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.

odds and ends

Going away from Rennes for a week and then coming back made me realize what a great city it is. Rennes is overflowing with places I like to wander around in and its architecture is awesome. Right now the air is clogged with the smells of gardinias, siringas, mimosas and forsythias. There is light in the evening for a long time and the combination of mysterious violent purple blooms, heavy smells, and the golden rays of the setting sun makes for an intoxicating 6: 30pm walk around my neighborhood.  Truely suburban paradise: everyone riding their bikes home from work, people talking to each other through open, screenless second story windows, ladies with their babies on the front stoop, older ladies gathered at convenient street corners, middle school boys yelling through letter slots and eating entire sleeves of cookies before dinner, old men out for very dignified walks with the prerequisit wooden stick and wool hat duo. I like it so I go out in it.  Rennes is a bike city so sometimes I go out in the bike lane and pretend I know French traffic laws and am accustomed to abiding them on a bike. It's fun and I can cover a ton more ground than on foot. Last Thursday I took Lucie's bike along the canal path where the mules of the pre-desiel-engine houseboats used to walk. After a while it goes into the country and is green green green and covered with sheep and cows pumping out Breton dairy products. I rode really fast out and then turned around and the wind hit me. Ohh! The way back I went through downtown and had my first cobble stones with bicycle experience. Bump bump bump bump.
I am also making great strides with my host mom's little boys who have been rather distant with me. This week they are not at all obsessed with their top collection which was previously a near constant occupation and thus they are now available for other fun activities such as throwing cereal with me around the kitchen when their mom isn't home, playing the piano with their toes ( I told them that is how Americans do it), playing violent games of croquet around tree roots and contesting my awesome* chess skills ( I won for the first time ever last night). When they are not beating me at chess, the pauvres suffer under their mother's current mania for spinach and zuchinni themed dinners and make up for their lack of nourishment by eating entire loaves of brioche bread before dinner.
Nourishment leads me to the next event of note: the North American invasion of Rennes. Last weekend Lucie was gone mountineering with ice picks and crampons and ropes so she told me to invite people over to her house which was possibly the nicest gesture ever. However, little known by me, Erin, Zoe and Bjorn had planned a birthday surprise for me. Thursday, one day before I thought everyone was coming, Erin, the mistress of stealth, had me positioned at the metro stop waiting for one of our Rennes friends who I had invited to dinner. Apparently I had a really spectacular slack jaw when Zoe and Bjorn surfaced on the escalator instead--their faces pressed against the plexiglass at my knee level. I just about died and then they mobbed me and took me out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Afterwards I was led to a secret location which turned out to be the anglophone bar the Funky Monkey. There someone else had miraculously arranged all of my fellow American study abroaders to swing by and wish me happy birthday. The bartender was even in on it; he brought me some sort of Roman candle bedecked cream covered shot that he made me take without my hands which I executed flawlessly AND avoided being captured on camera. Fun. The rest of the weekend we spent wandering around Rennes, staying up too late laughing and eating. Eating a lot. My favorite was a pancake meal we had after a long walk by the canal. We used Lucie's party crepe maker and were able to fry lardons ( French bacon chunks), cook pancakes and make impromptu toasted cheese out of Camembert all while sitting at the table. To make up for our lack of syrup I made a carmelized butter, apple, sugar, cinnamon dish on the stove. YUM! I thought I would never eat again, but the first 2 days after they left were marked by massive hunger on my part. Come back friends! I really enjoyed how my stomach ached from laughter.

Update from a globe trotter

The past week was vacation for the city of Rennes. I thought there was going to be a stampede of revelers last Friday afternoon at 5 o' clock as people fresh out of work and school paraded the town. I waited 'til the crowds had cleared and boarded the train for Gevena. The ride across France was one of the most beautiful I have ever taken. Everything is so green this time of year and there were puddles and rainbows. I was charmed. Despite being rural, the hand of man is firmly there; you can tell that the land has been worked for a thousand years which is a very interesting sensation.

Erin and I spent Geneva day one trying to find something to eat on a Sunday. We also visited the Red Cross Museum and took a walk along the lake. The next day we made ourselves all day sandwiches and took a really iffy hike at my insistence before gratefully boarding the train to Venice.

Venice was lovely, jammed with French tourists and offered a combination of sun and surprisingly enough snow. I loved watching the guys in boats. They had such comraderie and would shout stuff to their friends on shore as they rode past. It seemed like everyone knew each other and they were so kind to tourists. Wandering the streets was the most fun, but I also enjoyed the Doge's Palace and the Naval museum.
Florence was just like the movie Room with A View. I had the sound track running through my head as I climbed about on the bridges and the hills. Beautiful. I walked around in a kind of euphoria clutching my ever present gelato cone.  I also visited all the museums of stautes and church art and had several really nice meals. I sampled a tripe and pig ear concoction and found it good. I have several new pasta sauce ideas including one with pumpkin and rosemary which was  far removed from the mid-western pumpkin loaf. Who'd of guessed?
For the way back I took an overnight train from Florence to Paris. We all woke up early to some French lady insisting to the conductor that we were actually in Switerland despite the fact that we had crossed into France. They talked for a long while and slowly everyone filed out of their "couchettes" to stand in the corridor with them and watch the sun rise over the decidedly French hills. It was lovely.

For pictures try: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=302855&id=637287248&l=8f25029f02