A little toilet story

The first experience of the public bathroom in the USA can be quite a surprise. Generally speaking, they score on cleanliness, but totally lose on intimacy... As shown in this photo taken at work: one foot of clearance between the ground and the bottom of the partition on every side. For people often so individualists and puritans, it can be disconcerting.  

And there is that thing that I had never seen in Europe: the toilet seat with a whole in the front... Why isn't the toilet seat a full round?! 

The answer to this existential question: Of course, the hole is here for sanitary purposes. In sitting position, the full oval lid sometimes has spatters underneath and forms a nest of germs much more concentrated than with the slit version. 

I'll let you look into that situation next time you cross the Atlantic...

To wrap up on the fascinating differences we find in public bathrooms: 

• The disposable oval paper lid sheets, with a hole in the middle, to cover the toilet seat and sit ones butt on a clean surface.

•  The automatic soap dispensers where you don't push on anything for the soap to get out. 

•  In the same category, the automatic tap so you don't have to touch the tap after you washed your hands.

• And the automatic flush that is supposed to sense when you are done doing your business so you don't have to flush manually... This one has left me perplex more than one time. At first because of wondering where the hell they hid the flush handle or button, or for not getting up quickly enough... Even passed this stage, i found myself several times looking down and waiting for the flush to do its job and trying to find a way to wake up the sensor that hadn't sensed anything in the first place!! Sometimes technology just doesn't measure up...  

5 reasons why Americans hate the French

As I promised, after listing the few major stuff French people don't like about Americans, here are the few reasons why Americans talk shit about us. Once again, these are generalities. Plus almost all of the following cliches actually come from old british bias... No wonder Brits and French have never been friends ever in history.

French people are effeminate 

First cliche that comes straight from the English... During the 16th century, they were ridiculing the french language because they found it too delicate, too charming. (Personally I think we don't really have to worry about this since about every english speaking person will tell you that French sounds the sexiest.) 

What's noteworthy though, is that the way american men are educated minimize or eliminate their feminine side because it's considered a weakness. Men are often worried about not looking manly enough. French men dress differently and American men find that very weird. I stopped counting the number of times I've heard jokes about man purses. American men would rather die than wear that kind of accessories, which they consider gay looking. 

French people are cowards

On top of being effeminate, French people are sissies. From what I've read, it's an idea that came up because of the collaboration with the Nazis during WW2. And the caricature got stronger when we opposed Irak invasion. In an episod of The Simpsons, we are even called cheese eating surrender monkeys. Ask any American, he'll know what you're talking about. 

French people are elitists

Basically we're snobs, at least our leading elite is, and has been since Louis XIV proclaimed: "I am the State." The fact that most of our senior officials and executives graduate from the same Grandes Ecoles is considered inappropriate in America. It is even dreaded, because in their opinion, this system only perpetuates a class of arrogant, narrow-minded and incompetent leaders. BAM! When an american political figure knows how to speak french, he purposely avoids to show it at the risk of being accused of elitism. And in politics around here, there's pretty much nothing worse! By the way, the average French person gets his share too:  he has the bad reputation to be haughty and pretentious... 

French people are too theoretical

French people think in a much more abstract way than anglo-saxons and prefer theory to practice. It's a fact, and it's an incomprehensible concept for an American person. Also, the french system is very academic, and for a small but loud and powerful category of Americans, being too educated is considered pretentious.

French people are too collectivists 

Don't fool around with the american ideal of individualism and (individual) pursuit of happiness. Because in the american culture people are an individual entity, the ethic is "to each their own problem". While in other civilized countries people don't perceive themselves as individual and solitaries entities but as members of a group, where everyone is part of a whole. Which is why we help the ones in needs more than in the US, and it's why we don't feel like killing the others as much either. We're raised with a higher sense of solidarity so it's just harder to come down to the decision to kill. In politics, french socialism is very frowned upon and is easily  assimilated to communism, which is the worse thing ever for an American.   

To wrap that up on a better note, I'll add that most Americans like France and the French, for our language, gastronomy, culture, architecture, etc...  From my own experience, they admire us more than they hate us, or they find us too cute... So, oh well...

5 reasons why French people hate Americans

This article won't please everybody... especially this english version. I promise I will play it fair and will tell as much nastiness on the French a little later...

Americans around me often asked me why us french people hate them so much. Some of my american friends already kind of know, and generally they're also pretty critical about some aspects of their own model of society. (Which is not that rare, depending on the milieu.) I think most French people are not really anti-american, but they have a lot of received ideas about them. The same way than, for more or less justified reasons, some Americans can't stand French people. Well, quickly, here are the reasons we often find to explain why the French hold something against the Americans:

• Americans are brutes

The death penalty, the right to bear arms, the power of the NRA lobbying make us see Americans as cow-boys devoting themselves to barbaric practices.

• Americans lack culture

In America's wonderland, the culture level is clearly low. The education level is deplorable. Several surveys showed the disaster. According to an ABC reportage, "Stupid in America", fifteen years old american pupils were ranked only 25th out of 40 nationalities. When it comes to geography, many are incapable of locating countries on a world map. As for history curriculum, they are limited to their own country history. In France, who would possibly think of going to Disneyland for their honeymoon?! Here... it's common practice. Let's add to that the absence of gastronomy, the omnipresence of cars, obesity problems on one side, and the excessive love for sport on the other side, and we have gathered about all the subjects that feed the french anti-americanism.

• Americans are puritans

No sex before marriage, no alcohol before 21, the strengh of pro-life movements against abortion are all austere morals in comparison to the liberalization of french customs or any developed country's customs! I shouldn't give the example of Louisiana, because I'm very well aware that it's a special case: a southern State, extremely conservatist, where the scars of segregation can still be seen. Whatever it be, here, the law still authorizes public schools to teach creationism... Luckily we are the only one, with Tennesse, and luckily it doesn't mean all schools are teaching it, but it's freaky nonetheless. Obscurantism among american christians is baffling. French people are mostly exasperated by the whole hypocrisy of the american society: over-conservatism on one side and debauchery on the other .... Think about the notorious Spring Break, about the way young americans are pictured drinking, about american girls provocating outfits, about how fond they are of esthetic surgery, etc...

• Americans think they are the center of the world

I've read that since the end of WW1, it's like France never put up with the fact that the USA became first world power. America was seen as too politically immature and naive to become part of the powerful and victorious countries. Then, the american war in Irak, or their refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, only intensified the overall french anti-americanism.

• Americans are materialistics

All Americans are capitalists and only swear by their model of society: a consumption society. Here, people look at you funny if you dare saying that capitalism is also a bad thing. French people tend to reject globalization because they assimilate it to an americanization and standardization of the world. France has a catholic culture (even though most French are not religious anymore), and catholicism condemns accumulation of wealth. In France it's never good to show off your money. Average french people look unfavourably on rich people. Anglo-Saxons have a protestant culture, and protestantism has a totally different approach of money and profit. Americans are proud to show off their success, their big house, their big cars, their bling, etc...  It's shocking to a french person, but totally normal to them. Americans admire that. It becomes pretty easy to understand how we both became spiritual enemies.

In the end, it doesn't matter if those cliches are spread rightly or wrongly. It's not the issue.  Criticizing a culture with the point of view and reference frame of another culture isn't helpful at all. There's no cultural norm that's the right one, standards are different in each system, and every one has its own logic. The issue though, is that because we all think that our culture is legitimate, we all think it is worth something everywhere else. It can hurt to admit that the others don't work like us. And it takes years to be able to detach oneself from its own culture to truly understand another one.
Also, let's remember that all Americans are not Texan country bumpkins, that the country is far too big to draw one specimen profile, and that if there's a lot of stupid people, there's also a lot of brilliant ones.

To learn more: "Paradoxe américain: idées reçues sur les Etats-Unis" - Jacques Portes, north american history professor at Paris 8 university

Cultural differences #1: Implicitness and Explicitness

What a huge task to talk about cultural differences! I've gathered so many subjects, tried to categorized them myself to go over it piece by piece. But I quickly realized that each piece explains another piece, and that makes it super complicated to put everything together! Then I remembered this great book written by Pascal Baudry, French and Americans, the Other Shore, which I have recommended to many people. But I am about sure that nobody got into it yet, so to make it easier on me, I'm gonna use his own approach on the subject. And I will copy a lot of what he explains, since it's already so well done. After all, there's no need to re-invent the wheel.

American society is explicit, unlike France, which is a country where communication is very implicit. In France, there's a lot of unsaid things, a lot of innuendos, while Americans are very direct, straightforward. "To be able to assimilate within a mere two centuries, in a country as large as Europe, more than two hundred and eighty million foreigners, many of whom were not proficient in the English language, a particular culture has had to develop: in order to be able to act in an efficient and timely manner, people need to be able to ask for information without being judge on the very fact of asking questions or on the way to ask them, and to expect straight answers, stated at the same level as the questions."

Side note: I believe almost every french kid know the embarrassment felt when raising the hand in class, or anywhere else, to ask something. Or maybe it's just me.

"In addition, the founding fathers of the American nation chose to take the opposite course of the British royalist culture, with its vertical structure and its abuses. To that purpose, they set up a system of checks and balances, which is to say a set of procedures whose goal was to prevent any one of the three branches of government from exercising excessive power; that system rests upon a high degree of transparency, and therefore requires a continuous effort to ensure explicitness. Thus, starting from the British culture, which strongly leaned towards implicitness, American culture has become one of the most explicit on the planet. By contrast, French culture, which is older, does not seem to favor the assimilation of foreigners. It can thus afford to judge people based on the questions they ask (on their nature and quality, mode of expression, contextual relevance, the level of proficiency that can be inferred from them, etc..) to fail to answer at the level at which the questions are asked, to respond with critical or mocking innuendos, or even not to answer at all. Thus foreigners will be made to feel that they must somehow earn the right to be admitted into the French culture, through a gradual mastering of un-stated rules. They will be allowed - bit by bit, and at their own risk - to understand that culture from the inside, and later to behave like the natives themselves, including by failing to make the rules explicit for the uninitiated."

So, in the french language, there is a gap between what is said and what is meant because of the implicitness norm, which leaves room for a bunch of stuff that are only implied (allusions, shared historical references, desire, etc..). "Above all, the gap leaves communication open to misunderstandings and disagreements, forcing the participants to pay close attention to the means of relating, at the expense of content." Context is more important than content. Conversely, in the US, everything is always explained in detail. So much that it sometimes seems ridiculous (that is from a french person's point of view, who is gonna think he is being taken for an imbecile).

There's a lot of other disparities that come to mind when thinking of that context vs content theme. Pascal Baudry gives a few of them in his book:

• The French dedicate much attention to their workplace environment, while Americans are willing to work long periods in windowless offices;
• Americans use short sentences to go straight to the point. As far as I'm concerned, I still remember learning, during all my school years, the art of embellishing lonnnnnng useless sentences;
• French people decorate their cities with large numbers of monuments, bury power lines under ground, they design indirect commercials. In America, red lights are often hanging from cables in the middle of intersections, they put up monstrous billboards everywhere to make sure people get the message, and they impose the same grid pattern upon San Francisco's twenty three hills as they would upon any flat city.

San Francisco

In America, everything is black or white, you have the good people and the bad people, and not much nuance in between. Or if there is, it is disturbing for a lot of people. Everything is more nuanced in France. The French are well-known to love philosophizing and theorizing EVERYTHING. On the other hand, Americans are very pragmatic, and that would make them more efficient. Well, from a french point of view again, this is debatable...(Don't forget, everything is always debatable from a french point of view...) The Americans' lack of critical sense makes me wonder how efficient they really are. If something is not bad, it's good, and vice versa. So they do get to a result faster, but is it always the best? Anyway, I will just not philosophize on that any longer! I know that I've pissed off more than one person with my French-style theory. To an American person, a clause is either right or wrong. The typical french way to start sentences: "Yes, but.." or "No, but..." drives them crazy. French people play a lot with shades of grey... Americans prefer to go more efficiently towards action. 

“As a result, the French tend to be attracted by complexity, Americans by simplicity."

To wrap up, I'm going to quote that book again. It is so packed with good stuff I can't stop: "The reason why French was for several centuries the language spoken at European courts was not because it was the most precise one, as has been claimed, but that it was the one that allowed its speakers to be imprecise in the most precise way." Love it. lol

Americans and Food

This is it, Thanksgiving is over! Even though we obviously don't have this celebration in France, we all have heard and know more or less about it. I try here to explain to my fellow people that it's kind of like a Christmas before Christmas, without the gifts; that it’s one of the most important Holiday in the country, and also THE day when it’s wise to avoid traveling - as it is followed by a 4 day week end, when most families get together, which generates a huge mess in airports and on the roads. This year might have been even more of a mess because of a storm that covered pretty much half of the country. As far as I’m concerned, I was comfy in Baton Rouge, without family, but with three or four different invitations at friends’ parents. I could have litteraly gone from home to home until I found the best food. I contented myself with this dinner: Deviled eggs, ham, turkey, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, and sweet potatoes casserole:

I also explain them that originally Thanksgiving was a harvest celebration, then a Christian celebration during which North Americans would thank god for the good things received during the year. Now it’s a day off for everybody, the fourth Thursday of November, followed by Black Friday = The biggest and craziest sales day in the year. So if we recap… On Thursday we fill up our stomachs while being thankful for the simple things of life we already have, and on Friday we jostle one another to buy a new TV at unbeatable price. I love the irony here. In order to not sound like I’m a malicious gossip, I’m pointing out that a lot of Americans themselves are conscious of this little paradox… (See below)

Thanksgiving: the famous Turkey Day, or, the only day in the year when Americans eat better than the French. Aside from the turkey, there is usually cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, corn bread, apple pies, pecan pies. Those are among the classics. I also really liked caramelized brussel sprouts with bacon, and roasted garlic butternut squash with sage brown butter. Yummy. (I made the second myself, so proud, first time I had a butternut squash in my hands! I don't remember seeing that type of squash back in France.)

The first time I had fried turkey… this is also not bad at all!

Telling you about this great meal makes me want to talk about all the habits American people have in terms of food. It’s another world, you already knew that, but you might not know everything.

Dinner is ready!

First of all, it is common here to eat everywhere but on a dining table. Standing up, in the car, on the go, in front of the computer, on the couch. Meals at the table are often for dinner time only. And even then, the way of doing is very different: At home, dishes are not served in the middle of the table, but placed on the kitchen counter top, and people come and fill up their plate on their own. I remember my first impression: Ah that’s cool, there will be less to clear from the dinning table! But after a while it started making me almost sad. It’s not uncommon to see each and everyone get up from their seat with their plate as soon as it’s empty, not even waiting for everybody to be done. The whole affair is finished off in 10 minutes, clearly, it’s less convivial.

In France, every single meal is considered a mini social gathering. We never eat alone if there’s somebody else to eat with, neither at home, nor at work. This doesn’t exist for every day meals in the US, it’s appreciated, but not inevitable. At the office, even though we have a kitchen and a table for 6 or 8, a lot of my colleagues eat alone in front of their computer, without being called asocials. 

Always snacking!

In France having a meal is not only for the purpose of feeding oneself. We take our time, there’s a way to go from beginning to end: Starter, pause, discuss stuff, argue sometimes, main dish, pause again, cheese plate, pause, and the finale is dessert. In short, an every day meal has more importance than for an American. It seems like it is all botched here! It’s all done too fast. It must be said that a meal in America is made up of one single dish most of the time. The concept of first course – main course – desert does not really exist. For that matter the French word “entrée” is used as an equivalent of "main course", while it literally means "first course" in French! It misses the point completely! And the word “appetizer” is used for a dish served before the main dish, technically to open the appetite. Kind of like our French first course, except that considering the quantities of food served in the US, you’re not even hungry anymore after eating an “appetizer”, it totally defies its purpose! But that’s OK! You can just take your main dish in a “to go” box, leave your table in no time, and have a meal ready for tomorrow! After all it’s all about effectiveness here.

The action of eating does not evoke the same things for an American. I feel like French people have more respect for the food they eat. On a side note, you can clearly see that when you look at the differences of regulation in terms of what kind of chemical and other crap is allowed in food in the US compared to France! As a result, it’s like it doesn’t bother the American to eat anywhere at any time, or to eat in between meal times. No big deal. For French people it wouldn’t be very acceptable to do more than one thing while eating. Here it's totally tolerable: you eat and work, eat and walk, and even eat and drive… Yep!... And you mostly eat all sort of crap as you do all this, of course.

I’ve also noticed that American parents give food to their kids at every turn: when their kids are impatients, restless, tired, when they’re whining, or when they behave. “Here, since you behaved so well you can have an ice cream”. Because of that, food is perceived as a reward, a distraction, or something useful to calm down a kid that one wouldn’t succeed in making shut up. I’ve also seen children and teens randomly looking for food in the fridge at all hours of the day, without any parent saying anything about it. In short, everybody eat when they’re hungry, that’s it. I’ve never heard the English equivalent of our “Mange pas maintenant, ça va te gâcher l’appétit!” (“Don’t eat now, it’s gonna spoil your appetite!”) Never. So there you go, as much as it was annoying, years back, to have my mom limiting us to one slice of baguette with nutella or three cookies, and not four for the very regulated after school snack time… it is now quite pleasurable to be three sizes smaller than the local average, without even trying. 

Gastronomy is for snobby people

Despite these sad facts, it is possible to find good food and eat well in America. Pretty much only if you are lucky enough to be part of the middle and upper class anyway. Otherwise, really, it’s hard to have access to quality food, or it’s just not in everybody’s habits. I’ve read that Americans eat like children, in an impulsive way, always snacking, that their meal portions are too big. Generally speaking I can confirm that. I rarely see people here stopping to eat saying “I’m not hungry anymore”, but rather “I’m so full”. And their taste is often limited to what’s greasy or sweet. In France kids eat the same thing than the adults. You’re not asked what you like or don’t like. Here there’s always a kid menu, even at home sometimes, to avoid conflict and make it easier, and it’s usually not the most complex and refined… If you don’t like broccolis, that’s fine, we’ll give you Mac and Chesse instead. Be it at home or at school, how to savor and appreciate food (all food) is not part of the curriculum for the young little Americans, unfortunately.