…with riotous right-wingers!

Now this story is a few months old, but I only just heard the other day about the University of Oregon taking a novel approach to teaching the imperative to their French language students. Taking a short documentary of the October 2003 Manif de Droite or Protest of the Right, the French department had taken it upon themselves to educate their students with slogans such as:

Les femmes derrière, les hommes devant! (Women behind, men in front!)

On aime, on aime, les OGM! (Everyone love GM foods!)

Le gouvernement est avec nous, les pauvres taisez-vous! (The government is with us; You poor – shut up!)

Pas d’allocs pour les dreadlocks! (No welfare for the dreadlocked!)

Afrique, paye ta dette aux pays occidentaux! (Africa, pay your debt to the West!)

I found myself feeling slightly nauseous at this revelation – what, indeed, is the world coming to?

Unfortunately – as many things are these days – one essential detail was lost in translation, and I failed to realise that it was a parody of what a right-wing protest could look like, being performed by artists from Le Fourneau (La Fédération des Arts de la Rue et des intermittents).

Egg on my face! That was one of those moments of everything dawning on me with a beam of golden light and an accompanying angelic choir – ahh… I get it now!


The video account of the protest – even if 10 minutes is too long, check out the beginning for a better idea of all the brouhaha.

Once upon a time, I had a Russian boyfriend who used “democratic” as an adjective to describe cafes and bars. In his opinion, it seemed that “civil” was its antonym, and as the native English speaker, who was I to beg to differ?

It’s taken a number of years now, but Vanya – I’m finally on your rave-length, I finally understand what you were rabbiting on about for all that time. It only took a weekend in Portugal, away from Paris, to have your ir-rationale finally dawn on me, clear as mud. I guess it’s all about context…

Because Guillaume and I have just spent the weekend away in Lisbon, and after a lethargic few beers in the sunshine, I found myself waxing lyrical about the marvel of “democratic” cafes.

The revelation goes something like this: in a democratic cafe, you can get whatever you want, whenever you want, at a price accessible to everyone. It’s the unpretentious point-and-choose domain of snack bars and kiosks, and I was instantly won over by it in Lisbon.

On one hand, there’s the liberty and equality of Paris, where everyone is free to purchase alcohol or soft drinks at an equal price – yet rest assured the patron has taken liberties with the prices. Budget travellers in Paris are confronted with a veritable minefield of seating arrangements and drink options – do you want that coffee enough to sit down for it, or are you happy to settle for standing at the counter with the old men and other 1€ espresso aficionados? Paris is best for those working on their poker faces, for you get very adept at not raising an eyebrow to a 4.50€ slurp of beer…

Lisbon, on the other hand, is coffee and cake pick-me-ups, snacks and sandwiches galore, and well-endowed bowls of fruit. All in the same sitting, if you’re that way inclined – but with prolific snack bars you may as well wander and graze.

When I see a hot chocolate flavour list reading like an ice-cream parlour menu (classic, dark, white, orange, mint, hazelnut, toffee, coffee, fruits or white & fruits – I kid you not!) tucked away in some corner of a cafe in Paris, maybe I’ll come around.

But for the meantime, I’ll have my taste buds nostalgic for some Portuguese “democratic” cafe culture…

High on the list of Paris stereotypes is the one about the dog turd. My shoes (if they could talk oh the stories they would tell) are sad to say, there’s no fictive base to this one. Guillaume and I have even spent considerable amounts of time theorising as to the cause of this – but aside from fanciful theories about richer diets and increased bowel movements, I think it just comes down to more dogs in confined urban surrounds, inconsiderate owners (I mean the fact that they have huge handsome huskies better suited to Siberian snowdrifts and endless taiga rather than the Parisian concrete jungle should be evidence enough of this), and a reluctance to pooper-scoop. That’s it, plain and simple.

Like any other facets of French life, British author Stephen Clarke has also pondered this and notes it down amusingly as typical of the national pride in individualism.

He writes: ‘Why should I, dog owner, waste my precious time cleaning up after my dog or taking it to poo in a place where no one will be likely to tread in it? I don’t want it to poo in my living room or outside my front door, so I’ll walk it a few doors away, let it dump there and then go back home and get on with my life.

Some considerate Parisian dog owners do make an effort. They take their chiens to pretty pedestrian streets, where the dog won’t have its digestive system traumatised by the noise and vibrations of passing cars. The fact that street cleaners don’t clean up as often in the pedestrian streets isn’t the dog owner’s problem.’

You get the idea.

It reminds me of one evening at our local DVD store. Guillaume and I noticed a woman absorbed in a self-important bustle, dragging a ludicrously limping chihuahua who was trying desperately to stop for a leak. Don’t let anything get in the way of renting your DVDs, lady.

Not that we needed to advise her this, as she certainly wasn’t, and the pitiful pup was a sore reminder of this for any onlooker, being led by the neck and bounced along on three legs and one shoulder. Of course, when the insipid dog had a moment of rest – i.e. stationary inside the ‘video club’ – he let it all go in a moment of sheer relief. All over the floor, with a timid yet happy look on his face. This was nothing compared to the impatient tutting of the woman, and the exasperated look as the store clerk handed the cleaning product and paper towels to her with a: ‘This time, YOU clean it up.’

We killed ourselves laughing all the way home and tried to imagine how many times it had previously happened to the guy behind the counter to greet her as a serial-offender. Sheesh, why rent films when funny stuff like this happens in real life?

Do you think that I’d be suited in the world of culinary reviews? I’ve always dreamed of someone being interested in my convoluted film reviews, but maybe I’ll start with Paris café culture as a basis and work my way from there…

It’s just a little café that I want to get my teeth into, a stone’s throw from our place and a remarkable luxury in that it’s open on Sundays and until late at night, when the rest of the 16th sleeps and dreams of clouds with silver, gold and platinum credit card linings (exhausted by a day of frivolous spending and excessive promenading).

It goes by the name of Bo-Zinc, but we affectionately term it the ‘wanker café.’

(Excuse my language, Gran & Granddad, it’s just a new swanky French work I’ve picked up…)

This local café on the corner should be an absolute gem – with an interesting and reasonably innovative menu, affordable drinks, and a cosy and charming décor. In fact, we’ve theorised that this is the end product of when rebel-rebel youths of the 16th break from tradition and attend design school, instead of studying finance.

But… I find it an ordeal whenever I go there. Back in the heady, tobacco-smoke-clouded days of 2007, you could go to the café and watch on as the waiters leant back and smoked ciggies and practised looking like Orlando Bloom. There wasn’t much else to look at, no distraction in the form of a drink, as they weren’t likely to break from their posing to actually serve anyone. Now, in 2008 and strict anti-smoking laws, the new season’s fashion is for them to talk amongst themselves.

G & I were doing out laundry the other night, and wondered if we should stop by for a drink there to kill time. Until we realised that we probably wouldn’t get served before the half hour cycle of the washing machines was over, so we just brought a laptop and a DVD of The Office to convert the laundromat into our own personal lounge room…

… but not so good either!

The bad boys of the 16th have stuck. They’re not so bad* – they’re downright awful.

I feel a social responsibility to keep every Anglophone out there updated on the world of French novelty rap, so this instalment is devoted to the 2007 clip from the Dior Homme boys, Passy Mal, showing that even the gilded youth of the affluent Parisian 16th arrondissement can keep it real.

From Trocadéro to Passy, they’re the ones doing R’n’B…


The have some nerve though, going through the motions of a battle with the crowned sovereign of French “raparody”, Fatal Bazooka!

I guess the only reason this clip stirs a giggle from me is that they are from my ‘hood and some of the visual gags in the film clip are all too close to the truth. Their attempts at “hardcore” are pitiful though, as the only loaded weapons around here come in the form of stocks, bonds, trust funds and investments.

I’m here as an au pair, mind you. I’m not hereditarily stinking rich or shaking my stuff in finance. It’s eye-opening though and at times I have to concentrate on keeping a straight face when walking along Rue de Passy.

Guillaume and I saw some real, authentic basketball bad boys on 16th turf one night at a local supermarket though. But these Harlem Globetrotter hoodlums were buying a six pack of litre milk cartons and some cookies, so the cashier and queuing customers could only look on with doey glances from loving eyes and fond sighs at how it was just so adorable.

We hypothesised later that perhaps they were lining their stomachs before a heavy night of drinking, but the cookies were a little incongruous in that theory!

* The golden ghetto-wannabes Passy Mal play on the words pas si mal (not so bad) and their boutique-lined Rue de Passy origins.

I’ve heard it said that one of the biggest gripes of a language learner is to attempt to string together a simple sentence in a foreign language, only to have the listener reply ‘Do you speak English?’ in English.

This isn’t a problem for me. I don’t seem to run into the English speakers.

In fact, I’ve been guilty of doing it to someone else.

You see, I live near Musée Marmottan in Paris. It’s just across some gardens that are facing my apartment, but that’s really all I knew about it. I spend a lot of time in those aforementioned gardens “playing” as I’m here working as an au pair, and I’d constantly be asked for directions to this Monet museum. At first, I only bothered acquainting myself with the signs indicating the direction to the museum, because wherever I was I could always point to a sign.

Luckily, I stumbled across the actual museum one day in my wanderings, so now I’m pretty much set as a local tour guide.

But one day I was greeted by a group of women as I left my building, who stopped me and launched into all the trappings of what seemed to be a very well-phrased request for directions. I tried not to look too panicked and silently implored that I would know where the place in question was and how to give the directions.

Blah-blah-blah, the lady went on, until she uttered the crucial words – Musée Marmottan – in the thickest American accent I’d ever heard. I don’t know how to convey it in text so you’ll just have to imagine.

I did it. My reply was ‘Do you speak English?’ and all five of us let out a collective sigh of relief and laughed too heartily as a nervous reaction.

Gosh I felt like a little do-gooder that day!

After the first song it was question and answer time… and as the audience only contained three members – one woman who sang along to every word, my friend and myself – pretty soon the spotlight was turned to us: in 25 words or less, what is your definition of chaâbi?

Like fish out of water, we gulped a few times with stunned expressions on our faces, downed another slurp of lemon-infused beer and confessed that we really had no idea.

This wasn’t a university lecture, but an evening’s suggestion of entertainment. Last weekend I had my attention sparked by a small street press advertisement announcing a chaâbi concert, and thinking ‘Algerian Dockers blues from the 1920s’ might be interesting, I roped in a friend and off we went.

The gig was Hafid Djemai at Bab-Ilo, which is just over the back of the butte de Montmartre, and being a bit of a map-reading novice, I suggested that we just take the most direct route there – which unfortunately was charging straight up the hill to its Sacré-Coeur peak, and then charging straight back down again. But we made it, and made it to a modern-looking bar that seemed to be frequented by nothing more than old men, emptiness and silence.

Umm… the music is where?

Directed down to the basement, we encountered more sparse settings. Us. One barman. One woman. One drummer. Great…

The impromptu world music tutorial came into being when we responded with blank expressions to the fact that the next song would be ‘Ya Rayah.’ Incredulous that we were even there without knowing this song, we had the origins of chaâbi explained to us, we were given a brief run-down on the finesse and tone of the traditional Algerian mandolin-meets-guitar-meets-lute instrument and then told a little more about the song. Rachid Taha sings it. I’ve seen Rachid Taha play with Brian Eno in St. Petersburg. He does an Arabic version of ‘Rock the Casbah’, amongst other great songs. Turns out I even have an MP3 of ‘Ya Rayah.’ So it goes…


Rachid Taha performing ‘Ya Rayah’ live.

Luckily, more chaâbi fans turned up and we were spared anymore attention, until the interval came and we found ourselves telling our life histories to the assembled audience.

Do we speak any Arabic? (Ha, we’re struggling with French!)

Are we familiar with Algerian music? (Honestly, to sheepishly admit the truth, we’re not even all that familiar with Algeria…)

My friend let it slip that she was from Australia and we began to hear about cousins in Melbourne, a form of guitar/lute typical to Lebanese music, and the most famous Egyptian singer of the 1960s. We only managed to slip out when the musicians started with the opening notes of the second session… but it was well worth it!

Speaking about England, and small points of conversation that lead to absolute incredulity… a French friend announced the other day that he was really hoping to travel to London as soon as he could find some cheap train fares that corresponded with his work schedule.

The conversation flowed smoothly along those ‘Oh yes, and why is that?’ lines until he dropped the bombshell that he wanted to go to try authentic British fish and chips.

Guillaume and I were stopped in our tracks, only breaking our stunned freeze to lift Guillaume’s dropped jaw from the table and clarify that we had heard right.

‘For the fish and chips?’

All answers in affirmative, and an imaginary point is added to Bettina’s tally. The poor fellow wasn’t to have known that the desirability of fish and chips is an ongoing debate between us…

It all started in the kitchen of a dingy London flat and a United Nations congregation unanimously voting on the choice of the evening’s takeaway. We had a Mexican and an Austrian who had all spent time living in Australia, myself, my brother and Guillaume. It wasn’t only a clear winner (four in favour, one abstention) but a gleeful special treat for our Viennese companion visiting for the weekend.

They say it hurts the first time, and I think our enthusiasm for the greasy and excessively battered waif of a fish rubbed salt (and vinegar) in Guillaume’s wounds.

Not only did he not like it, but could see the respect he’d previously held for us evaporating and drifting off with the odours of the stodgy chips. Convinced there was a conspiracy afoot, he searched our faces for any signs that we were going to crack a smile, announce it to be April Fools Day and confess that we’d been pulling his leg.

No such luck. And with this recent shock revelation, I’m sure all the memories came flooding back to him…


Actually, going through my photos from that flat I managed to find a few other “culinary creations”… is it any wonder I now work with children? (I feel like a bit of a hypocrite telling them not to play with their food!) For the record, the “meal” on the right involved a crêpe! I can’t for the life of my remember why…

I haven’t been back to the UK since the Russian Old New Year concert in Trafalgar Square. I’ve thought about it, but for no longer than fleetingly (as we’ve run out of baked beans…)

I’d been considering a bit of a social experiment on that trip though, because I’d been reading Watching the English: The hidden rules of English behaviour by Kate Fox, and with my metaphorical sociologist’s cap wedged firmly on my head, I thought I could partake in a little participant observation…

It was eye-opening, to say the least, but that wasn’t because of the behaviour as such, it was more a little bit of surprise at the abundance of Amy Winehouse eyes (I’m not talking glassy or bloodshot, but the exaggerated cat-eye makeup curl) after the French fashion conservatism (some would say refined, classic and sophisticated… but really, it all boils down to unambitious and uninspired).

But my quest was for appearances of another sort. Disillusioned with some previous rudeness in Paris, I was on the search for that legendary English politeness.

Like reserve, privacy humour, weather-talk, class-consciousness, anti-intellectualism and eccentricity – politeness is considered to be one of those essentially or stereotypical English characteristics.

Fox sums it up as irrational excesses of politeness, such as ‘Excuse me, I’m terribly sorry, but you seem to be standing on my foot’ or ‘With all due respect, the right honourable gentleman is being a bit economical with the truth.’ Only in England would you hear – or find yourself uttering – something like that!

My experiment didn’t get off to a good start. I wasn’t let out of my seat enclosure into the aisle by two men, and had to push through – apologising profusely – to continue my social experiment. We’d barely shuffled forward, but I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to test the willingness of the English to queue like sheep (quoting Hungarian humorist George Mikes, Fox writes that ‘an Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one’). I was sorely disappointed as an exasperated shout echoed across the carriage:

‘Oh for f***’s sake, it’s only a train!’

Hmmm… and that was the point I abandoned that little ethnographic test (until I realised that Fox had also identified ‘hooliganism’ and ‘hypocrisy’ as quintessential English stereotypes, so I feel I had an academic victory!)

I’d like to share this newspaper article with you all; dedicated especially to anyone who happened to leave their office yesterday with a paper fish stuck to their back…

Calling Carla: Brown enlists first lady to give Britain style
Continental good taste and sophistication should be a birthright for all, says PM.

Hope you had a happy April Fool’s Day!