Le Franco Phoney

Okay, it’s time to come clean: I’ve been in Australia for the past few weeks, but I had plenty of blog topics to keep me writing about France. By the time you read this, I’ll be holidaying on an island on the Great Barrier Reef before heading to Brisbane for a family wedding, then back in France next week.

Until then, I want to write about how easy it is to idealise a home country when living abroad. It’s natural for anyone to compare countries, but I’m now comparing France to an Australia of ten years ago. In that time, a lot has changed: toll roads; skim-milk Big M flavoured milk; water restrictions from drought; new stadiums; and slower traffic just to name a few. Although I’m a fan of the low-fat flavoured milk, having to restrict showers to three minutes, using the government-provided egg-timer on a suction cup for the shower tiles is not as attractive. I guess I’ve used Australia as my normality guage for other countries I’ve lived in. I have idealised my country.

For example, I explained to my French travel partner that he wouldn’t need to pack a rain jacket because ‘Melbourne is having a drought and it only rains a few times a year so we’ll be fine.’ It rained two days after we arrived, then again the next day, and then again the following day. At least that might prevent shower times from dropping further. Then, after parking the car outside a shop advertised as ‘Open 24 hours a day’, we noticed, as we walked up to the door at 6.59am, that the staff were just unlocking the door after being closed overnight. I guess they just didn’t specify which days they’re open 24 hours.

When we spent a day snowboarding at Mt Buller, we hired equipment rather than lugging our own from France. Our first attempt to hire failed massively. We had our equipment fitted and had chatted to the ski technician about where we live in France and how pointless it would be to bring snowboards with us from there just for one day. His assistant then asked for a credit card. Apparently, my debit card isn’t good enough because there’s a risk that we’ll flee the country with, shock horror, very old ski hire crud including smelly boots, damaged snowboards and heavy bindings. I asked my partner if he had a credit card, but like me, he only had a debit card. They said if my driving license had been Australian and not British, it would have been okay. Errr, what? Common sense did not prevail and they said the risk of us not returning their old, worn out hire equipment was too great. We were stupidly honest with them about only having French debit cards, which are labelled only as ‘Carte Bleu, so on our way to the next shop, we agreed to give them a Carte Bleu debit card and not tell them it was a debit card. It worked and we hire some equipment.

Idealism shattered, I’m pleased to say that the positives have by far outweighed the negatives: friendly shop assistants; native birds tweeting outside my mum’s house; great food; a return to sunny weather; a fantastic city to explore, and so much more. I still call Australia ‘home’.

…but I’m still looking forward to winter in the French Alps.

It’s that time of year where snow lovers in the Northern Hemisphere are getting anxious about the upcoming ski season. Speculation has already begun on how good a season it will be, based on the lateness of red berries, the colour of autumn leaves, and which ways the cows prefer to face. Mushrooms, summer temperature, frost, the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, and bird activities are other indicators that I’ve heard of to describe how cold or warm, snowy or dry a winter will be. I’m still confused as to how each works and I vehemently question the accuracy of such methods, but they provide good banter nonetheless.

Anyway, if it’s a bad season or if you just can’t wait any longer, there’s always pine needle skiing. Yep. You ski on pine needles. I first found out about this a few months back when I took this snap by a bank ATM/teller in a town far away from the mountains. Next to this poster was some information about the sport and some contact information, so I had a look at their website (update July 2010: website no longer around) which has (edit: had) a great video, showing just how…errr…easy pine needles are to ski on. The video includes skiers on kickers, trunk slides, trunk tricks, and even a skier going switch mid-ski. The problem is that he then comes to a stop because he’s run out of hill. And then he has to walk back up because there are no ski lifts.

The video also shows footage back in the days of black and white film of people skiing on the pine needles with old wooden skis. Indeed, the poster says: “Ski all seasons. Why not? For 40 years, people from the South Basin have been able to do so.” What strikes me is that if people were doing this forty years ago and it still hasn’t caught on, then maybe there’s a reason.

Me, I think I’ll wait until winter, but if anyone reading this tries it or has already tried it, I’d be very interested in hearing how it was.

Driving along a back road toward Thônes one day, I discovered a roadside statue of Mary, protected by some lions and surrounded by candles, flowers (both real and plastic) rosary beads, statuettes and water features. Here’s a close-up of one of the two protective lions. It features a scary eye and an even scarier missing eye, some cob webs, and a rather big snarl.

Meanwhile, below is a photo showing just how close to the road this monument is (you can see a close-up of Mary and the trinkets that surround her in the top right corner, or click on the image to zoom in further). Yes, that’s a grotto on the left and Italian-style lions at the man-made gate right by the roadside.

The soft trickle of the water feature in front of Mary is drowned out every time a car zooms by on the country road, but it carries on regardless. Wax from melted candles forms stalactites near the statue of Mary alongside plaques draped with rosary beads. There is no graffiti and no signs of security against theft or vandalism. The marks on the grass by the roadside opposite suggest that many stop at the monument, but I’m unsure whether they’re here for religious reasons or, like me, out of curiosity. So many religious monuments exist by road sides here in France, but they’re normally much smaller and more secure from vandals.

Why is it here, right next to a road? When was it created? Who commissioned it? Who goes there? So many questions, and no answers at all. The only clue: some Latin inscribed below one of the lions with a passage from the bible, but I’ve no idea what it means, nor which part of the bible it’s from. I waited for a local to appear, but nobody arrived in the half an hour that I explored. It remains a mystery.

Ha! It’s funny that I’ve used the word ’sounds’ in the title above. In French, the word is ’son’ and it is pronounced with a nasalised ‘o’ instead of pronouncing the ‘n’ at the end — a bit like ’song’ in English (but not exactly: we don’t have an equivalent in English). Phonetically, it would be ’sɔ̃’, rhyming with the French words for ‘bridge’ (pont) and ‘probe’ (sonde). To me, it sounds very similar to some other words in French which French people say are completely different. For example, the following sentence in English:

I smell the blood without feeling a hundred percent.

…would be written like this in French:

Je sens le sang sans me sentir à cent pour cent.

It might not mean a lot when pronounced in English, but that all changes in French. Here is a very rough way of writing in English how it sounds in French (keeping in mind that ‘ong’ is really a nasalised ‘o’):

Zhe song le song song ma sontear a song pour song.

It’s probably best if you get a French person to say this sentence for you. If you want the linguistic translation, it’s probably something more like: ‘ʒœsã lœsã sã mœsãtiːʁ sãopuːʁ sã’.

What I’m getting at is that a whole sentence in French can have more than one word that sounds the same, making it much harder to guess the meaning unless it’s in context. Is it any wonder I struggle with this language! I know we have ‘two’, ‘to’ and ‘too’ in English, but that seems like peanuts when compared with all the words in French that are pronounced the same way, even if written differently. And that’s not even including the French word for ’sound’ — and any other words that sound the same when spoken — into the equation. Am I the only one?

I took this magazine clipping the other day, which shows a ‘Gâteau au yaourt simplissme’, or in English, a simple yoghurt cake. If you’ve ever been a chalet host or stayed in a British-run chalet, you have probably experienced the yoghurt cake. It comes in all shapes and flavours: add anything you like to the mix, or top it with anything you like: the recipe is merely the framework of a bland cake if nothing else is added. So, why this recipe? Apart from being flexible on flavours (allowing a chalet host to make the same easy mix each day and then chuck in a banana or some cocoa powder or really anything else to add some flavour), no additional measuring utensils are required, and this is a cake that is said to withstand baking at altitude, which has the reputation —right or wrong — for being difficult when it comes to anything rising in the oven. The yoghurt cake recipe is said to avoid this problem by the use of the yoghurt itself. Perhaps this is true at extremely high altitudes, but I’ve never had a problem cooking a standard cake at 1,100 metres above sea level.

I found this recipe in a supermarket living-style freebie magazine. I was surprised to see it because I always presumed the recipe was purely the domain of the British-run chalet, like some sort of secret that only other chalet hosts knew about. Perhaps, it was the French who came up with the idea in the first place, and the Brits have merely cashed in on such an effective, flexible, no-fail recipe. Or, perhaps it’s the other way around: the author of this recipe section may have learnt from the Brits and adapted the recipe for French bakers — in this case, kids. The title translates to ‘Three recipes for the littles  and the bigs’.

Either way, the recipe is a winner, and I’ve translated this one below in case you’re interested.

Ingredients:

1 pot of natural yoghurt (keep the pot to measure other ingredients)
3 pots of plain flour
2 pots of sugar
1 pot of oil (vegetable works well)
3 eggs
2 teaspoons of baking powder (or, if in France, a sachet of ‘levure chimique’)
2 teaspons of vanilla sugar/a few drops of vanilla essence (or, if in France, a sachet of vanilla sugar)

Method:

1. Place all the ingredients in a big bowl and mix together well
2. Preheat the oven to 210° Celcius
3. Grease a cake tin, then pour the cake mix into it and bake for thirty minutes. When the yoghurt cake is cook, leave it to cool.

On my last road trip, I came across this signpost in a lovely little village called Aignay-le-Duc. As you can see from the big photo, that’s actually three layers of sign posts, plus a couple facing a different direction. Want to get to Echalot? If you’re approaching from the road in front of these signs, you’re going to struggle: the close-up, side-on photo below shows how well it’s hidden in the main photo. The village has, perhaps, decided that placing directions to their own local shop signs might distract tourists. I can see it now:

Driver: “Hmm, which way to Echalot?”

Passenger: “Oh who knows, but look, there’s a patisserie to the left!”

…and then they’d be heading in the wrong direction. But at least they’d have happy bellies and the locals would be a bit richer.

Something else you might notice in the close-up photo is that one place is listed twice, but written differently. Not only is there an accent on the newer sign for Etalente, but an ‘e’ has been replaced with an ‘a’, making the place Étalante.

As for those villages listed below Etalante and Echalot on the old sign (somewhere ending in ‘Les Juifs’ and somewhere else on the Seine), I can only presume that at least some tourists have put their faith in the ‘Autres Directions’ (other directions) sign pointing left — and ended up in entirely the wrong place. Not to worry: they can always find the patisserie and stop in for a snack while they try to figure out where they are.

Take a good look at this book because I think it says a lot about the region I live in. The book is called Perrillat: a Savoyard name (14th-21st Centuries) — origins, family history, emigration. That’s right: the Perrillat family has been traced back to the 14th Century and this book, written by a more recent Perrillat, includes photos, excerpts of letters and other evidence of the family name’s impression on the area.

Indeed, I’ve seen the name everywhere: at construction sites, on fuel trucks, on shops, on farms, and on everything in between. It’s one of a handful of super-large families in the region that are so big that they don’t know some of their own family members. For example, one of my friends rented an apartment off some Perrillats last season. They invited me in for coffee (jaw droppingly rare for such a local family to be kind to such a non-local girl who can barely speak the same language as them), and I mentioned that I knew one of their family members — a ski instructor with the same surname. They asked who, and when I told them his name, they shrugged and said casually that it’s a big family.

As you might remember from a previous blog entry, it apparently takes three generations of family to be buried here before someone is considered a local in La Clusaz. The existence of this book comes as no huge surprise. Where else in the world would you find a book available in bookshops that focuses entirely on a local name? How many people would buy such a book to make it worthwhile? Who is the book of interest to? I guess if just half of the existing Perrillats bought the book, it would probably pay for itself, and any sales on top of that are a bonus!