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. Read the rest of this entry »
One thing about living on the other side of the world to a large number of friends and family members is that you tend to live in two parrallel universes which never intersect. This is why we so enjoy receiving NZ visitors in France. But until this weekend we had never had anyone from France visit us in New Zealand.
François is a young friend from Nantes, an engineering student who, instead of fulfilling his foreign work placement requirement somewhere sensible like England, he came all the way to NZ where he ended up working in a pulp and paper mill in the exotic (ahem!) little town of Tokoroa. If you read French you can find out here about his NZ adventure.
It was an ideal weekend as we had a dinner to get together with old friends, and gave a presentation in church on Sunday morning, part of which was an interview with François about his life in Nantes and what it’s like being a full-on Christian in such a secular educational environment. François is very active in Agape Campus – a student Christian movement in Nantes. It was great hearing his impressions of our homeland – seeing it through French eyes.
So France has a new president! It has been interesting observing the reactions in the media here in New Zealand. Friends in France are often surprised to hear that French (and European) current affairs are followed with interest down here at the bottom of the world. Reactions appear to have been fairly positive thus far :
Mr Sarkozy, son of a Hungarian immigrant, is not a product of the public service academy that has put its stamp on most of France’s leading figures. He sounds like a man of change rather than of tradition, and France sorely needs that. The 12-year presidency of Jacques Chirac has left the economy flat and overdue for drastic repairs. Mr Chirac was a classic conservative, content to accept the long-established line that market liberalism is somehow Anglo-Saxon and foreign to the social and moral foundations of the French republic. Mr Sarkozy is not nearly so sniffy.
New Zealand Herald
(speaking of M. Sarkozy’s break with the past) His emphasis on dignity, opportunity, respect and nationhood appeal to an older moral ethic, and a conception of France which, at least in theory, recognises the common good. The change he is promising rejects the pieties, policies and attitudes of rigid socialism…which have perplexed and paralysed France since they began their rise in the 1960s.
Maxim Institute
There have also been comments about Sarkozy being a “union-basher”, and predictions that he will come down hard on immigrants so as to be seen to be taking action. Nevertheless, much is made of his Hungarian background, and his selection of an immigrant cabinet minister.
It was France’s largest voter turnout in two decades. What does this say about how the French view their future? We are watching with interest.
Follow this link for a very interesting article giving a New Zealand appraisal of the current situation in France. It’s a bit thin as a reflection of the diversity of French society, and gives the impression that everyone is middle class with a good amount of disposable income. There are several “Frances”, and many French do not fit the journalist’s description. However, I think that on the whole the picture she paints of the coming crisis is prophetic.
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