Happy Mardi Gras!

Mardi Gras History
It's because of the french and spanish catholic influences that Mardi Gras is celebrated in the southern states of the US. New Orleans is the most well-known place to celebrate it but there are the same traditions in cities of Alabama, Mississippi, and all the way to Pensacola, Florida. On March 2, 1699, the day before Mardi Gras, French-Canadian explorer Jean Baptiste Le Moyne Sieur de Bienville arrived at a plot of ground 60 miles directly south of New Orleans, and named it "Pointe du Mardi Gras". He established New Orleans in 1718, and by the 1730s, Mardi Gras was celebrated openly in the city. In the early 1740s, Louisiana's governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, established elegant society balls, which became the model for the New Orleans Mardi Gras balls of today. The earliest reference to Mardi Gras "Carnival" appears in 1781. That year, the first of hundreds of clubs and carnival organizations formed in New Orleans. By the late 1830s, New Orleans held street processions of maskers with carriages and horseback riders to celebrate Mardi Gras. The two first Krewe were formed in 1856 and 1870. In 1872, to  honor a visiting Russian Duke, a group of businessmen introduced his family's colors, purple, green and gold as Carnival's official colors. In 1875, the Governor signed the "Mardi Gras Act," making Fat Tuesday a legal holiday in Louisiana, which it still is. Like the first krewes, most Mardi Gras krewes today developed from private social clubs with restrictive membership policies. All the parade organizations are completely funded by their members. So bascially it's way cool to have the opportunity to ride a float and throw beads to everybody else! All kind of other knick-knacks are also thrown to the kids. 

Parades start weeks before Mardi Gras. New Orleans is primarily well-know for its Endymion and Bacchus parades on saturday and sunday before Mardi Gras. Themes vary from a city to the other and year after year. Here in Baton Rouge, the main parade, much smaller than any New Orleans parade, takes place in the historic neighborhood of Spanish Town. Krewe members do not really wear masks or costumes like in other parades, but the rose color is a must for everybody. A few weeks before Mardi Gras, the carnaval organizers go, by night, to put up about a hundred wooden flamingos in the middle of the university lake. During the following days, Baton Rouge people turn up with small boats to adopt their own flamingo which they will proudly display on their porches or at their windows. As a result we can see flamingos everywhere on the front porches of this neighborhood's houses, all year long.

Mardi Gras in Cajun country
In rural villages around Lafayette, traditions are slightly different. The local event is called the "Courir de Mardi Gras". In cajun French it means the race of Mardi Gras, and it comes from old french rural rituals. Since it's the last day before Lent, the participants heartily eat and drink. The men of the village get out on horse backs in the morning, wearing costumes and masks to hide their identity, and go from house to house begging for ingredients to make the communal gumbo at the end of the day. Offerings go from an onion to a live chicken, which they'll have to catch. 
Personal advise: If you go see a Courir de Mardi Gras, make sure to have stuff to give away in your pockets in case one of them begs you to pass something... For lack of food for the Gumbo, a few coins, or a bottle of beer will do it. Otherwise you are taking the risk to have to get rid of something you didn't want to give, or to end up head upside down on their shoulders being spanked. I speak from experience. You have been warned, they are shameless...

Baltimore, Maryland

My first and only visit on the East coast. Yep, usually it's the first side everybody come to visit, but I guess I felt too good and comfortable on the West side... As a result, those few days in Baltimore almost felt like a return to my roots... I mean European roots: a few narrow streets, sometimes even cobbled ones, brick buildings, small human scale shops. I know Baltimore is not the first choice city to see on the East coast (by the way I didn't chose to go there either), but because all is relative, it was pretty refreshing for me, considering that, at the time, what I knew was californian suburbian life.
Baltimore was founded in 1729, is located on the Chesapeake Bay, between Washington and Philadelphia, and is one of the most important port of the East coast. 

Fell's Point neighborhood, an old 19th century port village

 

Valentine's Day!

 I'm not gonna give you an rundown on Valentine's Day, even though that's hardcore around here. I thought I knew everything about this holiday in the US. The difference between France and the US is that here, Valentine's Day is not only a lovers day, it's an occasion for everybody to show ones love/friendship/affection for whoever you want! Between friends, from parents to kids, between kids at school (and please... in a very organized way), as Louison is explaining it so well in her blog article "Les Américains et le Love" (Read it if you can read french, it's really funny!). We wish each other a happy Valentine's Day, (Got 3 text from friends this morning already...), some offer cards to each other, etc... To me it's a little beyond belief, but after all, why not, you feel less lonely when you're single! The new stuff I've learnt this year, is that there's also a VGalentine's Day the day before Valentin's Day! What is that??

Explanation:

1: "Gal" is a casual word for "fille", it's actually an alteration of the word "girl".

2: Galentine's Day is the name of an episod from the serie Parks and Recreation. The story is that every February 13th, Leslie (Amy Poehler) and her girl friends leave their husbands or boyfriends home and go out to celebrate their friendship, girls celebrating girls. It seems like this fad comes from there. 

Anyway, last night a good friend of mine had invited me to join her and her other friends (so that means I made even more girl friends!) for my first Galentine's Day! I think I couldn't be more immersed in the American culture than that... lol

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

When it's cold in Louisiana...

I apologize for the small talk but, it's been cold these days in Louisiana, much colder than normal. This translate into: We had freezing temperatures for several hours in a row. WOW. Yes, just enough to create chaos. 

 

To bring things in perspective, let's point out that most of the locals I talk to have only seen snow maybe one or two times in their life. That kind of event is so unusual that there's no investment made to anticipate it... No salt truck + above ground water pipes that freeze in no time + many bridges everywhere since we are more or less in the middle of a giant swamp = full paralysis for three days of an entire city, even entire state. With less than a twentieth of an inch of ice on the ground (in the end we haven't even had real snow) freeways were closed, most workers were asked to stay home, and we've had around 200 car accidents in town in one morning for the unlucky people that decided to take a chance outside. Luckily, by now, most Louisiana people can say they've survived the "2014 snow storm". Yesterday things were back to normal. The thermometer still indicated 28 degrees in the early morning so we were still given a third day off, or "snow day" as they call it. You never know, no messing around! 

The good thing is, we had cheap beer!

Little Rock, Arkansas

Last fall I was sent to a work conference in Little Rock, Arkansas. On the face of it, not a dream destination. Let's say I wasn't expecting this city to be more exciting than Baton Rouge. I had even read that, like here, it was one of the most dangerous city in the US, with ghettos all around the city, gangs problems, murders, rapes and so on happening everyday. In the end, I was rather pleasantly surprised. At least the Arkansas capital city gets to have a few highrise buildings worthy of a downtown, and even a pretty tramway and a pedestrian bridge that both go over the river! Damn, we still have a long way to go in our Louisiana capital...

 

 

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