itself.

That odd experience led me to brave the buses. Yes I held up the line trying to figure out the QR code scanning deal (no I didn’t understand the possibly helpful advice from the bus driver) and of course I felt and looked like a moron. Even simple things are nerve-racking the first time, but with enough repetition they do get easier. Pushing myself over the initial hurdle usually took more energy than I thought I really had, and I admit there were times I wished I could just spend one day back in the easy world.

France too has Amazon and thank goodness, but the delivery process was a challenge for me. After being trapped at home all day long waiting for the package to arrive, not daring to leave even for a quick run to the bakery, I was informed late in the evening that “Sorry! Your package couldn’t be delivered because you weren’t home.” A rain-smeared paper slip would be found in the mailbox, with an indecipherable scribble telling me where I might go to pick it up. I learned to avoid having anything delivered to my apartment if at all possible, but thankfully in France you can frequently ship to a point relais (pickup place). These locations are quite random, they include the post office of course (usually also to be avoided), but also Carrefour, the wine shop, the book store, the vape store, the tailor or key maker, the weird printer cartridge place, and of course to the ubiquitous and versatile tabacs. There it waits until you have time to retrieve it on your own schedule — that is if you don’t forget your passport, and if the shop owner hasn’t decided to go fishing for the day.

Amidst all this running about what struck me as the biggest difference from the suburbs of America from whence I had appeared, were the vast quantity of people in…well I was about to say “in my life,” but that is not exactly correct. They were in my presence; or anyway, I was in theirs. They were out and about.

The sidewalks and pedestrian streets were every day crowded with what seemed like half the town. In America the main reason to go outdoors is to immediately get into our cars, and when we get out of the car, it is usually to go immediately inside somewhere else. This kind of lifestyle would scarcely be possible in France; even with a car one would end up doing a great deal of walking by American standards. There is most certainly no parking lot in front of your favorite French café.

Consequently being outside with hundreds of others is just part of everyday life, and not only in the big cities. It is no exaggeration to say that on any Saturday afternoon in the small French town where I live, I could leave my apartment and see more flesh-and-blood human beings in ten minutes than I saw in the last ten years combined in America.

I soon learned that it was practical and even (sometimes) enjoyable to walk distances far greater than I would ever have guessed. All that exercise and fresh air had a salutary influence on my health, and my waistline. Most notably, being in the presence of so many others in real life — not just people on Zoom, or in the car next to me on the freeway — provided a glimpse into community living that I had not seen in the US.

At the end of my first month I had learned how to get by, but my glimpse into French society remained just that. A crowd alone does not a community make, and to be present in the midst of one is not necessarily to be a participant. If anything I discovered a new type of isolation only possible to experience in the company of others, something which I think many expats can attest to.

Obviously my next objective was to get out and meet people, somehow. 

Photo of Notre-Dame d’Amiens as snow begins to fall. 

Did you enjoy this article?  TAIP is 100% reader-supported through tipping.  If you want to leave us a tip of any amount it would be highly appreciated.  These tips help support our efforts to keep TAIP an ad-free environment.  Just as at a cafe, the tips are split evenly among the team.

streaming services

The Loss of Netflix and Hulu, or “How I Started Reading Again”

Posted by

0

I’m an early adopter.  Not the “have it first” type, but the “that’s really cool I’d like to try that” type.  Sometimes this works out well, other times one accepts bad experiences as the cost of being among the first to try them.

Those of us in our 30s are not “digital natives.”  Email and the internet really hit their stride after our undergraduate years.  But it doesn’t mean we take to “appification” any less, particularly ones that involve video.  Some of those video apps that I have particularly become attached to in previous years include:

  • Amazon Prime
  • Hulu Plus
  • NBC Sports (meant I could watch Premier League matches)
  • Netflix
  • Pandora

I knew before I arrived in France that none of these applications were ordinarily available and had started to cogitate about work-arounds or (gasp!) the possibility that I would simply “go without” while I was in Europe.

My degree is in Literature and I have thousands of dead-tree books carefully collected through years of library book sales, out-of-control spending at Half-Price Books, or at any other known honeypot for a bookhound like myself.  The smell of those pages — old and new — were pheromones for me.  They woke me up — excited me — made me simply happy.

However, in the final two years of my residence in America my reading pace had slowed to a trickle.  Instead of the usual 2-3-4 books a month I had slowed to not even finishing one book per month.  I would sometimes go a week or longer without even touching a book.  It wasn’t until I was out of the warm comfort zone that was my American existence (that I created for myself — I don’t blame anyone else!) that I realized what had happened: Netflix and its imitators.

It wasn’t entirely Netflix’s fault.  I should say it was the fault of having easy access to a nearly infinite library of video titles.  While I’m happy to doff my hat to the era of television that played host to the original Twilight Zone or produced my beloved The Prisoner, I have to say that the current era of television is perhaps the finest in history.  If we look strictly at script and writer-driven shows, like Boardwalk Empire, Treme, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Justified, Luther, Sherlock, and the like, we are witnessing the marriage of what any reader loves, whether he/she knows it or not: real, meaningful stories combined with expert costuming, cinematography, and directing.  There are many moments in any of the series I’ve listed above where one could freeze a frame and give an hour-long lecture on everything occurring in that sequence.

In a sense, I didn’t realize I had abandoned reading because I was still occupying my time with ideas and stories and concepts that mattered to me.  It was only when I had to confront having to get a VPN workaround and its own challenges — like only working 85% of the time — made it so that I accepted that I would just go without for a while.  There’s always time to catch up on those series at some point in my life.

What happened in that going without?  Reading, like the waters of spring coming forth from a snowmelt, burst in through all the well-known stream beds of my free time.  Public transportation facilitated this by giving me countless chances to get in a “quickie” with some novel or work I had downloaded for free (because it was in the public domain) and read on my Kindle app on my iPhone or iPad.  That led to even more reading (I was foolish enough to bring a number of dead tree books with me to Europe) and before I knew it, the old paradigm had reasserted itself in my life: free time spent in large part reading, with a tiny bit of TV via the free Fox app and a weekly movie in the theaters.  Unwilling to pay for any premium services like Netflix, I simply enjoy Pandora (I still haven’t converted to Spotify, but I am open to listening to you tell me why I should) and the occasional guilty pleasure of Masterchef or Hell’s Kitchen (I love cooking and I love Gordon Ramsay).  Last week my mother told me I should watch the new Jack Bauer 24 series and I haven’t yet told her that I already watched the first episode, having failed to stop watching 24 — as I should have — after the 3rd season.  Remind me to tell you about my feelings on the art of non-finishing some time.

So, can I ask you to try something?  Something that can be done from the comfort of your own home?  Give up Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu Plus for one month.  Watch what happens.  I’m not on a crusade here.  I just want you to experience what I wasn’t able to until I left everything I knew to move to a place where I only knew a handful of people.  All those programs you’re terrified you’ll miss will still be there for you.

If you ever go back.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Did you enjoy this article? TAIP is 100% reader-supported through tipping. If you want to leave us a tip of any amount it would be highly appreciated. These tips help support our efforts to keep TAIP an ad-free environment. Just as at a cafe, the tips are split evenly among the team.