La vengeance belge

Salut! Just a short, fun entry for now. My language prof gave us these jokes last week. The French love jokes about Belgians: stupid Belgians, dirty Belgians, whatever. Well, here's the Belgians' revenge, la vengeance belge. Some are better than others, and unfortunately jokes don't translate as well as I'd like.

A French guy uses a urinal, does he wash his hands before or after ?

--During

How does a French person commit suicide?

--He fires the gun 15 centimeters above his head, right in his superiority complex.

What do you call someone who speaks three languages?

--Trilingual

What do you call someone who speaks two languages?

--Bilingual

What do you call someone who only speaks one language?

--French

Why do the French love Belgian jokes?

--Because they make them laugh three times over: the first time when they hear one, the second time when you explain it to them, and the third time when they understand it.

Why do the French have smelly backs?

--From farting higher than their asses.

Why do you say “Go to the toilets” in France when in Belgium you say “Go to the toilet”?

--Because in France, you need a bunch of toilets before finding one clean one.

After creating France, God found that it was the most beautiful country in the world. It was going to cause some jealousy. So, to reestablish the balance, God created the French.

Why does a French person always drink from their cup when they swim?

--Because even in the water they need to open their big mouth.

You know how you save a French person from drowning?

--No, but all the better.

What’s the difference between Nelson Mandela and a member of the French government?

--Nelson Mandela was in prison before he was elected.

Alright, hope at least one of them got a chuckle. A bientôt!

Maggie B.

"Une cousine, grosse mais gentille..."

It is officially spring in Aix. It's sunny and warm and the Aixois who were reluctant to come out in the harsh, bitter cold of February (=40 degrees), fill the streets, cafés, and parks. And so do tourists, which is both amusing and painful to see. I'm at least an extended-stay tourist, which I tell myself is more respectable. It's interesting to see American tourists at their most stereotypical--comfy clothes, sneakers, et cetera--and, after being here for two months, understand why the French sometimes just don't get us crazy Americans.

I've already enjoyed complaining about tourists like a true Aixoise. Now, I've never needed an excuse to be bitter about minor inconveniences in everyday life. But my hostmom is the champion. Marie-Do has done some top-notch complaining, guilt-tripping, and nagging that would be hard, even for me, to replicate. Marie-Do is a good host mom. She's very interested in my experience here, she doesn't make foods I don't like, and she does my laundry. So it's important to know, I wouldn't write about her if I didn't find humor in her antics and if I didn't think my observations could give a little insight into the French mentality.

Marie-Do can talk forever about her health. The first time I met her she told me her glands were swollen. Recently it's her right eye (it's 'pulling,' she says, which I don't quite understand). She's a hypochondriac, as my program director says many French people are. The French are also more pessimistic than Americans. I didn't really think of Americans as being optimistic, but Marie-Do has made an optimist out of me. When I came back from Nice and Monaco and was describing the Bataille des Fleurs, she said "Oh! It's too bad you didn't go to Venice for their carnival." Same thing with Spain "Oh! It's too bad you didn't stay until Sunday." The number of times I've heard Oh! C'est dommage que....

I've gotten used to having the same conversations over and over with Marie-Do, because it's a courtesy, from what I've learned, to avoid silence or gaps in conversation. I think that goes for things like car rides, watching the news, and other times when Americans wouldn't necessarily be uneasy with an extended silence. Marie-Do is constantly asking--a more positive characterization than 'nagging' that I use for my own sanity--about my class schedule, my social life, what I'm doing this weekend, even though I told her yesterday, or often earlier that day.

When I say Marie-Do guilt-trips, I know it sounds bad. But maybe it's considered more polite to be passive-aggressive here. Okay, that doesn't sound any better. It's just something I've noticed, with Marie-Do and, to an extent, my host mom in Nantes, Roselyne. Maybe it's a French mom thing. Anyway, our upstairs neighbor, when he's home, constantly wears his shoes, which we can hear clicking on the floor. Marie-Do always says she's going to bring it up with him but that he's really very nice and she'll just 'mention it' or 'slip it in' by kindly suggesting that he wear slippers around the house. I won't recount the exact circumstances that led her to use this sneaky tactic to me, but it was artfully done, I must say. And, again, it wasn't as affronting as it sounds; I just laughed it off after.

I'll leave you with one amusing Marie-Do moment that happened just last night. Her ex-boyfriend took her out to dinner, but he came up to the apartment first to sit and talk a bit. This was the first I'd heard of him. This is not the ex-husband and father of her son, this guy was later. All I know is he is "very, very rich". So Marie-Do is babbling at him about everything going on in her life, her health problems, her efforts at home decorating, and her recent trip to Corsica. She's showing pictures of her extended family in Corsica, I couldn't see them but I was in the room. She gets to one of her and someone else and says "C'est ma cousine, grosse mais gentille." Translation: That's my cousin, fat but nice. I couldn't help but laughing, and neither could the very, very rich man.

That's it for now. I have an idea, though. If anyone is curious about some part of French culture or language I haven't written about, leave a comment. I'm no expert, but being in France means I can find an expert (okay, so maybe just Marie-Do) on whatever you might be interested in. So, comment!
A plus,
Maggie B.

Plus belle la vie!!!

Okay, so I know I'm in Spain and I should be writing about what I'm doing, but I found something on nytimes.com this morning that I couldn't resist bringing to everyone's attention.

Melting Pot of Melodrama Enthralls France

I haven't read the whole article, because I was so excited to see this in the New York Times, of all places. In France now there is an incredibly popular nightly soap opera called Plus belle la vie. My host mom and I watch it every night either during or after dinner.

Plus belle la vie is remarkable for several reasons. First, it's the first major French TV show that is set in Marseille, as opposed to Paris. For people in the South, this is important because for a long time Marseille was seen as dirty, crooked, and not at all refined like Paris. The show highlights some nefarious activities, but it also shows the nice parts of the city. I've actually walked by the bar that the design of the show's bar is based on.

Also, just in general, there aren't many French TV shows. Instead, they show a lot of dubbed American, British, or even German series. So they know Dr. House, ER, and most of the criminal drama shows. The only other well known, all-French series I've come across is 'Un gars, une fille,' a goofy comedy about a bickering French couple.

Finally, Plus belle la vie is scandalous. I've seen episodes about the trafficking (is that how you spell it? sorry) of illegals into France, racism, and homosexuality. Especially on those last two counts, the French prefer not to talk about certain things.

Read the article! Let me know what you think. I'm actually going to be behind on the plot since I'm missing three days of it this week. Oh no!
A bientôt!
Maggie B.

Zola & Cézanne

After the whirlwind of activity last weekend in Nice and Monaco, I decided to take it easy this weekend. It's not a very hard thing to convince myself to do, especially when I know I'll be going to Spain in just a few days for my first vacation this term! I will be in Madrid from Saturday to Monday, at which point I'm off to Sevilla from Monday to Wednesday night. I'm doing this largely on my own, though I'll see my friend Alicia in Sevilla and I'm hoping to spend Saturday in Madrid with two girls from my program whose plans overlap with mine. I'm a bit apprehensive, but if everything goes off without a hitch--read: I come back with all my possessions and documents, I fudge my way through Spanish enough to not get in trouble, and I maybe get a little sun in the face--I will be happy.

As for this weekend, it was filled with two people, who were natives of Aix!: Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne. They grew up here and were best friends. Until Zola wrote a book called L'oeuvre that depicted a painter in an unfavorable light. Cézanne was not pleased.

I've been working on reading Zola's Germinal in the original French almost since I got to Aix, and I finally finished today! It was a challenge. Zola, like most of the grands écrivains in French, uses the passé simple a lot (simple past), a literary tense that replaces the past tense used in spoken and most modern written French. And then there is the usual difficulty with elevated vocabulary. The biggest temptation was to look up every word I didn't know in a dictionary, but I knew it would be better to just read for the plot and the characters. I'm so glad I got through it. And I hope to read it again so I can understand more of the nuances next time.

Germinal is about mining in France in the 19th century when political awareness and activism was rising in the working class. The miners go on strike under the leadership of a young miner who has educated himself on new socialist ideas, but it's only the very beginning of organized labor, and the miners are ill-prepared for a two and a half month strike. Zola describes in detail the horrible conditions in the mines and the corons, the slums that the Company has set up for the mining families. And once the strike is under way, the families are constantly battling starvation waiting for the bourgeois management to accept the workers' demands. I won't ruin the end for you, but there are two movies of it and the translation in English. I've heard good things about both of the movies; one is from the 60s and the other is from the 80s or 90s, I think.

I don't think there is a book quite like this about the US, probably because America didn't exactly have bourgeois and wasn't as influenced by socialist ideas. At least, that's what most would like to think, since socialism=communism (duh, right?), the most terrifying of all political systems ever. But also, la grève, the strike, is a central part of political expression and activism in France. It is a rite of passage. Unions are incredibly strong here. When several of them get together on one issue, they can literally stop daily life even for weeks, by setting up boycotts or blocking roads with tractor-trailors.

All the French know the songs, slogans, and chants of la grève, even if they pretend to make fun of themselves for this common obsession of the strike. It doesn't seem to matter what the object of the grève is, there will be a song to fit it and a crowd who will sing it. It's an entirely different viewpoint from the US, where strikes are seen as last resorts and often burdens on the rest of the community. My junior year of high school my teachers went on strike for a month, and there were many people who criticized the teachers for abandoning their jobs as educators. Even if certain people among the French don't agree with the reasons behind a strike, I have never heard anyone question an individual's morals or character for participating in one. It would be just as surprising as someone complaining about a smoker in a restaurant!

Now, as for Cézanne, I did something this weekend I've been wanting to do since I got here: I hiked Mont Saint Victoire. This is the mountain that Cézanne painted, I think, 28 times. Or something like that. I had seen several of these paintings at the Met in NYC and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and now I kind of want to go back to see what I think, having seen it in person.

I went with three girls from my program, Allison, Sherie, and Jill. Four was a perfect number, very manageable. We took the short bus ride to the base of the mountain and started on a trail that was marked 'moyen', or mid-level in difficulty. It was a good day for hiking, not too warm, kind of brisk, and sunny most of the time. Eventually we came to a fork in the trail and we decided to take the more difficult path that would lead more directly to our target, the Croix de Provence, at the top of the mountain. Well, it certainly was difficult. I found myself thanking my friend Claudia for taking me once to the rock-climbing wall at Pitt. We were probably not wearing the right footwear for this kind of trail, but we made it, even after one rather dangerous detour from the path in search of pesky trailmarkers. And we got a huge payoff for our hard work of almost 4 hours climbing, not hiking (Allison was right to insist on the distinction in her blog, which again I'm referencing), to the Cross of Provence. The cross itself wasn't incredibly unique, but the views were amazing. Three-hundred-sixty degrees of rolling hills and mountains, a river, little towns peaking out from valleys. It was impressive, to say the least.

I still can't get over how different the geography (or topography? I'm losing my sense of the precision of certain words in English) is here, and the natural life. The mountain seemed to jut out of the land, not at all like the mountains I've seen before. The huge cliffs are streaked with this glowing orange that is the same color as the bright clay soil at the foot of the mountain. And the slopes (or dropoffs, really) are covered with beautiful conifers that are all over Cézanne's paintings, perfectly geometric bark and just the right amount of branches in the top third of the trunk. The brush is interesting too. Even though most leaves haven't come out yet, there's wild holly and these twiggy plants with muted purple-red branches that make the mountainside look like a patchwork of purples and greens and browns.

Needless to say, it was a great day. And tiring, after about 6 hours of hiking. This mountain is not for the faint-hearted or the out of shape. I count myself lucky to have only been slightly sore the next morning.

Pictures are to come!
A plus,
Maggie B.