This is a post for all those who had to move out of their parents' place to go to university. If you didn't, you've never had that awkward discussion with yourself about how you use the word 'home'. When I first moved to Melbourne and would tell friends that I'd be "home all weekend, I've got an assignment to finish," they'd pause for a moment and then ask, "Home in Melbourne or home in the country?" The dual-locality of my existence was too confusing for them to handle. I had to define my terminology; which one was 'home'.
Now, as an exchange student and ex-patriot Australian, I find myself having the same dilemma. It's not just the use of the word 'home' and which place it designates now. I don't really have that problem with my friends anymore. The word 'home' doesn't really even exist in French. There's 'house', which is 'maison', and 'apartment' and all the other words to describe a building which can be a home, but when it comes to describing the concept of a place of settlement, they flounder. You have to say, 'chez (person's name)', like 'chez Caelli' or 'chez toi' (your house). You can't say 'I'm going home', it has to be 'I'm going chez moi', literally, 'to my home'. So there's the linguistic influence for the day.
No, what I'm talking about is where the concept of home is for me. What home really means, as a place, and exactly where I mean when I say it. You see, I love Australia with all my heart, I think it's the greatest place on earth bar none, and yet I believe that I will never live there again. I hope, really, that this is true. Australia can't offer me the job and the lifestyle that I want and need and believe I was born to (multilingual cycling journalists are a little lost in English-speaking AFL-centric Victoria). But when someone assumes that I'm French, or English, I'm quick to correct them, or tell them that their guess of my nationality is wrong. I'm proud to assert that I come from Australia, proud to wear our flag and mingle with other ex-pats and teach others our national songs about suicidal thieves. Australia is my birthplace that will forever hold my heart, and I proclaim with Dorothea Mackellar that it's the wide brown land for me, but can I really sing with Peter Allen that I still call Australia home? I'm not sure. My nationality and heritage is Australian, absolutely, and I won't let anyone tell me otherwise, but I don't think that Australia counts as my 'home' anymore (unless I get send back to Monash for another semester and find myself living Down Under again). Though in a slip of the tongue I sometimes talk about 'back home', I don't really think of Australia in that way anymore.
I've written before about how much I detest Paris, of how I hate living in cities and how of all cities Paris is not my favourite in any way whatsoever. Yet according to the English definition of 'home', it includes in part your current place of residence. Mine is Paris. Yet there's another element to home that includes an emotional attachment, that mental acceptance of a place as being where you're tied to. That I don't really have. Yet sometimes, when I go travelling and I'm on a train returning to Paris, alone, weary and ready to settle, I find myself glad to get back to Paris, glad to be going...and there I stop myself, for I can't think that. I can't think of Paris as 'home'. I don't want to be attached to that place. But I remember when I came back from Germany, having spent a lot on the next ticket out of there because nothing had really gone right since leaving Luxembourg, how I felt the most incredible sense of relief as we pulled into Gare de l'Est in Paris and I hopped on the metro home. Oops. You see? I was relieved to get back to Paris, to familiarity and also to a little apartment decorated in a million postcards and cycling press passes where three needy cacti and a plush turtle were waiting for me. The place I'd made my own - home. Can my apartment be home even if Paris is not?
But I had another, stranger feeling the other day, on a train going through Brittany somewhere on my latest excursion. Even though I recoil at any possibility of bonding with Paris, of desiring to call it home for any other reason than being my place of residence, and forming any other attachment than the little piece of Serenity that I call my apartment, as the train whizzed through green woods and fields and I watched curled up on the seat with a book in my hand, I felt some sort of connection with this place. France is not a place I want to have a connection with. Australia yes, of course, Girona in Spain, or Luxembourg, these are places I want to live, places with which I want to foster a spiritual connection that manifested itself from the first moment, these are places with which I would be proud to share an official link of residency, citizenship or simply love. I would love to say that I am Luxembourger, or that I am Catalan, to develop such a relationship with the place that I'm proud to wear its label. France was never one of these.
But over time I think I've become French. Not Parisian. I will never identify as Parisian. But French, just a person who is part of the country that is France. I didn't want this. But I find that despite my aversion to my specific place of residence, there is a link there. I feel a concern for this place, a connection, a...care. Maybe France is home now. I hope not. I prefer to think of Europe as 'home', until I can find that elusive place which I know is out there and will sing to my soul with all the joy of a lark who is learning to pray and which my soul will recognise as long-lost kindred to whom it has finally come home. There will be that deeper, meaningful, spiritual connection as well as the sense of comfort, security, familiarity, love, and the necessary residency which combine to create my idea of home.
But maybe there can be more than one type of 'home' for me, in the same way that I had 'home in Melbourne' and 'home in the country'. When I lived in Australia I called my Melbourne house 'home' and my Creswick house 'my parents' place'. Even then it hurt, since I knew in my heart of hearts that my country house was my home and my city house was just an impersonal place to live while I had to be in the city. But since I spent more time in the city, calling it 'home' was less confusing for my friends, and anyway I felt kind of cool talking about 'my parents' place' all the time like I was an independent young adult, instead of just a kid boasting of 'my house'.
My point is, maybe I can have different kinds of 'homes' around the world too - but with different names, of course. Australia can be 'Core of my heart, my country!' and for now France will be 'home'. Maybe one day a small town in Spain or Italy will be the one on which I happily bestow my beloved nomen of 'home' with all the love one has for a soulmate, while the 'Australia' of which I teach my elderly Spanish neighbours will be as a best friend or sister, and France will be the old friend with whom you have romantic tension, knowing that it will never be anything more and savouring it as it is. Different kinds of love for different kinds of home. Maybe this will finally allow me to untangle the confusing mess of loyalties I've developed in my continuing quest to find the place where I truly belong. Future me can bask in the warmth that is knowing where one's love and one's true place in the universe are. But in the meantime, I have a question:
Where is home?
Friday 24 May 2013
Thursday 23 May 2013
Wednesday 15 May 2013
France Life #3: The Language
Right from the beginning, the whole point of me moving to France was about language – specifically, learning the French one. However, I’ve learned that moving to Europe to study in a foreign language is never just about one language. It’s about many.
The first thing is that Paris is multilingual. Unlike Australia, where people only speak English and tourists have to do their best approximation to make themselves understood, in Paris it’s all about making yourself understood to the tourists. English is the primary language, of course, but there are people speaking Spanish, Italian, Portuguese…well, pretty much anything that isn’t French that they think will make them money.
Then there are the non-French speakers who live in Paris…well, like me. It’s such a melting-pot, more so than Australia, really, but it’s worth noting that the whole of Australia is a melting-pot. Paris is probably the only place in France that can truly claim that title, but it does it well. Poorly-accented French is mixed in with the languages of all the immigrants and exchange students from around Europe and the world. Walk into any bar on Rue Mouffetard in the 5th and you’ll hear at least one language other than French. This all means that my favourite trick of switching languages when I don’t want to talk to someone is less effective, unless I’m particularly careful in choosing my languages (like German. That works really well).
What really fascinates me is the languages' use in relation to me. When I walk into a tourist shop, for example, looking for presents to send back home, the store owners always greet me and start spruiking their wares in English. Customarily I reply in French, partly ‘cause I’m in France and partly because it’s easier to keep talking and interacting in French, since that's the language that I usually use. The surprise on their faces when they hear my reply is evident – “Vous parlez francais? You speak French?” They assume, since I’m a clean-cut white girl in their souvenir shop, that I’m an ignorant tourist who can’t speak French. I very much enjoy dispelling this stereotype as I explain in fluent French that I live and study in Paris, I’m just looking for something to send home to my best friend/sister/mother, which is why I’m in a shop catering mostly to ignorant non-French-speaking tourists.
Then there’s what happens in other shops. I walk into…a café, a boulangerie, anything, really, and address whomever I need to speak to in French, outlining my order, question, request. They hear the Anglophone accent that I’m told tints my fluent French, and suddenly when they reply they’re speaking English. It’s clear from my vocabulary, syntax, grammar, hell, my confidence, that I speak French pretty damn well, probably far better than a lot of Frenchmen speak English. Yet they seem to assume that as a native English speaker I would rather speak English than French.
People occasionally suggest that it’s because they want to practise their English on me. Sure, that happens sometimes. My « copine » (girlfriend) at the boulangerie gets an occasional laugh from saying stuff to me in English when I show up for my baguettes, and I’m happy to teach the lady at my favourite creperie that it’s pronounced ‘dor-da’ and saying ‘dah-durr’ makes you sound like you just walked out of the American south. But most of them aren’t like this. In the middle of a formal, professional conversation they just switch to English. I wish they wouldn’t. After all, I’m in France, which speaks French, and I clearly speak French. There’s no call to speak English. None at all. But this is the rub of living in a multilingual society like Europe.
D’accord, then.
The first thing is that Paris is multilingual. Unlike Australia, where people only speak English and tourists have to do their best approximation to make themselves understood, in Paris it’s all about making yourself understood to the tourists. English is the primary language, of course, but there are people speaking Spanish, Italian, Portuguese…well, pretty much anything that isn’t French that they think will make them money.
Then there are the non-French speakers who live in Paris…well, like me. It’s such a melting-pot, more so than Australia, really, but it’s worth noting that the whole of Australia is a melting-pot. Paris is probably the only place in France that can truly claim that title, but it does it well. Poorly-accented French is mixed in with the languages of all the immigrants and exchange students from around Europe and the world. Walk into any bar on Rue Mouffetard in the 5th and you’ll hear at least one language other than French. This all means that my favourite trick of switching languages when I don’t want to talk to someone is less effective, unless I’m particularly careful in choosing my languages (like German. That works really well).
What really fascinates me is the languages' use in relation to me. When I walk into a tourist shop, for example, looking for presents to send back home, the store owners always greet me and start spruiking their wares in English. Customarily I reply in French, partly ‘cause I’m in France and partly because it’s easier to keep talking and interacting in French, since that's the language that I usually use. The surprise on their faces when they hear my reply is evident – “Vous parlez francais? You speak French?” They assume, since I’m a clean-cut white girl in their souvenir shop, that I’m an ignorant tourist who can’t speak French. I very much enjoy dispelling this stereotype as I explain in fluent French that I live and study in Paris, I’m just looking for something to send home to my best friend/sister/mother, which is why I’m in a shop catering mostly to ignorant non-French-speaking tourists.
Then there’s what happens in other shops. I walk into…a café, a boulangerie, anything, really, and address whomever I need to speak to in French, outlining my order, question, request. They hear the Anglophone accent that I’m told tints my fluent French, and suddenly when they reply they’re speaking English. It’s clear from my vocabulary, syntax, grammar, hell, my confidence, that I speak French pretty damn well, probably far better than a lot of Frenchmen speak English. Yet they seem to assume that as a native English speaker I would rather speak English than French.
People occasionally suggest that it’s because they want to practise their English on me. Sure, that happens sometimes. My « copine » (girlfriend) at the boulangerie gets an occasional laugh from saying stuff to me in English when I show up for my baguettes, and I’m happy to teach the lady at my favourite creperie that it’s pronounced ‘dor-da’ and saying ‘dah-durr’ makes you sound like you just walked out of the American south. But most of them aren’t like this. In the middle of a formal, professional conversation they just switch to English. I wish they wouldn’t. After all, I’m in France, which speaks French, and I clearly speak French. There’s no call to speak English. None at all. But this is the rub of living in a multilingual society like Europe.
D’accord, then.
Tuesday 14 May 2013
Europe Lessons #3: The Lucky Country
They call Australia ‘the lucky country’. It’s a title we take for granted, something that we dismiss with a shake of the head when people try and impress upon us how good we got it. Yeah, yeah. The lucky country. We know.
But I’m finding that maybe we don’t know, or maybe we don’t try to know, how true this actually is. I was asked the other night if I miss Australia. Yes, I miss Australia. I always will. But what I also miss is the quality of life, liberty and education that we have and take for granted, those securities, rights and privileges that don’t exist even in a first-world country like France.
Take, for example, social security. I’ve written before about the beggars and the homeless that seem to populate Paris. People who have no security, no certainty in their lives from one day to the next. I feel lucky not to be one of them. I know that were I to wind up homeless, kinless, friendless and penniless in the street, the Australian government would take care of me. The Salvation Army would take care of me. There would be someone to give me food, shelter, clothes, until I could earn those things for myself again. Even on a slightly less drastic level, we have Centrelink, annoying though it is, providing financial support to those who need it until they can support themselves again. I’m not sure what I would have done without Youth Allowance. If I had to work to support myself, I probably wouldn’t have had time for extra-curriculars, maybe not even time to overload to finish my Diploma, and moving to the other side of the world would have been out of my budget and time constraints. I’d be a different person, one who still lived in Australia, who didn’t sail, never served as secretary in so many uni clubs, who never did anything but work and study.
But I’m finding that maybe we don’t know, or maybe we don’t try to know, how true this actually is. I was asked the other night if I miss Australia. Yes, I miss Australia. I always will. But what I also miss is the quality of life, liberty and education that we have and take for granted, those securities, rights and privileges that don’t exist even in a first-world country like France.
Take, for example, social security. I’ve written before about the beggars and the homeless that seem to populate Paris. People who have no security, no certainty in their lives from one day to the next. I feel lucky not to be one of them. I know that were I to wind up homeless, kinless, friendless and penniless in the street, the Australian government would take care of me. The Salvation Army would take care of me. There would be someone to give me food, shelter, clothes, until I could earn those things for myself again. Even on a slightly less drastic level, we have Centrelink, annoying though it is, providing financial support to those who need it until they can support themselves again. I’m not sure what I would have done without Youth Allowance. If I had to work to support myself, I probably wouldn’t have had time for extra-curriculars, maybe not even time to overload to finish my Diploma, and moving to the other side of the world would have been out of my budget and time constraints. I’d be a different person, one who still lived in Australia, who didn’t sail, never served as secretary in so many uni clubs, who never did anything but work and study.
Education’s
another thing. The university I go to,
l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III, often shortened to Paris 3, is one
of the Sorbonne-group universities that are known all over the world. Now, maybe Sorbonne Pantheon, which is
Sorbonne No 1, has actually earned that global recognition and that
reputation that makes people go, “The Sorbonne?
Wow! You’re so lucky!” Paris III
definitely hasn’t. The quality of the
teaching has actually been pretty good – the linguistics teachers are all
really knowledgeable and interesting, and each semester I’ve had a really good
lit professor, too. You know the kind –
strict, expects you to follow the rules closely, but really nice and willing to
help if you stay on her good side. It’s
everything outside of the actual teaching that’s been a problem. There’s not much in the way of student
life. There’s even less in the way of
student support. In the Monash Arts Faculty
there’s a department devoted to helping students with academia – essay writing
support, proofreading, preparing for an oral presentation, etc. – so last year
I went searching for the Sorbonne equivalent to get help on writing a
commentaire composé, since I’ve written like a zillion since I got here and I
figured I should learn how to write them properly. Couldn’t find one. No-one could help the poor exchange student
correct her homework. I can’t even drop
by the teacher’s office in their designated hour to ask questions and
stuff. They don’t have offices, or
hours. It’s all do-it-yourself. Little things like that, but it’s just made
me so much more grateful for Monash and the fact that I chose to do the
majority of my degree at such a good university in Australia. I had a wonderful time there, got the full
‘uni experience’, as it’s called, and enjoyed most of my degree. I wouldn’t have in France. Incidentally, Monash remains one of the best
unis in the world, top 100 (top 70).
Paris 3 doesn’t even make the top 400.
So many
other ways, too. Bureaucracy – we all
complain about Centrelink, I know, and I haven’t applied for a resident’s or
immigrant’s visa in Australia before, so I can’t be sure what it’s like, but
I’m pretty sure it’s not as bad as all the bureaucracy in France, be it opening
a bank account, or getting a visa (“Come on, hurry up, girl!” “But I still don’t understand what you want
me to do…oh, stick my breasts up against the X-ray machine?” “Yes!
What did you think we were doing, for heaven’s sake?” “I don’t know, no-one’s told me anything!”),
or enrolling in classes, or sorting out social security, or doing electricity
bill paperwork, or government funding paperwork, or whatever else red-tapey
these obstacle-happy people can come up with.
Seriously, Centrelink might be bad by Australian standards, but by
everyone else’s it’s a totally top-notch organisation. You just don’t appreciate this principle until
you’re afraid to go to the doctor even when you have flu for the third time in
a row because you don’t understand how to do the paperwork to manage it.
The
attitude, too, and the freedoms we get are different. In France the military patrol airports and
train stations, rifles in hand. We’re
lucky to see two cops with guns at airports here. I baffled a Belgian recently by pulling out
my learner’s permit and explaining that this is perfectly valid ID in Australia
and if, God forbid, the cops were to stop me on the street and ask for proof of
identity (not that I can ever, ever
imagine that happening) then my learner’s would be totally acceptable. They have to carry a national ID card or
passport just to take a train. I think,
technically, I can be stopped on the street here in France and demanded to
produce my visa and passport, which I’m technically meant to carry at all
times. The law feels more present here,
the government’s involvement in people’s lives deeper than in Australia, where
the cops and pollies are inclined to leave everyone alone. Here, I’m much more conscious of the military
and police presence everywhere.
There
are just so many little things I find myself noticing around here, things that
we take for granted in Australia. I find
myself more and more appreciative of the way we do things back in Australia,
comparing life to back home and thinking, “If I was in Melbourne now…” with a
self-righteous attitude born of the knowledge that we ARE better. We ARE happier, we ARE safer (I refer you to
the rubbish bins designed to not be conducive to terrorist attacks), we ARE
more economically secure and better educated and more equal; in so many ways we
really ARE the lucky country.
**
Editor’s note: we’re also about to reach our 23 millionth citizen. Read this guy’s letter to the little baby who
will be No. 23,000,000 describing the wonders of the lucky country into which
they’ve just been born.
Saturday 11 May 2013
Europe Lessons #2: People and Trust
I’ve never been the most trusting of people, it’s true.
I usually take a while to get to know someone before I’ll tell them my secrets, lend them my stuff, be myself around them, and even then I’m always a bit wary.
Living in France, and Europe, has been a journey of trust and how I view people. And I’m sorry to say that I think it’s changed my perspective for the worse.
I’d never seen a beggar until I moved to Paris. There aren’t beggars in Melbourne. I’ve seen people selling The Big Issue on the street, sure, but even in the CBD late at night I’ve never seen disreputably dressed people with a suitcase full of stuff curled up on a piece of cardboard with a sleeping bag over the top. Here, it’s sadly normal. The metro stations seem to be a common haunt for them – dry, and not too cold. You can usually find them curled up behind the benches in Cluny-La Sorbonne or other stations around the centre of Paris. By day they usually take up stations on various street corners around Paris, dogs on their lap and containers and signs asking for money.
They’re not the only kind of beggars. People often get on the metro and walk up and down, asking for money, often with a small child in their arms. It’s mostly young Indian/subcontinental women that I’ve noticed (along with the odd possibly drunk, slightly disreputable middle-aged bloke who stands at the door of the metro and proclaims his poor fortune in a loud voice). I might be a little more sympathetic if they weren’t all reasonably well-dressed and neatly presented, with a good-quality baby sling strapped to their chest. Then there’s the RER beggars. They have a set of cards with information neatly printed on them in French asking for a euro or a ticket restaurant (meal coupon). There’s usually a date of arrival in France from some less fortunate country, the number of children or siblings they’re supporting and some other set of unfortunate circumstances that make them perfect candidates for charity. They walk through the train, placing these on seats next to passengers for you to read and leave a small token next to when they come back to collect the note.
Again, the RER beggars are usually quite well-dressed, and they clearly have access to a computer and printing services (and the money to pay for them) if they’ve got nicely printed cards. I’ve even seen one little girl, 11 or 12, walking through the train placing cards on seats, and with every card she put down she pulled a small disposable pack of tissues from her backpack and put it with the card, presumably as a gift for generous donors (nice purple backpack too, by the way). My first thought: if you’re so hard up for money, why don’t you just sell the tissues instead of giving them away? Sure, it didn’t end so well for Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl, but unlike her, these beggars aren’t in rags, far from it, and they all own baby slings or backpacks – definitely a step up from Little Match Girl Poverty.
Then there’s the older, apparently Muslim woman who sits in the stairwell at the Le Bourget train station with her hand held out, or the guy who approached me at the Barcelona metro ticket machines asking for my change. It happens so often.
All of this has made me very wary of my wallet and handbag. When I go to an ATM, I put the money straight in my purse and walk away as quickly as I can, because a young girl at an ATM would make a perfect robbery target, or even a good begging target, perhaps. On the metro, too, there are multilingual announcements to beware of pickpockets and keep your bags closed and in sight at all times. They’re not kidding, either. It happened to one of my exchange friends last semester. Her backpack was opened while she was wearing it and her wallet stolen from inside.
In Australia, I would never worry about closing my handbag while slung over my arm. Just not necessary. Here, if I can’t close it because I have textbooks in there then I flip the clasp closed to hold it together and then keep it tucked very tightly under my arm. When I first arrived in France, I was using my battered old backpack to get around with, and the zip on one of the outside pockets was broken, so I didn’t use it except for rubbish. More than once I had people try and close the pocket for me, or tell me it was open – even one of the staff at the Louvre sprinted down a corridor after seeing me from behind and noticing that my backpack was ‘open’. It’s not something that would cause alarm in Australia – in fact, people would probably think it was a fashion statement. Here, it’s a serious problem.
There’s more, too. There’s this trend, and I noticed it in Rennes as well as Paris, of 20- and 30-something Indian women running petitions for goodness knows what, hassling passers-by to sign it. In Paris they have a pretty much constant presence on the corner of Quai Saint-Michel and Petit Pont, about four of them at a time. It bugs me, and I’m surprised the authorities haven’t stopped it for the same reason, since that’s a big tourist area and it must be thoroughly off-putting for tourists to be harassed in any number of languages about some petition which means absolutely nothing to them. Headphones and complete lack of attention are usually pretty good at repelling them, but I did say no once to one who got very much in my face and received a jab in the shoulder with a pen for my troubles.
Usually when people like this come up to me I switch languages to whichever I speak that I reckon they don’t. Sometimes they switch too, if I’m pretending to be Spanish or French (somewhere other than France, that is), in which case I’ve distracted them long enough to make walking briskly past them possible, and other times they honestly believe that I can’t understand them and let me go. The technique is most effective on men who are trying to hit on me. Yes, sadly I’m serious.
It’s happened a heap of times now. I’m not talking about guys my own age flirting or being cute, I’m talking about men at least 10 years my senior trying to seduce me, literally. This one time in Strasbourg I was openly propositioned by a guy old enough to be my grandfather, who then decided to try and guess how old I was. “15? 16?” Apart from the insulting fact that I’ve worked hard to look my whole 20 years, I’m pretty sure THAT’S ILLEGAL. I mean, it is in Australia, and France isn’t THAT backward.
This was far from an isolated incident. There was the guy in Madrid who started off nice (“You look just like Monica,”) and got clingier and clinger. The one who groped me on the metro. The one who tried chatting me up as I walked down the street to my apartment. The one on the RER making eyes at me and giving me a creepy grin. I don’t encourage them – heavens, I don’t even KNOW them – and once I realise what they’re up to I do everything in my power to ignore them, avoid them, switch languages, whatever works.
If they were my own age (and a little less creepy) then it wouldn’t bother me so much. I could just put it down to some seriously inept flirting (and probably the fact that they’ve never had a girlfriend). My problem lies in the fact that I don’t think a single one of these guys has been under 35. In fact, I’ve been joking for months that I’ll throw a party if I get hit on by someone UNDER 35. These guys can tell how old I am – I barely even look 20, in fact – and they’re deliberately setting out to ensnare a ‘naïve’ girl who’s almost young enough to be their daughter. Such an age gap is far from socially acceptable when one of the parties is as young as I am, and it’s certainly not acceptable to me.
My lack of interest is no deterrent either, and that’s something that comes up in conversations about rape culture and sexual harassment. It becomes harassment when it’s unwanted attention. If you’re interested, show your interest, and if it’s clearly reciprocated, then take it further. If it’s not clear, back off. Well, I’m clearly showing that I’m not interested, and they keep at it. It makes me feel uncomfortable and threatened, but unfortunately, short of leaving France/Europe (an enticing solution at times) or becoming a hermit in my apartment, there’s no way I can avoid putting myself in the public situations where this occurs.
Case in point: at the youth hostel I just stayed at in Rennes, there was this African guy in a blue jumper, late 20s-early 30s, who was very familiar in the way he addressed me, winked at me, right from the start. Me, being wary, avoided him and his gaze, only saying a polite hello over breakfast, that sort of thing. Basically avoided him for the whole time I was there, showed no interest and showed that I was actively disinterested. At the train station today, I ran into the Canadian friend I’d made (who, incidentally, was not scared of blue-jumper guy like I was) as we were both boarding our trains. “Oh, by the way, that guy at the hostel wanted me to pass on a message to you. He wanted me to tell you that he thought you were very pretty.” We both burst out laughing, since I’d already confided to Canadian my experiences of creepy people hitting on me and we both agreed this guy was a player.
But how was that sort of comment appropriate? Blue-jumper KNEW I didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t even want to look at him, and yet it’s OK for him to send flirty messages to me like that? The way I see it, not cool, and yet it’s happened so often that maybe this is actually the norm in Europe. I hope not. It’s not fair on the girls is happens to, for a start, and it’s not exactly promising for respectful relationships between men and women around here – I’m talking about in the workplace, in the shops or in cafes, as much as in romantic relationships. If this is how guys in Europe think they can treat girls…what does that say?
Between all of the above experiences, I’m now terrified every time someone approaches me that they’re begging for money or going to hit on me or asking me to sign a petition or going to tell me that I have ‘beautiful eyes’ (they must learnt this one at their mother’s knee, ‘cause I’ve heard the exact same line from about three different guys). I practically cringe when I see them coming, and I’m actually relieved when I hear the native Anglophone accent of a lost tourist looking for help. I don’t open up to people or chat to random strangers in the street, always terrified that I’m going to give too much away and they’ll use it against me somehow.
And even when someone doesn’t fit into one of the previously identified categories above, I’m still wary of interacting with them in case they’re some variant I haven’t met yet. Like the boy in Rome, 12 or 13 years old, who tried to help my parents with their luggage at the train station, tried to help us find our seats, tried to help us get settled on the train, and all in the hopes of earning a few euro. I in return was almost outright rude as I refused to acknowledge what he wanted, since we’d refused his help the whole time. I hate that I’ve turned into this rude, dismissive, sheltered, fearful creature. I hate that Europe’s turned me into this. I wish I could change, go back to the open, carefree person I used to be. I hope, in a friendlier country like Australia, I can.
I usually take a while to get to know someone before I’ll tell them my secrets, lend them my stuff, be myself around them, and even then I’m always a bit wary.
Living in France, and Europe, has been a journey of trust and how I view people. And I’m sorry to say that I think it’s changed my perspective for the worse.
I’d never seen a beggar until I moved to Paris. There aren’t beggars in Melbourne. I’ve seen people selling The Big Issue on the street, sure, but even in the CBD late at night I’ve never seen disreputably dressed people with a suitcase full of stuff curled up on a piece of cardboard with a sleeping bag over the top. Here, it’s sadly normal. The metro stations seem to be a common haunt for them – dry, and not too cold. You can usually find them curled up behind the benches in Cluny-La Sorbonne or other stations around the centre of Paris. By day they usually take up stations on various street corners around Paris, dogs on their lap and containers and signs asking for money.
They’re not the only kind of beggars. People often get on the metro and walk up and down, asking for money, often with a small child in their arms. It’s mostly young Indian/subcontinental women that I’ve noticed (along with the odd possibly drunk, slightly disreputable middle-aged bloke who stands at the door of the metro and proclaims his poor fortune in a loud voice). I might be a little more sympathetic if they weren’t all reasonably well-dressed and neatly presented, with a good-quality baby sling strapped to their chest. Then there’s the RER beggars. They have a set of cards with information neatly printed on them in French asking for a euro or a ticket restaurant (meal coupon). There’s usually a date of arrival in France from some less fortunate country, the number of children or siblings they’re supporting and some other set of unfortunate circumstances that make them perfect candidates for charity. They walk through the train, placing these on seats next to passengers for you to read and leave a small token next to when they come back to collect the note.
Again, the RER beggars are usually quite well-dressed, and they clearly have access to a computer and printing services (and the money to pay for them) if they’ve got nicely printed cards. I’ve even seen one little girl, 11 or 12, walking through the train placing cards on seats, and with every card she put down she pulled a small disposable pack of tissues from her backpack and put it with the card, presumably as a gift for generous donors (nice purple backpack too, by the way). My first thought: if you’re so hard up for money, why don’t you just sell the tissues instead of giving them away? Sure, it didn’t end so well for Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl, but unlike her, these beggars aren’t in rags, far from it, and they all own baby slings or backpacks – definitely a step up from Little Match Girl Poverty.
Then there’s the older, apparently Muslim woman who sits in the stairwell at the Le Bourget train station with her hand held out, or the guy who approached me at the Barcelona metro ticket machines asking for my change. It happens so often.
All of this has made me very wary of my wallet and handbag. When I go to an ATM, I put the money straight in my purse and walk away as quickly as I can, because a young girl at an ATM would make a perfect robbery target, or even a good begging target, perhaps. On the metro, too, there are multilingual announcements to beware of pickpockets and keep your bags closed and in sight at all times. They’re not kidding, either. It happened to one of my exchange friends last semester. Her backpack was opened while she was wearing it and her wallet stolen from inside.
In Australia, I would never worry about closing my handbag while slung over my arm. Just not necessary. Here, if I can’t close it because I have textbooks in there then I flip the clasp closed to hold it together and then keep it tucked very tightly under my arm. When I first arrived in France, I was using my battered old backpack to get around with, and the zip on one of the outside pockets was broken, so I didn’t use it except for rubbish. More than once I had people try and close the pocket for me, or tell me it was open – even one of the staff at the Louvre sprinted down a corridor after seeing me from behind and noticing that my backpack was ‘open’. It’s not something that would cause alarm in Australia – in fact, people would probably think it was a fashion statement. Here, it’s a serious problem.
There’s more, too. There’s this trend, and I noticed it in Rennes as well as Paris, of 20- and 30-something Indian women running petitions for goodness knows what, hassling passers-by to sign it. In Paris they have a pretty much constant presence on the corner of Quai Saint-Michel and Petit Pont, about four of them at a time. It bugs me, and I’m surprised the authorities haven’t stopped it for the same reason, since that’s a big tourist area and it must be thoroughly off-putting for tourists to be harassed in any number of languages about some petition which means absolutely nothing to them. Headphones and complete lack of attention are usually pretty good at repelling them, but I did say no once to one who got very much in my face and received a jab in the shoulder with a pen for my troubles.
Usually when people like this come up to me I switch languages to whichever I speak that I reckon they don’t. Sometimes they switch too, if I’m pretending to be Spanish or French (somewhere other than France, that is), in which case I’ve distracted them long enough to make walking briskly past them possible, and other times they honestly believe that I can’t understand them and let me go. The technique is most effective on men who are trying to hit on me. Yes, sadly I’m serious.
It’s happened a heap of times now. I’m not talking about guys my own age flirting or being cute, I’m talking about men at least 10 years my senior trying to seduce me, literally. This one time in Strasbourg I was openly propositioned by a guy old enough to be my grandfather, who then decided to try and guess how old I was. “15? 16?” Apart from the insulting fact that I’ve worked hard to look my whole 20 years, I’m pretty sure THAT’S ILLEGAL. I mean, it is in Australia, and France isn’t THAT backward.
This was far from an isolated incident. There was the guy in Madrid who started off nice (“You look just like Monica,”) and got clingier and clinger. The one who groped me on the metro. The one who tried chatting me up as I walked down the street to my apartment. The one on the RER making eyes at me and giving me a creepy grin. I don’t encourage them – heavens, I don’t even KNOW them – and once I realise what they’re up to I do everything in my power to ignore them, avoid them, switch languages, whatever works.
If they were my own age (and a little less creepy) then it wouldn’t bother me so much. I could just put it down to some seriously inept flirting (and probably the fact that they’ve never had a girlfriend). My problem lies in the fact that I don’t think a single one of these guys has been under 35. In fact, I’ve been joking for months that I’ll throw a party if I get hit on by someone UNDER 35. These guys can tell how old I am – I barely even look 20, in fact – and they’re deliberately setting out to ensnare a ‘naïve’ girl who’s almost young enough to be their daughter. Such an age gap is far from socially acceptable when one of the parties is as young as I am, and it’s certainly not acceptable to me.
My lack of interest is no deterrent either, and that’s something that comes up in conversations about rape culture and sexual harassment. It becomes harassment when it’s unwanted attention. If you’re interested, show your interest, and if it’s clearly reciprocated, then take it further. If it’s not clear, back off. Well, I’m clearly showing that I’m not interested, and they keep at it. It makes me feel uncomfortable and threatened, but unfortunately, short of leaving France/Europe (an enticing solution at times) or becoming a hermit in my apartment, there’s no way I can avoid putting myself in the public situations where this occurs.
Case in point: at the youth hostel I just stayed at in Rennes, there was this African guy in a blue jumper, late 20s-early 30s, who was very familiar in the way he addressed me, winked at me, right from the start. Me, being wary, avoided him and his gaze, only saying a polite hello over breakfast, that sort of thing. Basically avoided him for the whole time I was there, showed no interest and showed that I was actively disinterested. At the train station today, I ran into the Canadian friend I’d made (who, incidentally, was not scared of blue-jumper guy like I was) as we were both boarding our trains. “Oh, by the way, that guy at the hostel wanted me to pass on a message to you. He wanted me to tell you that he thought you were very pretty.” We both burst out laughing, since I’d already confided to Canadian my experiences of creepy people hitting on me and we both agreed this guy was a player.
But how was that sort of comment appropriate? Blue-jumper KNEW I didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t even want to look at him, and yet it’s OK for him to send flirty messages to me like that? The way I see it, not cool, and yet it’s happened so often that maybe this is actually the norm in Europe. I hope not. It’s not fair on the girls is happens to, for a start, and it’s not exactly promising for respectful relationships between men and women around here – I’m talking about in the workplace, in the shops or in cafes, as much as in romantic relationships. If this is how guys in Europe think they can treat girls…what does that say?
Between all of the above experiences, I’m now terrified every time someone approaches me that they’re begging for money or going to hit on me or asking me to sign a petition or going to tell me that I have ‘beautiful eyes’ (they must learnt this one at their mother’s knee, ‘cause I’ve heard the exact same line from about three different guys). I practically cringe when I see them coming, and I’m actually relieved when I hear the native Anglophone accent of a lost tourist looking for help. I don’t open up to people or chat to random strangers in the street, always terrified that I’m going to give too much away and they’ll use it against me somehow.
And even when someone doesn’t fit into one of the previously identified categories above, I’m still wary of interacting with them in case they’re some variant I haven’t met yet. Like the boy in Rome, 12 or 13 years old, who tried to help my parents with their luggage at the train station, tried to help us find our seats, tried to help us get settled on the train, and all in the hopes of earning a few euro. I in return was almost outright rude as I refused to acknowledge what he wanted, since we’d refused his help the whole time. I hate that I’ve turned into this rude, dismissive, sheltered, fearful creature. I hate that Europe’s turned me into this. I wish I could change, go back to the open, carefree person I used to be. I hope, in a friendlier country like Australia, I can.
Friday 10 May 2013
France Life #2: The Confession
I do not like Paris.
I know that already half my readers have collapsed in shock. "But it's PARIS! But you've lived there for almost a year now! How can you not like it?" Well, there's essentially two parts to that answer.
The first part is, I'm not a sheep. I'm not a 'let's go to Europe 'cause it's cool' tourist. I am a discerning tourist, a traveller. I need a reason to like a place. 'Because it's cool' and 'because everyone else says so' are not reasons. They're excuses made by people without the ability to think for themselves and who care more about their image of chicness in the eyes of other people. I am not afraid to judge. I'm not afraid to have opinions. I'm not afraid to say 'No. I don't like it.'
Paris, from the first, never grabbed me. Maybe it was the phenomenon of stranger build-up, hearing so much about a place that it can never live up to the expectations, no matter what they may or may not be. Maybe it was because I'd just come from a place that DID grab me, very, very strongly. Whatever it was, Paris never caught my attention. I'd been there twice before I moved there. Only at the end of my second trip did I catch a small glimpse of its potential. But still, there was no 'Oh my God' moment. There was no 'Hey, this has all been a little bit cool, actually,' either. I've been to places that have made me go 'Oh my God'. I've been to places that have stolen my heart and never given it back. I've been to places that have just been so pleasant and enjoyable that I'm looking forward to going back. Paris was never one of those.
It's touristy, insanely so. I hate touristy places. The transformation into a touristy place tends to destroy what made it worth visiting to begin with. The Parisians are not the most friendly of people. They can be, but I suspect that I have an advantage in being a competent French speaker and in being Australian. There are no unresolved beefs to cause tension, and I'm not an ignorant, irritating tourist who thinks that everyone speaks English if I just say it slowly and loudly enough. But even so, they can be a bit gruff sometimes.
Paris does have some great locations, I'll give it that. Places like Saint-Chapelle, the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur at Montmartre and Pere Lachaise Cemetery are incredible in their own ways and have a great history. But the Eiffel Tower is not particularly attractive, remarkable, or important in any way except that it gives a good view the one time you climb up it. The Champs-Elysees is just a street. The Seine is just a river. In short, Paris is more or less just like any other city, with some really cute history and architecture and undiscovered gems, but there's nothing to make it more special than London, or Tokyo, or many other places I've been. It's earned a reputation which has been repeated by woolly-headed tourists and never been revised.
Also, it's a horrible place to live. It's crowded, frequently dirty, the public transport system can be great or disastrous, the bureaucracy is HORRIBLE, and when you live there you have all the niggling tasks of daily life without any joys in recompense. Basically, it's a place I'd like to visit once in a while, like I visit Sydney, but not somewhere I'm keen to live again. Paris and I have made our peace, I've learned to like her, but I'm ready to move on.
Part 2 of my answer is not really about Paris at all. I calculated yesterday that I've spend half my life living in the city and half in the country - born in Melbourne, moved to the country when I was a little girl, back to Melbourne for uni and then shipped off to Paris. So in short I'm pretty equally informed on the whole city-country debate. And the thing I've noticed more and more as I get older is that I'm a country girl. Despite being born in Australia's second biggest city, the country is my home, where I feel comfortable and happy. I first noticed this when I moved to Melbourne, and the conviction has been growing ever since. Regular trips home helped ease the pain of separation, though. When I felt a hankering for some trees and green and quiet I could hop on a train on Friday night and find myself in a house in the middle of the bush with four sooky cats and an exasperated sister who couldn't wait for me to leave again (at least, that's what she always told me, but there's evidence to the contrary...).
And then I moved to Paris. A city with the population of half my country, and suddenly I couldn't hop a train home when I missed the quiet and the green. I remember the first time I realised that, sitting in class one Wednesday afternoon thinking it was a long time since I'd been home and I was missing the sound of the wind in the trees in Creswick, and maybe I should...but oh. It's a little hard to get to country Victoria from Paris. That was also when I learned the true meaning of the word 'pang' - the tight feeling in one’s chest after one realises something slightly painful.
Anyway, my time in Paris has clinched and accelerated that realisation, that cities are not for me and the country is where it's at. Unfortunately, at this point in time the country is not an option for me. I find myself calculating how long til I can get out of Paris, find somewhere smaller and quieter, praying that whatever crops up next in my life won't require me to stay where I am or move to another big city.
And now every time I travel I get this wistful feeling, watching out the windows of trains and buses, staring at the views of rural coastal Normandy from the top of Mont-Saint-Michel, thinking about how beautiful and uncomplicated and tranquil it all looks, the full-sized houses with their front yards and the tiny town centres that are completely deserted and calm and everything that I miss about my own little hometown, and a little part of me wants to cry. Even when I travel I have to travel to cities, because there aren’t youth hostels in tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, even if I had a way to reach them, so I’ve been all over the upper half of France and can tell you how to get from A to B in Lille, Strasbourg, Rennes, Tours, but I have no idea of what the vibe is, what life is truly like in the smaller rural places that make up most of the geography if not the population of the country.
So instead I have to content myself with glimpses out the window, dreams from my own imagination of how it must feel to walk those fields I see and climb those trees, the snatched moments in obscure places that I find myself in for my work and which are the only times that I ever travel to the hidden, undiscovered locations that are my true joys. Domburg, in Zeeland, Holland; Cerilly, in southern France; La Foz, in Asturias, Spain – this is how I get my fix of country, saving the colours and the peace and landscape and mentally cursing Paris the whole time for being a big, dirty, grey, impersonal, unwelcoming city.
So really, the distaste I feel for Paris at moments like these is not Paris’s fault. Paris just represents everything that I don’t want but have to put up with because I don’t have another choice. But even if you told me I had to live in a city again and gave me all the choices in the world, Paris would not be on that list. In fact, I’ll take Melbourne over Paris anyday. We’ve actually got it pretty good down there. But that’s another story.
I know that already half my readers have collapsed in shock. "But it's PARIS! But you've lived there for almost a year now! How can you not like it?" Well, there's essentially two parts to that answer.
The first part is, I'm not a sheep. I'm not a 'let's go to Europe 'cause it's cool' tourist. I am a discerning tourist, a traveller. I need a reason to like a place. 'Because it's cool' and 'because everyone else says so' are not reasons. They're excuses made by people without the ability to think for themselves and who care more about their image of chicness in the eyes of other people. I am not afraid to judge. I'm not afraid to have opinions. I'm not afraid to say 'No. I don't like it.'
Paris, from the first, never grabbed me. Maybe it was the phenomenon of stranger build-up, hearing so much about a place that it can never live up to the expectations, no matter what they may or may not be. Maybe it was because I'd just come from a place that DID grab me, very, very strongly. Whatever it was, Paris never caught my attention. I'd been there twice before I moved there. Only at the end of my second trip did I catch a small glimpse of its potential. But still, there was no 'Oh my God' moment. There was no 'Hey, this has all been a little bit cool, actually,' either. I've been to places that have made me go 'Oh my God'. I've been to places that have stolen my heart and never given it back. I've been to places that have just been so pleasant and enjoyable that I'm looking forward to going back. Paris was never one of those.
It's touristy, insanely so. I hate touristy places. The transformation into a touristy place tends to destroy what made it worth visiting to begin with. The Parisians are not the most friendly of people. They can be, but I suspect that I have an advantage in being a competent French speaker and in being Australian. There are no unresolved beefs to cause tension, and I'm not an ignorant, irritating tourist who thinks that everyone speaks English if I just say it slowly and loudly enough. But even so, they can be a bit gruff sometimes.
Paris does have some great locations, I'll give it that. Places like Saint-Chapelle, the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur at Montmartre and Pere Lachaise Cemetery are incredible in their own ways and have a great history. But the Eiffel Tower is not particularly attractive, remarkable, or important in any way except that it gives a good view the one time you climb up it. The Champs-Elysees is just a street. The Seine is just a river. In short, Paris is more or less just like any other city, with some really cute history and architecture and undiscovered gems, but there's nothing to make it more special than London, or Tokyo, or many other places I've been. It's earned a reputation which has been repeated by woolly-headed tourists and never been revised.
Also, it's a horrible place to live. It's crowded, frequently dirty, the public transport system can be great or disastrous, the bureaucracy is HORRIBLE, and when you live there you have all the niggling tasks of daily life without any joys in recompense. Basically, it's a place I'd like to visit once in a while, like I visit Sydney, but not somewhere I'm keen to live again. Paris and I have made our peace, I've learned to like her, but I'm ready to move on.
Part 2 of my answer is not really about Paris at all. I calculated yesterday that I've spend half my life living in the city and half in the country - born in Melbourne, moved to the country when I was a little girl, back to Melbourne for uni and then shipped off to Paris. So in short I'm pretty equally informed on the whole city-country debate. And the thing I've noticed more and more as I get older is that I'm a country girl. Despite being born in Australia's second biggest city, the country is my home, where I feel comfortable and happy. I first noticed this when I moved to Melbourne, and the conviction has been growing ever since. Regular trips home helped ease the pain of separation, though. When I felt a hankering for some trees and green and quiet I could hop on a train on Friday night and find myself in a house in the middle of the bush with four sooky cats and an exasperated sister who couldn't wait for me to leave again (at least, that's what she always told me, but there's evidence to the contrary...).
And then I moved to Paris. A city with the population of half my country, and suddenly I couldn't hop a train home when I missed the quiet and the green. I remember the first time I realised that, sitting in class one Wednesday afternoon thinking it was a long time since I'd been home and I was missing the sound of the wind in the trees in Creswick, and maybe I should...but oh. It's a little hard to get to country Victoria from Paris. That was also when I learned the true meaning of the word 'pang' - the tight feeling in one’s chest after one realises something slightly painful.
Anyway, my time in Paris has clinched and accelerated that realisation, that cities are not for me and the country is where it's at. Unfortunately, at this point in time the country is not an option for me. I find myself calculating how long til I can get out of Paris, find somewhere smaller and quieter, praying that whatever crops up next in my life won't require me to stay where I am or move to another big city.
And now every time I travel I get this wistful feeling, watching out the windows of trains and buses, staring at the views of rural coastal Normandy from the top of Mont-Saint-Michel, thinking about how beautiful and uncomplicated and tranquil it all looks, the full-sized houses with their front yards and the tiny town centres that are completely deserted and calm and everything that I miss about my own little hometown, and a little part of me wants to cry. Even when I travel I have to travel to cities, because there aren’t youth hostels in tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, even if I had a way to reach them, so I’ve been all over the upper half of France and can tell you how to get from A to B in Lille, Strasbourg, Rennes, Tours, but I have no idea of what the vibe is, what life is truly like in the smaller rural places that make up most of the geography if not the population of the country.
So instead I have to content myself with glimpses out the window, dreams from my own imagination of how it must feel to walk those fields I see and climb those trees, the snatched moments in obscure places that I find myself in for my work and which are the only times that I ever travel to the hidden, undiscovered locations that are my true joys. Domburg, in Zeeland, Holland; Cerilly, in southern France; La Foz, in Asturias, Spain – this is how I get my fix of country, saving the colours and the peace and landscape and mentally cursing Paris the whole time for being a big, dirty, grey, impersonal, unwelcoming city.
So really, the distaste I feel for Paris at moments like these is not Paris’s fault. Paris just represents everything that I don’t want but have to put up with because I don’t have another choice. But even if you told me I had to live in a city again and gave me all the choices in the world, Paris would not be on that list. In fact, I’ll take Melbourne over Paris anyday. We’ve actually got it pretty good down there. But that’s another story.
Europe Lessons #1: Smoking
I once promised I’d write an essay on smoking in Europe when I had the time, and now that uni’s over and I’m a free woman, time is all I have (OK, so I was lying through my teeth about that last part). Nevertheless, I have indeed had some time to think about the phenomenon that is smoking in France and Europe and how it differs from Australia.
The first thing that you notice is the prevalence. EVERYONE smokes. Glamorous young ladies with high heels and painted nails smoke. Middle-aged men drinking espressos at the corner cafes smoke. Attractive young uni students with two-tone scarves smoke. Little old ladies with bicycles smoke. Someone once told me that cycling was the national sport in Belgium, like soccer is everywhere else. That's not true. I've come to believe that smoking is, in fact, the continental sport of Europe.
I walk out of the airport with my luggage in tow and the two elegant Italian girls I saw on the train to Pisa airport have already got fags behind their ears and lighters held between their lips in preparation. I walk out of class and reach for my lip balm while my classmates reach for the tobacco and cigarette papers to have them ready for when we reach the ground floor. I walk back into class after break with a hot chocolate; they arrive five minutes late smelling of nicotine. It's just everywhere.
The second thing you notice is the self-righteousness. In Australia, smoking is BAD. You know that if you smoke that makes you BAD (or your chosen hobby is BAD), and you know that BAD people have no rights. You can't smoke in restaurants. You can't smoke in bus shelters. You can't smoke within five (or 10) metres of a building entrance. In fact, you can't smoke almost anywhere except your own home, and even then the landlord will probably charge you extra to clean the nicotine stains off the ceiling. If you breach any of these laws, some non-smoking citizen will tell you, politely or not, that you're not allowed to do what you're doing and move. This will be backed up by the imposing glares of other nearby non-smoking citizens who don't wish to have their health compromised by the personal irresponsible health choices of a random stranger. We're all about protecting everyone else from the adverse effects of smokers' personal choices, and do nothing for the smokers but freak them out with images of their future internal organs on the cigarette packets and put large holes in their bank accounts.
It's the inverse of Europe.
Here, cigarettes are a dime a dozen. In fact, one of the most frequent establishments you'll find in Europe and the one with the longest opening hours is the tabac (or tabacchi in Italian) - literally the tobacco shop. It also sells things like lottery tickets and mobile phone credit, but most people in the line at Le Bourget are looking for their daily poison-stick fix. And my suburb is pretty typical.
The laws are different too. While yes, there are laws to protect non-smokers, similar in most ways to Australian ones, they aren't enforced, and there's no law-abiding citizens to hold smokers to account. I'd be a little afraid of being lynched if I was to approach someone in France and inform them that no, they can't smoke here, it's against the law. And the laws aren't quite as strict, either. For example, it's forbidden to smoke in the main covered area of train stations, but it's allowed on the covered-but-open-to-the-air platforms. Doesn't matter that while it avoids a smoke build-up over time, it's just as bad for the non-smokers who are sitting on those platforms waiting for the train, watching the smoke drift in front of their faces because the smoker is standing upwind and there are no other seats on the platform to get away from them.
Pure-air breathers are far and away the minority here. At least, it feels like it most of the time. As a result, we just have to put up with fighting our way through the crowd of smoke and people outside the main doors of the university ('cause they can't just pollute the air, they have to block the whole footpath for 10 metres while they do it), live with always choosing to sit inside at restaurants to avoid getting a side serve of smoke with our meals, and basically build our whole existences around ignoring or avoiding those who choose to smoke.
What annoys me, apart from all of the above, is people who have a ciggy just before entering a non-smoking area, like a train. Making these zones non-fumeurs really doesn't help much if the fellow with the seat next to me sits down smelling so strongly of his last cigarette that I start coughing and choking until I almost have an asthma attack - an impressive feat, given I'm not actually asthmatic. And because he had his cigarette BEFORE he got on the train, he can't imagine that he's done anything wrong.
This is the other part - the attitudes. In Australia smokers frequently look almost cowed, knowing that they're second-class citizens in the eyes of the law and that everyone around them is condemning them to the eternal burning fires of the deepest, darkest hell. When in a public place or crowd, they're almost apologetic for their actions - or at least, everyone tries to make them feel like they SHOULD be. It's the opposite in France. My dirty glares do nothing here. I have to be apologetic for NOT smoking. Smokers are the ones with the rights here. Sure, there are limitations imposed on them by law, but when those laws apply to the majority, the majority can choose to ignore them and those who enforce the laws can decide that it's too hard to regulate and prosecute ALL of them - and chances are at least some of those law enforcement officers smoke, too.
On the plus side, not everyone thinks that smoking is cool, good or necessary. I met a Belgian guy a few weeks back who likes the Belgian royal family, but doesn't approve of Queen Marguerite's chain-smoking habit, and hates smoking in general, even though he's grown up in a culture that basically condones and promotes it. My Spanish friend (hi, Armando!) is the only one in his immediate family who doesn't smoke. This desire for self-inflicted lung cancer is not universal, and I'm always reassured by finding people, especially of my generation, who don't feel hell-bent on destroying themselves and their bank account in such a fashion, and who actively disapprove of the phenomenon in general.
Sadly, though, such encounters don't give me reason to think that the rate of smoking in Europe is likely to decline in coming years. There are just as many who do smoke as there are who don't. For me, this poses another annoying problem. The number of attractive young Frenchmen I've met (or Europeans in general, for that matter) is remarkably small, and it keeps decreasing. You would not BELIEVE how big a turn-off the sight of a cigarette or lighter can be, even behind the ear of the most ravishing young Spaniard or the most dashing Italian. After all, ignoring the part where I collapse on the ground from a non-asthmatic asthma attack, who actually likes kissing an ashtray?
The first thing that you notice is the prevalence. EVERYONE smokes. Glamorous young ladies with high heels and painted nails smoke. Middle-aged men drinking espressos at the corner cafes smoke. Attractive young uni students with two-tone scarves smoke. Little old ladies with bicycles smoke. Someone once told me that cycling was the national sport in Belgium, like soccer is everywhere else. That's not true. I've come to believe that smoking is, in fact, the continental sport of Europe.
I walk out of the airport with my luggage in tow and the two elegant Italian girls I saw on the train to Pisa airport have already got fags behind their ears and lighters held between their lips in preparation. I walk out of class and reach for my lip balm while my classmates reach for the tobacco and cigarette papers to have them ready for when we reach the ground floor. I walk back into class after break with a hot chocolate; they arrive five minutes late smelling of nicotine. It's just everywhere.
The second thing you notice is the self-righteousness. In Australia, smoking is BAD. You know that if you smoke that makes you BAD (or your chosen hobby is BAD), and you know that BAD people have no rights. You can't smoke in restaurants. You can't smoke in bus shelters. You can't smoke within five (or 10) metres of a building entrance. In fact, you can't smoke almost anywhere except your own home, and even then the landlord will probably charge you extra to clean the nicotine stains off the ceiling. If you breach any of these laws, some non-smoking citizen will tell you, politely or not, that you're not allowed to do what you're doing and move. This will be backed up by the imposing glares of other nearby non-smoking citizens who don't wish to have their health compromised by the personal irresponsible health choices of a random stranger. We're all about protecting everyone else from the adverse effects of smokers' personal choices, and do nothing for the smokers but freak them out with images of their future internal organs on the cigarette packets and put large holes in their bank accounts.
It's the inverse of Europe.
Here, cigarettes are a dime a dozen. In fact, one of the most frequent establishments you'll find in Europe and the one with the longest opening hours is the tabac (or tabacchi in Italian) - literally the tobacco shop. It also sells things like lottery tickets and mobile phone credit, but most people in the line at Le Bourget are looking for their daily poison-stick fix. And my suburb is pretty typical.
The laws are different too. While yes, there are laws to protect non-smokers, similar in most ways to Australian ones, they aren't enforced, and there's no law-abiding citizens to hold smokers to account. I'd be a little afraid of being lynched if I was to approach someone in France and inform them that no, they can't smoke here, it's against the law. And the laws aren't quite as strict, either. For example, it's forbidden to smoke in the main covered area of train stations, but it's allowed on the covered-but-open-to-the-air platforms. Doesn't matter that while it avoids a smoke build-up over time, it's just as bad for the non-smokers who are sitting on those platforms waiting for the train, watching the smoke drift in front of their faces because the smoker is standing upwind and there are no other seats on the platform to get away from them.
Pure-air breathers are far and away the minority here. At least, it feels like it most of the time. As a result, we just have to put up with fighting our way through the crowd of smoke and people outside the main doors of the university ('cause they can't just pollute the air, they have to block the whole footpath for 10 metres while they do it), live with always choosing to sit inside at restaurants to avoid getting a side serve of smoke with our meals, and basically build our whole existences around ignoring or avoiding those who choose to smoke.
What annoys me, apart from all of the above, is people who have a ciggy just before entering a non-smoking area, like a train. Making these zones non-fumeurs really doesn't help much if the fellow with the seat next to me sits down smelling so strongly of his last cigarette that I start coughing and choking until I almost have an asthma attack - an impressive feat, given I'm not actually asthmatic. And because he had his cigarette BEFORE he got on the train, he can't imagine that he's done anything wrong.
This is the other part - the attitudes. In Australia smokers frequently look almost cowed, knowing that they're second-class citizens in the eyes of the law and that everyone around them is condemning them to the eternal burning fires of the deepest, darkest hell. When in a public place or crowd, they're almost apologetic for their actions - or at least, everyone tries to make them feel like they SHOULD be. It's the opposite in France. My dirty glares do nothing here. I have to be apologetic for NOT smoking. Smokers are the ones with the rights here. Sure, there are limitations imposed on them by law, but when those laws apply to the majority, the majority can choose to ignore them and those who enforce the laws can decide that it's too hard to regulate and prosecute ALL of them - and chances are at least some of those law enforcement officers smoke, too.
On the plus side, not everyone thinks that smoking is cool, good or necessary. I met a Belgian guy a few weeks back who likes the Belgian royal family, but doesn't approve of Queen Marguerite's chain-smoking habit, and hates smoking in general, even though he's grown up in a culture that basically condones and promotes it. My Spanish friend (hi, Armando!) is the only one in his immediate family who doesn't smoke. This desire for self-inflicted lung cancer is not universal, and I'm always reassured by finding people, especially of my generation, who don't feel hell-bent on destroying themselves and their bank account in such a fashion, and who actively disapprove of the phenomenon in general.
Sadly, though, such encounters don't give me reason to think that the rate of smoking in Europe is likely to decline in coming years. There are just as many who do smoke as there are who don't. For me, this poses another annoying problem. The number of attractive young Frenchmen I've met (or Europeans in general, for that matter) is remarkably small, and it keeps decreasing. You would not BELIEVE how big a turn-off the sight of a cigarette or lighter can be, even behind the ear of the most ravishing young Spaniard or the most dashing Italian. After all, ignoring the part where I collapse on the ground from a non-asthmatic asthma attack, who actually likes kissing an ashtray?
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