Posts from — December 2008

If anyone is cursing because you have to wait a couple of weeks for the winter soldes in Paris, please don’t. A supplement in the Melbourne Age newspaper today has reminded me of yet another reason to escape to France. There’s something vaguely obscene about people camping in the streets as they do in Australia from 11pm Christmas night so they can be first into the Boxing Day sales when they open at 5am. If we rename December 25 as Consumerist Day, then I guess that would be okay, or at least consistent. But to call it Christmas Day and then follow it immediately with such nonsense, just turns it all into… humbug!

To top it all off, they’ve spelt ‘bargain’ as ‘bargin’. Now surely there would be a national outcry if either of these heresies occurred in France!

In Paris and most departments of France, les soldes begin on January 7 at a civilised 8am. The DGCCRF (Direction General de la Concurrence, de la Consommation et de la Repression des Fraudes) sets the dates each year, decreeing that the soldes last for five weeks, with the original price tags clearly displayed.

In Meurthe-et-Moselle, les soldes start on January 5, likewise in Meuse, and Moselle. In Guadelope it’s January 3, St Pierre et Miquelon January 21, and in Reunion they have to wait until February 2.

Brigitte's Christmas tree

I’ve managed to find the words for ‘Petit Papa Noel’, and have been having great fun singing along with a French Ukelele band:

C’est la belle nuit de Noël
La neige étend son manteau blanc
Et les yeux levés vers le ciel,
A genoux, les petits enfants,
Avant de fermer leurs paupières,
Font une dernière prière.

{Refrain:}
Petit Papa Noël
Quand tu descendras du ciel
Avec des jouets par milliers
N’oublie pas mon petit soulier
Mais, avant de partir,
Il faudra bien te couvrir
Dehors tu vas avoir si froid
C’est un peu à cause de moi

Le marchand de sable est passé
Les enfants vont faire dodo
Et tu vas pouvoir commencer
Avec ta hotte sur le dos
Au son des cloches des églises
Ta distribution de surprises

{Refrain}

I’ve just been listening to Yvan Amar’s Danse des Mots program on Radio France (about which I’ve blogged before), in which he interviewed Afghan/French writer and film maker Atiq Rahimi. Rahimi has just won the Prix Goncourt 2009 for his latest book Syngue Sabour (pierre de patience). Syngue Sabour is Persian - his mother tongue - for ‘stone of patience’. Rahimi took the idea of the ‘stone of patience’ from ‘a folk tale about a black stone that absorbs the distress of anyone who confides in it’, according to an article in the International Herald Tribune.

The Prix Goncourt has been running for 105 years and has been awarded to many great French and non-French writers. Among the former group are Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and Marcel Proust.

The most fascinating part of the interview, for me, was when Rahimi talked about writing in French, his second language. He said that writing in French was liberating, but also imposed certain obligations. For example, he has to concentrate on each word, and also on the rhythm and sound of the words. He has to write and re-write, to check each word in the dictionary. In this way, it was like poetry, he said, because in poetry you must work on each word, each phrase, each comma. You have to be both precise and concise with each phrase, each image.

If you’d like to listen to or download the interview yourself, you’ll find it here.

I’ve just been given a wonderful Christmas present: a book called Finding France in Australia, written by two Australian francophiles, one with a French husband, and published by Melbourne company Matheson Publishing. I’ve only been looking at it for ten minutes, but already I know when and how to find French language programs on Australian radio, where to find French restaurants in each capital city, with REAL French staff, French cooking classes, language classes, bilingual schools, a shop called Madame B in Melbourne that stocks French women’s clothes, and a French bookshop run by a Frenchman, in - of all places - Fremantle Western Australia.

The book also features excellent articles - on French wineries in Australia, on French cuisine, and one on the man who fought for several years to overturn the ban on the importation into Australia of French Roquefort cheese. There is also one of the clearest short summaries I’ve read recently on France’s long and complicated history. And most importantly of all - one hundred words you will find on French menus.

I’m not in favour of beauty contests, but since no one seems to have managed to stop them, I will say that I think the new Miss France, Chloe Mortaud, is beautiful (am I the only one who thinks it ridiculous that it’s not Mademoiselle France?). There has been, however, a certain amount of ‘backbiting’ that would seem to be an inevitable part of such competitions (I do hope Aussie slang is understandable to my non-Aussie readers! If it’s not, please leave comments below).

To counter the gossip, Le Poste has interviewed Mademoiselle Mortaud, to give her the right to respond to the nastiness. Certainly not the most in-depth article of the week in the French media, I know, but one which gave me the opportunity to learn a few new phrases. At least I hope I have learned them correctly. Idiomatic expressions in a foreign language can be very difficult to get right. Please do correct me if I am wrong, using the comments section below.

First, there is the title of the article:

Miss France: “Je n’ai été méchante avec personne” = I’m not nasty to anyone.

Méchant/e = nasty, mean, bad, spiteful

Huer = to boo or jeer

Mettre en avant = to advance something, e.g. an argument

le côté = direction, way

metisse = mixed race

ringard = literally ‘fire iron’, so this sentence — ‘Certains attribuent un petit côté ringard à Miss France…‘ quite likely means : Certain people assign/impute a troubling side to Miss France [the contest]…

At the cafe in the Place de la Sorbonne

Victorians go out alone far more than Australians in the other states, according to a new survey I heard about on ABC Radio this morning. This started me thinking about how much I enjoy travelling alone. It’s not that I’m anti-social—quite the opposite, in fact. And that’s precisely why I love travelling alone: locals are far more likely to talk to you when you’re alone than when you are in a group. I have sat alone in Paris bistros, for meals or just for a coffee, countless times; on the majority of occasions a fellow diner or even a waiter has started a conversation with me.

A few years ago, I was staying near the Sorbonne, and made it a habit to have a mid-morning coffee and read Le Monde in one of the Cafes in the Place de la Sorbonne. It was the time of the referendum about the European Constitution, and each day there were articles in the newspaper outlining the reasons to vote Yes or No, which I laboured over, looking up many words in my pocket French dictionary. It wasn’t a busy period in the cafe, and one of the waiters in particular always made time for a quick chat, after greeting me with, ‘Bonjour, c’est l’etudiante de la constitution Européenne!’

One evening, quite late, I called in to the same café for a drink on my way home. The evening was not too cold, so I sat outside. My usual waiter wasn’t there, but that didn’t matter. As I was drinking my chocolat chaud, a man came along, looking rather down and out, and holding out a bottle of something that he was trying to sell, saying he needed to buy himself a meal. Before the few of us sitting at the tables could think of what to say or do, one of the waiters walked up to the man, took him gently by the arm, and led him inside the restaurant, saying he would find him something to eat.

As well as in Paris, I’ve sat alone in cafes in Melbourne, London, Brussels, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Tokyo, and possibly quite a few other places that I’ve forgotten. But I’ve never forgotten that waiter’s action, and I’ve never seen it occur anywhere else, although it probably does. When I find myself having to tolerate yet another stupid tourist’s tale about the ‘rudeness’ of Parisian waiters, I sometimes tell this story.