Behaviors

Are people all the world over the same, or are they different? This is a question study abroad students are supposed to mull over as they immerse themselves in local culture.  That being said, after two months in Rennes the answer defies me even though I spend the majority of my time here people watching. I have also realized (rather late) that Rennes is a city and I have never lived in a city before. Half the time I don’t know if I am observing urban life or particularly French urban life. At any rate the subjects are plentiful. Here I go:

1# Rules and Regulations.
I have been taught that France has a culture of authority and regulation. This has been foremost in my mind and consequently I see it everywhere whether it is the middle school teacher shrieking at her student who dared use a green hi-lighter when she had specified pink, or the huge “pelouse authorisé” sign at the Jardin des Plantes. Strangely enough, although there are acres of grass (pelouse) at the jardin and there were hundreds of people there on that sunny day, they were all flopped on the authorized side. Lucie told me that once she walked across the “pelouse intredit” and one of the green and orange clad garden workers stood about two feet from her and blew his whistle wildly. I saw one of these patrollers astride a Gestapo-like moto-bike. I don’t know where they found this thing because it looked kind of antique. Instead of a side car, he had a bucket of rotting plant material and of course his whistle. What fun you could have roaring through the sloping forbidden grasses on that thing…
    What do you do however when the rules defy your objectives? My bus driver Tuesday thought he was driving a Citroën instead of a segmented caterpillar. In true spirit, he breaked VERY late for two successive stoplights and went roaring across the crosswalk into the roundabout when his two-ton vehicle refused to submit. The lady at the crosswalk paused to lecture him. His next action blew my mind. He called his supervisor to complain that the stoplights were not regulation and he had been compelled to break very hard because of this irregularity. The city of Rennes has got to fix its stoplights... Now why didn’t I think of that? Evading personal responsibility much?  The busses are on time in Rennes (and fabulously convenient), but there is a minute slip room depending on who gets on and off; the lights could not possibly be green each time the bus goes by. I’ve been wondering about this guy for days.

#2 French afternoons.
People in Rennes spend an inordinate amount of time on park benches.  This is where I get shaky on my French behavior or urban behavior, but in my experience, Americans don’t seek out park benches in the same manner. You are on a park bench because you have to be there: your feet are tired, you are waiting for something, you are stranded in some way. Not so in France. In the afternoons between 4 and 7 about the time the American in me is perishing from hunger, people sit on the benches obviously doing nothing but enjoying the scenery, the sun, the people, not working etc… If they are young men, they might have beers, if they are girls, they will have cigarettes, if they are elderly, they will be blinking in the sun and taking off their scarves. If they are mamas they will be with other mamas and will have to get up periodically to make sure their toddlers don’t pinch their fingers in the ever fascinating and incongruous elliptical trainer planted in the grass. (Let it be noted that I have never seen anyone over the age of 5 actually exercising on these mysteries). Middle aged men run rather professionally and the occasional teenaged or twenty something girl jogs with her friend looking super out of her element and usually wearing regular but de-moded clothing. I can’t be certain why I feel this way, but it seems to me that people approach this time of day and its God given right to in-you-face leisure as reason #735 why the world turns around each day. Released from school ( which gets out around 5pm), work and daily responsibilities for a short while, people postpone dinner and relax. All of this in public too. This is definitely not American behavior in my experience. At home during this time I am frequently trying to charge through something and figure out a way to eat dinner. The idea of culturally supported doing-nothing is totally foreign to me. Don’t those people sitting on the bench in the sun for two hours have something to do? cries the American within me. Despite philosophical difficulties with the concept, I got to admit it is rather nice; I am out there too.


At the same time as this meta-level perhaps cultural, perhaps urban tendency to flock towards parks, there is plain old garden variety human activity. In France, people get on the wrong bus and fume in frustration as they are carried out of town. French educators use the French language to get into professional tiffs when their territory is threatened. French girls crying on a bench are given French cigarettes and French Kleenex by their French friends. French middle school boys shove each other and French middle school girls giggle. All this mundane and wonderful kind of stuff could go on anywhere. Some of my favorites:

The teenaged boys who had jumped the fence behind the toddler exercise equipment and were orderly tagging the wall. They had set up a boom box on a picnic table and had some cans there too. They kept pulling an Impressionist painter and jumping back over the fence to view their work from afar. When I showed up they were conferring about their signatures. During all this, no one was giving them any trouble and a few people were curiously checking out what they were painting. When they were done, they jumped the fence, brought their cans to the recycling, and left leaving only a lingering scent of spray paint.

The metro. What can I not say about the metro? It is transportation yes, but I seem to have a sort of romance with it. Yesterday there was the cat-lady with the bag of newspaper strips who was weaving pot-holders during morning rush. The night before, it was just me an a very sad hipster boy wearing skin tight jeans and a stylized sailor jacket with at least thirty buttons and a metal squirrel emblem. He had his i-pod jammed in, and his black-rimmed glasses magnified his huge tears. Once it was the jolly Senegalese guys with shopping bags filled with strawberries. During the late mornings it is the Turkish ladies or the Algerian ladies with their groceries, baby carriages and brilliantly colored outfits. At night it reeks of cigarettes and booze and people pass around "juice bottles." At all times of day it is an experience of intensely personal anonymity and when people come out of their metro masks, it is also a time for heavily muscled rough looking men to coo into baby carriages and escort elderly ladies over to the chairs. In short: fabulous.

With all this now on the table, I still don’t know about my beginning question: universality of humanity or not? People seem to have the same basic behavioral motivations as Americans (frustrations, jealousy, tears, chivalry towards old ladies and mamas, crazy happiness), but in cultural context they manifest themselves differently and it takes me a while to see clearly (me realizing the French teachers were establishing professional turf case in point). I watch this stuff happening, but I also see it happening apart from me. I am charmed and sometimes it seems as if everything makes sense. I am staggered and I walk away wondering what on earth I am doing here a stranger in a strange land. I know how to get around in Rennes and I am starting to know exactly how my French skills are used in Rennes, but while I walk amongst the flowering March magnolias and wait for eternity for dinner I can’t help thinking how different I am from all this.