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When I planned my move to France, I partially imagined that I’d have French friends, and that we’d speak in French all the time: erudite conversations about new-wave cinema in late-night cafés and jokes about Sarkozy amidst Gauloise smoke. The reality so far has actually been more interesting, and introduced the dilemmas of being a “foreigner” in a strange land.

Thursday night tango at Place Saint-Anne, Montpellier

So far, all my friends in France speak English. Which is not to say we all speak English together often. But it is something we all have in common. My friends fall into three broad categories:

• British and American expats (they are unavoidable, and the ones I’ve met aren’t annoying)
• French citizens who are bilingual from birth (ie. they had an anglophone parent)
• French citizens who learnt English as a second language and may have spent time in anglophone countries

Conversations with all these people often take place in French, but sometimes we switch between English and French mid-stream, depending on the subject matter and whether we think one or the other language can express an idea (or tell a joke) better.

Context plays a role: for instance, it’s ridiculous to speak to my American or British friends in French, but if a francophone friend walks into the room, we’ll switch to French so we don’t seem like we’re rudely talking in a foreign language behind their back.

Abandoned shopfront, Montpellier

I’m coming to the conclusion that my relationships in this country will always pivot around the unavoidable fact that I am a foreigner, and an anglo-saxon to boot. Perhaps this is why my friends here all speak English – at some level they all relate to the challenge of sitting inside and outside a culture at the same time.

The nature of being a foreigner does not make friendships less genuine or more distant here. It’s just a question of becoming comfortable with your role as an intermediary between two languages and cultures. Given my accent and life experience, it’s impossible to be accepted as a French person, so it’s not worth trying. But in the end, I didn’t move to France to become French.

Maybe life in France is a bit like finding oneself in an ocean – swimming in French but breathing in English. Both languages are necessary to make progress and to stay afloat.

The mouth of the Hérault river at Grau d’Agde

Tuesday was the 14th of July – Bastille Day, but nobody calls it that here. It’s just “le quartorze juillet” or “La Fête Nationale“.  Some friends and I decided to mark the occasion by going out to the Domaine de Grammont for the pique-nique républicaine and the 11pm fireworks.

Grammont is on the outskirts of the city, slightly beyond the reach of trams and regular buses, so the municipalité laid on free shuttle buses to take the crowds out to the Domaine. So far, so good.

The picnic was fun, we sat in the grounds of the château, munching on sandwiches and learning about life in Dublin and Omaha, Nebraska. And the 30 minutes of fireworks (with musical accompaniment) was easily the best display I’ve ever seen. Sometimes, France manages to do things exactly right, and this was one of those moments.

The great disappointment of the evening was the organisation of the return transport – with tens of thousands of people trying to get back into town after the display, there was a bottleneck involving too few buses, large numbers of increasingly frustrated citizens and an absence of any apparent control or organisation. It was, to use a colourful Nebraskan metaphor, “a total clusterf*ck“.

The motorcycle police seemed to be there simply to keep the scene clear of private cars to allow the buses, the bus drivers and the general public to have a big argument with one another.  With no crowd barriers, lots of young children, alcohol-fuelled anger and dozens of slow-moving buses, the potential for either violence or a serious accident was very real.

In the end, we gave up on the buses and the restless peasantry and walked 10 minutes back to the tram at Odysseum. Ironic (or perhaps appropriate?) that a festival designed to celebrate national unity, and those great valeurs républicaines of fraternité, égalité and liberté should culminate in a display of méprise, colère and bordel.

Spectacular and beautiful state-funded largesse, followed immediately by organisational chaos,  small-minded arguments between citizens and a near-riot.   I continue to fall in love with this country more and more.

Canadians have hockey, Americans have little league, New Zealanders have barefoot beach rugby, the English have rainy weekends in Brighton.  But if you want to evoke the sun-kissed childhood of a French person from the south, just mention toro-piscine.

La toro-piscine was a summer amusement for kids in southern France long before skateboarding and the roller coaster, and seems to remain today a distinctive and well-loved part the culture of the region.

From the Camargue westwards, bull sports are popular across the south. Most towns and many villages have their own purpose-built arènes. There’s la corrida (real bulls and real death), la course camarguaise, (real bulls but no death) various runnings of the bulls, and la toro-piscine (young cows, silly games and prizes for the kids).

Last night I went to the toro-piscine at Palavas with my landlady and her cousins from northern Alsace, who like me had never been to a bullring before. Palavas is a beachside town near Montpellier, with funfairs, cheesy souvenir shops and an overpriced revolving restaurants in a tower – a little like Blackpool, but with sunshine.  And, like most southern resort towns, Palavas runs bulls during the summer season.

Cows (les vachettes) and the game equipment are provided by the arena, but the competitors are volunteers from the crowd, who play individually in teams for prizes. In the centre of the arena is a pool, (hence piscine), and one of the classic games involves coaxing the vachette to chase you across the pool. There is real danger, real tension and real laughs.

At the end of the evening, a bull, wearing a bell around his neck is trotted out to “collect” his vachette. Sometimes the vachette is eager to depart the ring, and sometimes she’s reluctant – as if she’s had too much fun with her human friends to bother with her boyfriend.

Here’s a 2-minute highlights reel:

Today, the sports and marketing circus known as Le Tour de France came to town. The city ground to a halt for 12 hours while obscenely fit men sweated around a 38km course chased by thousands of photographers, helicopters, physiotherapists, policemen and advertisers. One of the oldest sporting contests, this year Le Tour is in its 96th “édition”. It’s certainly the biggest single annual event in France, apart from the opening of Carla Bruni’s handbag.

I got into town about one o’clock, and rather than heading for the starting line on Place de la Comédie, I camped out for the afternoon at the top end of the old town by the Arc de Triomphe. Peyrou was obviously the place to be, because Germany’s Tourteufel, Didi Senft joined us in the crowd. He’s the ultimate Tour fanboy, having followed every Tour since 1993. You can see him in the background of a couple of my photos.

Le Tour is of course, an enormous sponsorship opportunity, and the race itself is preceded by a parade of sponsors trucks – Nestlé, Caisse d’Epargne, L’Equipe, Skoda – and they seem to be cheered just as enthusiastically as the cyclists who follow.

Then, finally  came the riders. Today’s race was a team time trial, so rather than one big peloton of riders whizzing past, there was a team every 7 minutes for most of the afternoon.

I didn’t stick around to see Lance Armstrong and the Astana team, who were last off the starting blocks: the sun was strong, and I thought I’d jump a tram home before the crowds started ebbing back to their daily lives.

There’ll be a big cleanup tonight in Montpellier. Here, the circus has come and gone, but continues onwards for another 20 days, sweating, grinding and advertising itself towards Paris. Allez !

For those readers who haven’t visited Montpellier, here’s a little video-taste of the town (well, the historic centre at least).

I’ve just got a FlipCam MinoHD for a new web project I’m starting. It’s pretty much the world’s smallest HD camera. Today I took it into town to try it out. Here’s a quick edit of some street scenes I shot. The camerawork and the angles are not great, but I’m learning.

As anyone who follows this blog will notice, there hasn’t been much activity over the past week. Several topics were mooted. (Inter alia: racism in France, quality of life vs income, general annoyance at swish travel writers and foodies who rave about holidays in Languedoc, but have have never spent more than a fortnight here at a stretch, treating the place as some kind of thyme-scented culinary theme-park for their fabulous friends from Manhattan without regard for the region’s crippling rate of unemployment).

But none of these ideas ever got past the neural sub-editor in my blogocortex. In addition, a combination of heat, thesis-writing and job-hunting has been eating into time normally spent composing blog posts.

So, here’s a glass of wine from last night’s Estivales, and it comes with the hope that there’ll be some more action soon. A la votre.

Sunday night was the summer solstice, and France celebrated the Fête de la Musique. Basically, nearly every hamlet, village, town and city is turned into a giant venue for multiple free concerts and spontaneous jam sessions for the entire evening. In Montpellier, part of the tram network is shut down so stray trombonists or dreadlocked djembe-players don’t get run over, and several hundred thousand people pour into the centre of town to wander, drink, dance and listen (roughly in that order of priority).

All in all, it’s rather less about the musique, and more about the fête.

Like most nationally-celebrated events in France, the Fête de la Musique is a central government initiative, launched by Jack Lang, François Mitterand’s Minister of Culture in 1982. Several French friends told me rather proudly that the concept has been “exported” to many other countries, however no other country can rival the enthusiasm and napoleonic ubiquity witnessed in France every June 21st.

The atmosphere in Montpellier was amicable chaos, and the quality of the music varied from determinedly-average to actually-pretty-darn-good. I was disappointed by the number of covers bands, and lack of original local music: it seemed madness that a magnificent outdoor setting like la Promenade de Peyrou should be given over to an Air Guitar contest (mais oui) and musical tributes to Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana. Music fans had to search elsewhere for gems.

Down on the Esplanade Charles de Gaulle, a Devo tribute band was competently belting out disco-rock to a disinterested early-evening crowd. FauxDevo were so loud I almost walked straight past the Stick Jazz Trio without noticing. Set up among the tables outside Chez Boris, the SJT is based around Jean-Jacques Koto Bekima’s 10-string “stick” guitar, an instrument that allows bass and solo guitar lines to be played simultaneously.

They played great, opting for the sort of intricate modal bop that suits guitar-led groups. Saxophonist Sebastian Debloos trades in a nice Lovano/Brecker tenor style, the hallmark of jazz school graduates. But SJT was energetic, intelligent and held a decent crowd despite competition from the nearby stages.

When I got down to the Opera House on the Comédie, a local batucada group were finishing off a wandering samba session through the old town. They weren’t that great: I’ve heard better batucada in New Zealand – this particular group just weren’t tight or particularly swinguant.

Fellow Montpellierain jcverdie filmed their progress through town (see above). The video is less interesting for the music than for the impression it gives of the streets and architecture of the Ecusson for those who haven’t visited Montpellier before. [Edit: the video above apparently is not Onda Maracatu. You can watch Onda Maracatu here.]

Montpellier’s not a big city. It seemed inevitable that I’d bump into a friend among the crowds. On rue St Guilhem I got pulled aside by Dany, who was insistent: “Richard, tu viengs boire un pot avec nous?” (Dany is from Sète, and is the most typically southern Frenchman I’ve met – chauvinist, eternally tanned and incredibly friendly).

From then on the proceedings evolved into a rather typical Montpellier evening out:  I met more people from Brittany (I swear 80% of the inhabitants of Montpellier are Breton), we went to a taverna owned by one of Dany’s friends for tapas and sangria (80% of Montpellierains have a friend who runs a taverna), and my French improved after a few drinks.

A little flamenco performance in an alleyway drew our attention for a few minutes. Some of my friends from the CRS swaggered past. The officers seemed determinedly unmoved by the music going on around them. “Ah, mais les flics, tu sais, ils dansent à l’intérieur“, whispered Dany. The cops, he assured me, were dancing on the inside.

Dany had to drive back to Sète, so I slowly made my way back to the tram, past some music school students jamming to Canteloupe Island (mais oui) on rue de Candolle, and an enthusiastic set of nouveau-swing by Le Comptoir des Fous at Place Albert 1er. Finally, I’d found a band singing in French! And singing French songs !

As Francis Cabrel describes it, “La nuit a été chaude en alcools…“. The crowd in the square were well-oiled by this stage, swigging 2 Euro rosé straight from the bottle, and homeless people were dancing in front of the stage with their dogs. Even if the cops weren’t smiling, everyone seemed pretty darn happy. It was, after all, la fête, quoi.

Yesterday, I went to see the police. Nothing serious, I just lost my British Passport (a silly story not worth retelling here), so I needed to get a police report. All of those schoolboy phrases, starting with “Où-est le commissariat de police, s’il vous plaît?” suddenly seemed startlingly relevant for the first time in my life. My third form teacher would be proud…

But nothing in France is simple, especially getting a police report. As Ed mentioned recently, France bathes in a marasma of overlapping and mutually ignorant layers of public service. The police services (plural, for there are at least 3) no exception.

After consulting the British consular website, it seemed that I needed to get the report from the Police Nationale. So I duly trammed into town and trotted into the Commissariat de Police on Place de la Comédie, a prefabricated-toilet-looking building with violently slamming doors that skulks behind the Office de Tourisme.

Not the Montpellier Police Station. (Image: franck_h20)

I explained my situation to the junior officer on the front desk: I’d lost my passport and needed to make a déclaration de perte. The officer seemed slightly perturbed that I wanted to talk to him about a document that wasn’t issued by the French authorities. “You must talk to your consulate, monsieur. It is a British passport, not a French passport.“

I explained again that I’d already talked to the consulate, and they said I needed to make a déclaration with the local police. However he insisted again that his station couldn’t help me, and I needed to make the déclaration at the Préfecture (which is the local office of the French national government, nothing to do with the police).

A little bit doubtful, I headed back across Place de la Comédie (a furnace in the mid-June sun) and up to the Préfecture. The lady at the reception desk was confused with my request, but her colleague seemed confident that they could help. He took great delight in adressing me in barely comprehensible lycée-level English, (although I told him we could speak in French) telling me to “ka-nock” on the door of the Office for EU citizens, and they would sort me out.

I ka-nocked on the door of the Office for EU Citizens, and eventually a rather informed-looking lady emerged. She was appalled that the police officer had told me to come and see her, and said it was a police matter, and she couldn’t help me. She suggested that if the police nationale couldn’t do anything, I should try the police municipale (the local city cops who essentially handle noise complaints, hand out parking tickets and look enviously at the “real” police and the Gendarmerie who get cool guns).

“Je suis jaloux, moi” (Image: StreetFly JZ)

The Police Municipale is a short walk from the Préfecture, and when I arrived, the bloke behind the desk (resplendent in shorts, flip-flops and a polo shirt) told me in no uncertain terms that they were not the autorité compétente for a déclaration de perte, and I should address my query to the Police Nationale. With a sigh, I thanked him for his help, and headed back out into the afternoon heat, back down the hill to the Commissariat de Police.

Back in the public-toilet architected Commissariat with the slammy doors, Mr Junior Desk Officer was not pleased to see me back, but he was polite. This time there was another colleague with him, with a couple more stripes on his epaulettes, who also thought that a déclaration de perte was not his job, but he had enough training to go and fetch a sergeant, who indicated, finally, that yes, a déclaration de perte could be lodged at the Commissariat. So they entered my details in a computer and told me to wait for the next available duty officer.

While I waited in the police reception, a trio of CRS officers strolled in. The CRS are part of the Police Nationale, but their main job is to quell riots and make the regular police officers jealous, because they carry enough impressive clobber around their waists to start World War III.

The CRS are evidently taught a particular way of walking at CRS-school: a kind of slow-motion Robocop swagger with a dash of professional wrestler. The CRS walk says “I could break your legs just by staring at them”. They also wear dark blue one-piece boiler-suits, possibly designed for easy laundering after a day spent thigh-deep in blood and tear gas.

Not quite like the CRS dudes I met in the police station

Finally I was called through to the interview room, where my statement was taken by an efficient lady officer whose official image was somewhat spoiled by the pink Hello Kitty watch on her wrist.She’s probably incredibly bored with stupid foreign residents losing passports and permis de séjour, but didn’t show it. The whole process took about five minutes, and I thanked her and walked out the door with a precious signed and stamped déclaration.

So, all in all, a rather a typical experience of French bureaucracy – three agencies who didn’t know what the other did, resulting in one big hot, sweaty circle back to where I started.  It didn’t bother me too much, I’m developing a good argumentative pose which helps in getting results in this country. But I have a lot of spare time and speak reasonably functional French. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be if you were a foreign tourist in a rush…

Result!

Three things encountered on my walk in town this morning:

A completely honest beggar on rue de la Loge whose sign reads “Juste pour l’alcool et drogue“. I’m pretty sure it’s clever irony, because he’s got a nice-looking guitar and speaks pretty good English.

Two fabulous gendarmes on motorcycles who zoom through the crowds of pedestrians on the mall outside the Polygone shopping centre. One pulls up under the canopy outside the bank, proceeds to put his card in the cash machine and take out some Euros, while his partner keeps guard. Once he’s picked up his lunch money, the cops then zoom off again back through the crowd.

The regular morning cacophony on rue de Candolle, by the cathedral, where you can hear at least five or six instruments practising at once. Today it was cello, vibraphone, clarinet and trombone. The sounds bounce off the walls of the high, narrow streets, giving the impression that you’re walking through an Eric Dolphy album.

When you live in a certain place, it’s fun sometimes to hear the perspective of someone who is just “passing through”. Tony and Wendy are two British retirees from Lancashire currently caravanning through France. I found their blog via Lost in France.

Their holiday tales are recounted with a good dose of humour, whether describing the lovely weather or the cheapness of the wine in the supermarkets. But, as with many British tourists in France, Tony and Wendy consistently arrive everywhere at lunchtime, and everything is inevitably closed.

When you live in France, lunchtime closing is not something you notice, usually because you’re having lunch yourself (what else is there to do?). Tourists need to learn that lunchtime is important. They shouldn’t be spending that time doing unimportant things like arriving at places.

Anyway, here are a few highlights from their trip so far:

Paris
“…the Pompeidou centre – ugly mess. Finally we get to the Louvre and of course the Mona Lisa. You could spend all day in there, it’s massive, but you can only have so much culture per day so after more religious paintings than you can shake a stick at, along with some fine pottery, we escape to Starbucks for a well earned rest.”

Dogs in Limoges
“The French seem to have this obsession with small dogs – rats on leads – but today we saw the ultimate, a tiny dog in a pouch on the front of a motor bike and the dam thing even had a pair of goggles on. It’s just a pity they don’t know how to pick their dog muck up.”

Social Anthropology in Languedoc
“We really should have kicked the French out of this country, it’s wasted on these miserable specimens. It’s an age profile, the kids are friendly and respectful and chat every time they go past and then you have the elderly French who walk around with faces like a smacked arse and never speak.”

Boules near Perpignan
“Now this isn’t just old men, but it’s a complete cross section of society; all meet up; shaking hands; kissing – a bit dodgy some of that; and taking it all very seriously.”

Beziers
“A place that turns out to be scruffier and more depressing than Blackburn and it’s a nightmare to drive around…. It has a cathedral with fine sculptures, stained glass and frescoes, but it’s surrounded by scaffolding and anyway it’s closed for the most sacred ceremony – lunch. We get to walk through the Muslim quarter, free parking but will the car be there when we get back, very depressing. Not much character, the best bit is the flower market – how it all made us yearn for Blackburn! A few more clues to the place, they’re keen on Rugby and bullfights.”

Montpellier
“Montpellier is one of the nicest cities we’ve been to. Especially if you don’t have to drive around it. It’s a very young thriving city and we visit a place in the centre named the Egg* its full of fancy French style cafe’s, we sit having a coffee it’s opposite the Comedy Opera. Of course it’s MacDonalds, an excellent cup of coffee all for E1.30 and a front row seat for people watching.”

Well, at least they enjoyed Montpellier, even if they did visit McDonalds and witnessed a drugs bust.

Bon voyage, Tony et Wendy, bonne route, et bonne continuation!

*Images used in this post are all my own, and don’t illustrate Tony and Wendy’s trip.