Life Leçons

"I am a (wo)man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess." - Red Green

When I was nine, my parents organised a house exchange with a family from Sceaux, a historic suburb of Paris. Over the course of three weeks, we visited chateaux, museums, and picturesque towns all over the country. I play-pretended to be living in France, walking to the bakery every morning for baguettes and spending the afternoon lounging at the neighbourhood pool. Life there felt like a dream — everything looked the same as back home, but something was distinctly off. The streets were smaller, the buildings older. The public pools had diving boards and lifeguards, but they also had topless women. The business people went to work on scooters rather than in cars. Not the sexy Vespas, the kick-push variety my friends and I rode to school. But the biggest difference of all was the food. 

This was the year Mireille Guiliano released French Women Don’t Get Fat, the book that launched a thousand eating disorders. In it, she discussed the many ways her compatriots’ stayed slim, one of which included an innate ability to resist snacking. But if the France Guiliano wrote about really existed, who was eating all this food? In Halifax, I had to go to the convenience store for treats. Here, they came to you, trussed up in chantilly cream and fondant. You couldn’t walk a block without hitting a pastry shop or crêpe kiosk. I decided if French people didn’t snack, I would step up to the plate. I stuffed myself silly, preparing my body for puberty like a bear for hibernation. My siblings and I would wander the grocery stores wide-eyed in wonder, begging our parents to buy any and/or all of the treats that packed the shelves. Even the cereal aisle wasn’t spared. Looking at the rows of honey-flavoured corn pops and chocolate-filled granola clusters, you had to imagine French dentists recommended brushing your teeth before, during and after breakfast. This appreciation of sugar was best exemplified in ChocoCrack, which was as addicting as its name suggested. So addicting my brother smuggled back a box in his suitcase, mounting it on his wall like a trophy hunter. 

It was only years later, when I actually moved to France, that I better understood the nuances of the French diet. Because while snacking in Canada is an activity, snacking in France is an hour. 4:30pm, to be exact. It’s a lifelong habit that starts in childhood, when children come home from school and enjoy a sweet, elegant snack, like a baguette with a delicate bar of Milka nestled inside. We all have our rituals, but the French dedication to goûter can border on fanaticism. Once, after a colleague complained to me about how hungry she was, I fished into my bag and offered her a banana. “A banana?” She paused. “Don't be ridiculous. It’s 5 pm.”

To say the French have a hard time thinking outside of the box when it comes to their cuisine would be an understatement. I know not one, but two French people who were surprised to find out cheese tastes good in a croissant, a pairing you’d think shouldn’t be that big of a leap for a country creative enough to have cultivated the minds of Claude Monet and Yves Saint-Laurent. But it’s not just food they’re regimented with. They may not be as mean, as cowardly, or even as sexy as they’re made out to be, but they more than live up to many of their other stereotypes — specifically that they’re pathologically-committed to maintaining their way of life. They really do go on strike often and they smoke even more. Heavy petting in public is actively encouraged. Vacations are sacred — I have thirty-seven paid days off, not including public holidays, and a colleague still had the gall to suggest French people work a lot. They even have chaos down to an art, protesting every Sunday like clockwork. And just like most of the boys I grew up with in Canada were hockey players, almost all of the men I know in France are techno DJs. Try to change any of this and you risk shutting down the entire country for 7-10 business days. 

These are the things I think of when people ask me what it’s like to live in France. Six years in, I still have a hard time getting used to the most basic rules, like how often you have to say hello and goodbye. You can be ass-naked in a changing room and you’ll still be socially required to greet every stranger that walks in. Canada, in comparison, is the land of opportunity — the opportunity to do whatever you want, whenever you want. You want to go grocery shopping at 2 am? Eat your lunch on the subway? Sure, who are we to stop you. It’s this blasé attitude towards everything that’s probably why I have such difficulty assimilating.

But as much as I tease them, I love their language, I love their humour. I love being an outsider, observing their little habits. I love, for lack of a better expression, their commitment to the bit. It’s one of the things I like best about living here. Everything is new. I go to work, I come home and I make dinner, but there’s always something about my day that surprises me. Biking past a beautiful, centuries-old church? Beautiful. Seeing a colleague smoke out the window of a meeting room? Fascinating. Hearing a middle-aged, able-bodied man loudly complain as a decrepit old woman cuts in front of him in line at the bakery? Unforgettable. In Paris, there’s always something to be amazed by. 

Compared to the French, I am unruly. Compared to most people, actually. Growing up, I regularly had to have knots professionally cut out of my hair. I see no issue in folding my clothes inside out. My relationship to personal hygiene is distant at best. I can be loud, and crude, and my tendency to eat all day long baffles my colleagues. I’ve never met a five-year plan I liked. Or any plan, really. So while I’ve spent time in France over my early, mid and late 20s and many things in my life have changed, I haven’t. 

But these days, I worry that going with the flow has pushed me off track. I finally understand what Joan Didion meant when she wrote about her 28th year, about realizing that “not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” I could comfort myself by saying life gets in the way sometimes, but more than anything, I get in the way. I am the most lenient babysitter I ever had, letting myself drop everything to entertain whatever fleeting feeling or passing whim I experience. Up until recently, I’ve lived my life as if I’ve already lived it, with certainty that the things I want are just around the corner. But now, as thirty looms even closer, I find myself, if not longing for structure, at least a little curious as to what it could do for my life. 

So for my inaugural Substack post, six months after I planned to publish it, here it is. My commitment to finally learning something from the French and adopting some rules into my life: write every day, publish once a month, and never, ever, eat a banana past 4:30 pm.