I was recently reading a continuous chortle of an exploration of French culture through vocabulary. Entitled Pardon my French: Unleash your inner Gaul by Charles Timoney, it outlines all those little essential facts and factors of establishing a life in France.

But one particular entry comes to mind frequently (although I wish it didn’t because Guillaume and I then kill ourselves laughing for no externally discernable reason) and I’ll include it here to taint any future experiences in French cafés for the rest of you!

Timoney writes:

If you listen carefully the next time you go to a café or brasserie, you will hear the double coffee order… [the waiter] calls the order to the barman who will then get it ready and set the cups on the bar. What is interesting is that the waiter repeats the number of coffees ordered just after the word ‘cafés’. Thus, instead of calling out, ‘Deux cafés!’, the waiter in fact shouts, ‘Deux cafés… deux!’

As I was rolling around in stitches reading out the rest of the passage to Guillaume, we reflected how true (and ridiculous) it really was. I mean, it’s not really a vote of confidence to the skills and perceptivity of the bartender now, is it?

Maybe the bartenders are a breed of their own, prone to dozing off and forgetting what they’re actually doing behind the bar. Slowly nodding off into a counter-top coma, perhaps they are only jolted to attention by the cry of ‘cafés’ but are at a loss to the quantity.

Did he say one, three or even four? That’s when the repeated number comes in to play, and he can happily prepare the daily caffeine fix for the clients.

Listen carefully next time you order your coffees and just try to suppress a smile.

With all my thanks to Jonathan Li for these wonderfully expressive espresso pix!

To complete my “research on stressful shopping experiences”, we also tried to do our once-in-six-months mega-shop at a nearby Carrefour hypermarket on the afternoon of December 31st. Just as we started loading up our trolley, an announcement came over the loud speakers: ‘Today we have the special closing time of 6pm. Registers will close in 30 minutes.’ People subsequently went nuts and after ten frantic minutes trying to get everything we needed, Guillaume just headed for the checkout to wait.

I just thought I’d grab a few more items, but I got caught in the grocery gridlock. It was insane. No one was moving anywhere, and no one wanted to give any ground. It was just a stationary mash of bodies and trolleys. There were amazing displays of solidarity though; people were passing their items over the heads of others, including random strangers in the chain, to friends similarly waiting in line with the trolley. The lines went to the end of aisles, and I don’t see how anyone could have got out of there before midnight.

Caught in the crowds, I began visualising that everyone would still be there prior to the stroke of midnight. I envisaged that there would be a huge countdown, and then people would start kissing each other and cracking open warm bottles of champagne and eating whatever happened to be in their aisle for an hors d’oeuvre. We’d all be friends for the coming year, whereas back in 2007 we were just hostile bodies pushed together for two-for-one Christmas chocolates, washing detergent and orange juice.

In fact, every time (well… both times) we’ve been to Carrefour it’s been stressful. The first time was a Saturday morning following payday, and that was the second. Of course we should have gone earlier, but it was much nicer to spend the morning ice-skating!

Our strategy worked well though – I was able to backtrack and dash through an empty aisle, leap over a fire exit barrier, and land our extra items on the conveyor belt just as the cashier was serving Guillaume, who was in turn frazzled from his anxious wait.

As we left, there was an angry man arguing with the shop security. “But you didn’t advertise on the radio that you were closing earlier!” We shook our heads wistfully, that man didn’t realise how lucky he was to be spared the inferno within…

Here’s another pearl of wisdom written by someone far wiser than myself on the topic of French wine.

If French wine consumption has dropped by half since the 1960s, I can’t imagine what it was like prior to this point in time (seriously imbibed, if lunch on Sunday was anything to go by…)

French Window’s fantastic post also brought back memories of drinking in Russia. Wine is not so commonly consumed there, so it’s not usual to have a corkscrew handy… but never fear! Russian resourcefulness will prevail!

At a BBQ? Got a butcher’s knife? Consider yourself armed with a bottle-opener (and I’m not talking about pushing the cork in - oh no - the whole neck of the bottle gets removed in one fell swoop!)

AIM: To prove, or dispel as myth, the adage that everything is better in France.

HYPOTHESIS: A desperate wish for the evening’s entertainment that the former is true.

BACKGROUND RESEARCH: Last weekend, when I went to Amsterdam, my rideshare driver was telling me that the French sauce hollandaise doesn’t actually exist in the Netherlands as their national dish of meat, boiled potato and veg is covered by no more than butter. Actually, (he rolled his eyes to indicate the situation was worst than this first impression) since post-WWII shortages meant that Dutch butter was used as international export currency, tastes in the older generation have changed, and the national sauce is now… margarine.

Furthermore, crème anglaise is custard, but a magnificent French reinvention of custard. I think that’s enough to count as solid scientific research.

EQUIPMENT FOR EXPERIMENT: Two bottles of cheap wine, purchased in a Saturday morning rush when everything else was closed except for discount supermarket, ED, which has even gained an infamous status in French hip-hop as so cheap, it’s not even worth their while to bother about shoplifters.

One is a Bordeaux, revealed at the checkout to be not exactly the one I intended to pick up (the only time I’ve been left wishing that it was an accidental under-scan). The other, a Beaujolais Nouveau, I had always been curious about, given the strength of their global advertising campaigns. By twists of fate, I always seem to be made aware of the new season’s release, but had never actually tried it. Guillaume was aghast when he saw what I had brought home, until I protested my innocent curiosity.

“It’s the same for the French. Every year we know it will be awful, but every year we try it nonetheless. It’s like the Foster’s beer of Australia – no self-respecting local will admit to drinking it, but somehow it does wonders with spin and the export market.”

METHOD: I’ve opened both bottles well in advance. I thought if a good wine needs an hour to breathe properly before service, then bad wines might need a couple.

I think I’ve pulled a bicep in the process of opening the Bordeaux, but it smells a lot more promising that the Beaujolais Nouveau.

RESULTS: Both wines are far from poisonous. The Beaujolais Nouveau takes the gong for “most likely to be contained within a five litre cask” and the Bordeaux the encouragement award for “most promising cooking wine.”

There is another great south-western French drinking ritual in which I was always too nervous to participate. That was until, transformed by Marseillais “Dutch courage” at the Fête de l’Huma, I joined in on what I had previously only referred to affectionately as “oh no, it’s that Ricard-hey-hey-crowdsurfing-caterpillar-thing… again.”

I probably need to set the scene a little further, and I’ll start by elaborating upon that which ISN’T personally humiliating (for once). I’ve observed, with the rational detachment of a sociologist, this ritual a number of times. The first – my “baptism of fire” to French drinking culture – was at the raucous Mont-de-Marsan street party, when hundreds of revellers dropped to the street in a seemingly spontaneous and impromptu display. Sitting on their bottoms, close together in a line with parted legs, a man (more often than not) at the front of the line jumped on the outstretched hands below and was carried to the back of the row, where he ceremoniously took his place to prepare to receive the next crowdsurfer. I almost wrote it off then as one-off behaviour, but then seeing at subsequent parties and wedding receptions, I realised that a certain song triggered it all off.

The song, Un petit ricard dans un verre à ballon by Les Ricounes, is about a drink, Ricard Pastis, which is an aniseed and liquorice flavoured long drink popular in the south of France.

I can’t resist any hyperbolic description, so here is an excerpt from the company website to describe what happens after the shot of Ricard is poured:

Next comes the ritual moment when a splash of water gives a glass of Ricard its first frisson of freshness, followed by the first sip in which it reveals the infinite wealth and generosity of its flavours.

This is when the appearance of the drink changes from dark translucence to a soft, dense, custard-like colour. I love watching this transformation so much, that quite often I will agree to have a Ricard, before remembering that I really don’t like the flavour very much at all.

And so it happened at the Fête de l’Huma, an enormous three-day concert on the outskirts of Paris, held as the annual event of the Communist Party newspaper L’Humanité (if you need your memory jogged, here is my previous account of the event). I had been trying to be the hostess-with-the-mostess, in other words exposing a newly-arrived friend to all that was wonderful about France – which is this case boiled down to a tour of regional alcohols. As the hour approached midnight, we were trying to navigate ourselves to an exit through the colossal La Courneuve site to catch one of the last metros of the evening.

We almost found it, but then a familiar sound hit my ear. It was THAT song. Un petit ricard dans un verre à ballon. And my friend hadn’t sampled Ricard, so she was as yet unaware of the joys of watching that first drop of water launching the Ricard alchemy. We stopped, we had a drink, we pumped our hands in the air at the appropriate times (basically at the end of every line in the chorus), and thus impressed some boys from Dax with our knowledge of south-western French culture. In return, they started the crowdsurfing caterpillar dance for us, and we rode a wave of hands a few times. Upon collapsing into the dust at the end (as the patron of the bar started the same song for the fourth time on repeat), we remembered that we were trying to catch the metro, and with the haste of Cinderella, disappeared into the night.

During my time in Venice, I met two other lone travellers and we formed an inseparable trio for the duration of the visit. Even though we were under strict instructions from the owner of our youth hostel to follow his self-guided walking tour of Venice and visit the glass-blowing island of Murano, we got distracted after the first stage of the tour – the seaside resort island of Lido.

An old man on the vaporetto water bus across the Lagoon of Venice informed us that if we liked football, we should get ourselves to the Venice vs. Novara match at 2pm. We said that we’d consider it after our picnic lunch, during which we watched hundreds of men stream off the various vaporetti and head towards the local stadium. At first we were confused – “Mid-afternoon on a Thursday? These Italians must love their football!?!” – but then we realised that it was the All Saints’ Day public holiday.

Cutting a long story short, we went, and the atmosphere was electric. The most notable factor (well, for us anyway) was the constant drone of cheers. We were perched between the two Venice cheer squads, and those who had the nerve to barrack for Novara were at the opposing end. The interesting thing was that each cheer squad was orchestrated by a cheer leader who kept the group going with various instructions of what to say and when and how to clap.

My favourite cheer involved everyone spinning their team scarves above their heads, helicopter-style, which reminded me of a French song of group frivolity.

The first – and so far only – time I’ve heard Patrick Sébastien’s ‘Tourner Les Serviettes’ (‘To turn the serviettes’) was at a wedding reception near Bordeaux. It’s an energetic song with a techno beat that would make any Ukrainian village wedding participant green with envy. Basically, after hours of indulging, the DJ launches this track and everyone forgets the greasy smears from the magret de canard, and throwing care (and bread crumbs) to the wind, starts to twirl their napkins above their heads.


Not my personal shenanigans, but a similar endeavour…

When it began, I thought I had been instantly transported to a new planet somewhere in the outer realms of the universe.

Needless to say, it didn’t take long before I was standing on my chair too, turning my serviette as if there was no tomorrow!

Look, I’m a sucker for superlatives, so any blog post entitled “The most annoying customers in the world… ever” has definately got my undivided attention.

Conjure yourselves to a mid-morning Provencal marketplace, add some slapstick misfortune and British tourists…

And quoting P.G. Wodehouse’s The Luck of the Bodkins: “Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”

I’m in the middle of a particularly British moment, the D.I.Y cup of tea. Not that I’ve been doing any real D.I.Y, just a vigorous cleaning of a recently inherited chest of drawers. I think that’s a sign that I’ve already been in le seizième for too long – I’m considering even a spot of cleaning to be D.I.Y, because around here, on doing cleaning oneself is a bit of a rarity, one for the occasional Sunday morning punters.

Why? I’m allergic to dust. This is also a recent acquisition. Before, and I’m almost ashamed to admit it, I thought allergies were just psychosomatic (shame! Boo hiss! I’ve just halved my readership… that brings it down to one, thanks for sticking by me, Mum). But now I have (particularly debilitating for a student) an allergy to dust and dust mites, and hence an allergy to our hand-me-down chest of drawers.

This has, of course, got me thinking about many profound things, as fuelled by radioblogclub.com. There are two cheesy pop songs I have a soft spot for at the moment.

The first is Mika’s ‘Love Today’. It reminds me of driving around in the summer, when everyone around here couldn’t get enough of his catchy words and operatic drivel. Now, like any discarded post-15-minutes-of-fame item of pop culture, its shrugged off as “oh… that..”.

Even worse, it has been relegated to the supermarkets. If I were to do any thought association with it now it would be drifting through the vegetable aisle of Franprix, while Guillaume ponders in the alcohol section, using a South-Western gut feeling to pick us a Bordeaux red.

The other song is Raphael’s ‘Caravane’. I have such a weakness for this song of last season – not that I know a word of it (I’m sure it doesn’t get very deep in its 3:30 minutes) – but because the film clip has a very Russian winter feeling to it. The gorgeous couple (not that this brings back memories), twirls in circles whilst swigging vodka. Ahh… those “were” the memories… I think…

There is a corny postcard available for purchase in Guillaume’s hometown. In fact, it’s sold across the region, but as we never actually bought one, I can’t precisely convey its sublime poetry… but it goes something along the lines of wanting healthy regularly, love – occasionally, work – infrequently… and pineau – every day!

In my last post I mentioned something about regional specialities, so I’d like to elaborate on this a little. Throughout France, regional specialities can be food, drink or both. In the Charente region, it’s pineau.

For the record, pineau is an aperitif alcohol made from a blend of grapes and eau de vie. Try to imagine the sweet cousin of wine and cognac, and you’re in the vicinity. It’s not alcoholic enough to send you reeling, not sweet enough for your teeth to fall out, but very refreshing nonetheless.

Being a sweet-toothed fan of cooking, and prone to having a flick through glossy-paged cookbooks, I was once checking to see the kinds of desserts that were particularly Charentais. Two struck me as particularly notable – Melon Charentais (cut up a rock melon, drench it in pineau, serve) and Fraises Charentaises (same thing, but with strawberries).

I’ve got a friend of a friend who makes his own – but as this is actually illegal in France, I’m not going to either mention their name… or open up a mail order service!