Bournagain

Something really odd happens to you when you return home after a few months travelling. There is a very short window of opportunity, where for a few brief days you have the objectivity of an outsider, which enables you to notice things in a fresh way, before familiarity obscures them again.

We just got back to France yesterday after over 4 months away (I might do a post about our eventful voyage home once the jet lag subsides and the memory of the anguish of missing not one but three of our connections becomes a little less raw)!

People often ask us “what are the differences between New Zealand and France”, and I never know what to say. So now that I still have a bit of that “just-flew-in” objectivity left before it fades into the familiar, I’ll record some of those things that have left us in no doubt that we really are back in France.

• The mind-numbing circularity of Charles de Gaulle airport, which seems to have been designed as if it was intended as some vast Skinnerian behavioural experiment to test how long it takes for a human being to lose their sense of direction.

• The compassion of the people whose work it is to assist poor travellers who have been disoriented by such things as lost bags, missed connections, the design of airports, or (as in our case) all of the above. A bit of politeness, treating the person behind the desk as an individual human being and not just a cog in some wheel, and an honest sharing of one’s predicament goes a long way in France.

On the other hand, if you want to produce the Gallic shrug and a stubborn refusal to lift a finger to help, just be demanding of your rights and critical of that monstrous organisation that got you into your present sufferings (usually the employer of the person in front of you).

There are exceptions, however. One irate tourist, from a country just to the north of France that shall remain nameless, berated the cashier at a newsagents for not being willing to change her 20 euro note into “moneda“. This is the Spanish word for “change”, which was the only word in a language other than her own that she used – and that in a French railway station – go figure! She lamented in her own language (understood to me but happily over the head of the cashier), over how much she hates French airports and how inexplicable it is that the ticket machines didn’t accept her foreign debit card etc. etc. Judging by her accent the person in question comes from a culture where it is fairly common to accuse the French of being “arrogant”. It really made me stop and think how often we (myself included) accuse others of the same faults that trip us up.

In the end the lady got what she wanted, thanks to the long-suffering cashier who had probably heard it all before.

• Heather particularly noticed proof that chivalry is not dead in France, as we saw young guys competing with each other to look after elderly ladies struggling with heavy baggage.

• The children exclaimed over a very simple but very French breakfast in the hotel where we were obliged to spend an unexpected night due to delays and missing baggage. You’d think they’d just been served a meal in a 5-star restaurant the way they went into raptures over their orange juice, baguette with butter and jam or nutella, and hot chocolate (into which the aforementioned baguette, now slathered in jam or nutella, is dunked).

High speed trains, row houses with black slate roofs and terracotta chimneys, road works and roundabouts everywhere, hypermarkets, elderly ladies on park benches, hollyhocks, a bottle of Bordeaux left behind by our house-sitters – nothing very deep, but a bunch of small things that are a powerful reminder that we really are back.