On Thursday morning I was up pre-dawn to drive S to the airport for a commuter flight to Lyon. Lots of people (Mostly men getting dropped of for commuter flights that early, though most going to Paris) This meant I had the car for a whole day and was miffed that nothing was open at 5:30 am and I had to waste 3 ½ hours of car time waiting for stuff to open. The trip to the airport takes only about 15 to 20 minutes at that un-godly hour of the morning.
Idiom
« J’ai le patate ce matin » A French idiom that means roughly “I ate my Wheaties this morning” or “I’m having a good morning” or “I feel good today”. Those sentiments basically. However, it literally translates to “I have the potato this morning”. So seize your potato and seize the day!
Ice
When you get water or soda at a restaurant, it’s cold but there is no ice in it. If you drive through McDonalds because you just HAVE TO HAVE a fountain pop, you’ll get a total of three ice cubes. I think that maybe gold is somehow used or involved in the ice making process here.
Tortoise Trouble
Merging speedily on the highway on Thursday, on my way to explore the mall, and just happened to glance over to the median and saw a tortoise there. My questions are these: How the heck did he get there? With all this traffic whizzing by, how the heck did he get to the middle? Is he alive? How long has he been there? Or perhaps he was born there and has never left. Does he wait until nightfall to make his crossings when there’s less traffic? Can a tortoise survive being run over by a car? How fast does a tortoise have to cross three lanes of traffic all traveling at at least 130km/hr to not be killed?
Personal Space
The French seem to have no concept of personal space; ok, they have a much different concept of personal space than we do. (Not as bad as the Japanese who seem to actually hire people to push and cram them and then hold them into the bullet trains so the doors will close.) It’s bad enough that some of them are hygiene deficient but then they stand behind you in line at the IKEA, or grocery store or yes especially the post office and they stand RIGHT behind you. They are literally breathing down your neck. I was in line at IKEA on Thursday when I suddenly felt someone’s very close presence behind me. I turned around to investigate and practically kissed the woman behind me. She smiled at me in a puzzled fashion but seemed not to sense anything WRONG with the situation. I scooted forward and she scooted forward. I inched forward and she inched forward. I couldn’t get away from her. Finally, I feigned adjustment of my backpack purse and walloped her as I casually tossed it back onto my shoulder. She stepped back an inch but I could still hear her breathing.
Passing Protocol
In France it is illegal to pass from the right lane. On the highway you turn on your left turn signal, move carefully into the left lane, pass the car on your right, turn on your right turn signal and pull back into the right lane.
If, however, you plan to pass more than one car, say a line of 3 or 4 slow moving cars or trucks. You must leave your left turn signal going the entire time that you are in that lane so others will know that you do not intend to pull back to the right any time soon. This all seems very orderly and straight forward, and it, for the most part, is.
My dilemma is this. The major highway that girdles Toulouse is three lanes. So you would assume that the lanes would be ‘fast’, ‘too fast’ and ‘insanely fast’, moving from right to left. But does that mean that technically we are all to ride all the way to the right. Is it ok to be a ‘left lane bandit’ in the center lane? Do the turn signal rules still apply? Do the turn signals have a second speed for passing in the ‘insanely fast’ lane and then you turn them down to regular speed for staying in the ‘too fast’ lane?
Lane Ownership
The highways have little dotted white lines to delineate separate lanes. As all highways do. However here they seem to be not so much a rule as a suggestion. If you are undecided as to which lane you want or need to occupy it seems to be ok to drive in one with one tire hanging over into the neighboring lane just in case.
Old Bags
I think I’ve mentioned this before. When you shop at the big grocery stores they do not provide you with grocery bags. You must bring your own bags, (or load all your groceries back into your cart and then put them in your car that way) and not only that, but you must bag your own groceries. This is true of all markets. You bag your own groceries. Oddly enough this is not such a bad thing if the store is very busy. When it is bad is when the store is not busy and you have a large order. By the time you have finished unloading your cart the cashier has almost finished ringing you through, and then you have to run over and pay for groceries while trying to bag everything at the same time and pray that the cashier doesn’t feel the need to make idle chit-chat.
Guardrails
Some of the streets through many of these towns are basically old cart tracks that were paved. Meaning that the road used to be largely traveled by foot or cart traffic and then was later paved to accommodate modern vehicles. This being the case, the road is quite narrow. Meaning that there is barely enough room for one car and sidewalk (pedestrian) traffic. This means of course that as you travel through town there are many one way streets. Many of these streets have ornate guardrails at the edges of the sidewalk; I assumed they were there to keep pedestrians safe from the speeding lunatics. In reality, however, those guardrails are up to prevent people from parking on the sidewalk. All over town, if the road is not wide enough to accommodate traffic and parking and there are no guardrails, people park on the sidewalks. No violation, it is OK to park on the sidewalk. If they don’t want you parking on the sidewalk they put up those lovely guardrails. No guardrail? Help yourself.
Daily Bread
You see it in French movies or documentaries about France. It’s a common site. A person walking down the street with a long baguette in their hands. Nothing protecting the bread just a small square of tissue wrapped around the middle so you can hold on to it. And they have to have fresh bread every day. The only things open on Sundays are the bakeries so that people can get their daily bread. But why daily bread purchases? Because if you don’t finish the baguette on the day of purchase it is unfit for human consumption the next day. There is nothing like a fresh warm baguette, but eat it while it’s fresh, because the next day all it is fit for is batting practice. Perhaps a deal could be made with major league baseball for practice bats.
Dernier Sortie Avant Péage
This road sign means, ‘last exit before the toll road’. This means that when you see this sign you should seriously think about whether or not you have any change in your purse and if you don’t, take that exit!
Boar update
S of course did not completely believe me about the boars in the yard. I have to admit that I had some trouble believing it myself the next morning, so I did a little research. It turns out that wild boars are actually wide spread throughout Europe and that they are actually hunted and eaten. There has been, over the past five or six years, a problem with ‘fast-breeding’ boars. Though the major problem is mostly in the east it seems to be spreading. Animal Planet had a bit to say about it and they include a photo of baby boars. The end of the article has some basic facts about the mammals and what they eat. So there you are I’m not crazy. (Though some of you may not accept this as conclusive proof.)
Where there’s smoke there’s fire?
Everyone in France smokes. I have considered taking it up myself just to fit in. But our topic today is this: The French grow little, if any, tobacco. This means that their cigarettes are mostly imported. Mostly imported from the US! Why do they not see this as a plot by Americans to kill off the French? Or have I watched Conspiracy Theory too many times.
Commuters the World Over
I made the 1 hour and 15 minute commute to pick S up at the airport on Thursday night. There were about 10 of us waiting on our side of the glass wall that keeps us from going to the arrival gates. The airport is mostly silent and few people are milling about. The arrivals monitor tells me that S’s flight is on time and will arrive at 7:35 from Lyon. It also shows that there will be 2 flights arriving from Paris, one shortly before and one shortly after S’s flight.
From where I’m standing I can see two sets of escalators. One set of escalators (The up and down flanking a set of stairs for those health nuts) veers off slightly to the left and the other set veers of sharply to the right. S should arrive through the one on the left labeled ‘Port 2’.
At precisely 7:35 people begin to come down from ‘Port 1’, at first I don’t notice anything peculiar since I know it’s not S’s flight and am thus not paying much attention. However as the commuters begin to come through the doors in the glass partition some oddities emerge. 90% of the commuters are men, almost all in dark suites and coats, carrying briefcases in one hand and cell phones pressed to their ears with the other. There are two people who are obviously leisure travelers. You can tell because they are wearing colorful clothing and mostly because when they emerge from the doors they walk toward the baggage claim carrousel. All the others head straight for the exits. About this time people begin emerging from the left side. Same phenomena, in fact it could be a tape loop of the right hand exodus. I look for S and spot him (coming down the stairs of course) just as a fresh wave of passengers start to emerge from Port 1. It’s all very subdued, some still talking shop with fellow passengers; all heading for the exits in an orderly fashion. It reminded me of that scene near the end of The Thomas Crown Affair where all the hundreds of men in bowler hats are all over the museum and you see them in the stairwells and hallways. Like a bunch of movie set extras. Each one looking pretty much the same as the last. Thank goodness that S is so tall.
