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Thursday, November 23. 2006
Whenever you see a (German) caricature of a Frenchman (say, a picture where you can see several different nations and the illustrator wants to make it clear that it is showing normal people instead of celebrities), he'll be likely to carry a baguette. This long, white piece of bread really is a symbol for France, and completely justified.
I'm not just talking about eating habits, here. Having lived here for a while, I've really got the impression that the baguette is an integral part of French culture.
First of all, let's clarify what we're actually talking about. If you go to a German bakery and order a baguette, you'll get also get a long white piece of bread, but that's not the same. A good French baguette is more crunchy on the outside, nice and fluffy in the inside and it doesn't have any nutritional value whatsoever. Often enough, they're just freshly made and still warm.
Getting a baguette, especially in the mornings has a cultural significance equally important as getting fresh rolls has in Germany. Every morning, you can see small armies of French people walking to the next boulangerie and back with one or several baguettes, which are impossible to carry without displaying them. If you're feeling peckish, you can get a nice croissant too, but that's another (yummy) story.
So, imagine you've got a baguette and start eating it. As mentioned before, a French baguette barely qualifies as food and you end up eating more of what you put on the baguette (most likely cheese, of which there's an excellent choice here, and butter, probably salted). So, having a lunch that consists mainly of baguette and cheese is hardly a lunch, it's more like nibbling. That's typical: while a typical German meal is made of a few basic ingredients (e.g. meat or potatoes) and designed to be eaten up and to make you big and strong, a French meal is more like fiddling around with loads of bits of food. So you'd usually have a baguette with something else.
The story isn't finished, here. Here, there's only one place to buy a baguette, and that's your local boulangerie. And a boulangerie is basically a place that sells baguettes. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but my that's my impression: you can get croissants, pains au chocolat, pieces of pizza, other sorts of bread... but the number of sold baguettes is way bigger than of all the other stuff. I've actually gone in and ordered 'One, please' and got one baguette without further inquiry. So, in a boulangerie they chuck some flour and water together and sell it for around 65cents. There's so many bakeries around - so how do they make money?
Ah... another interesting cultural thing! As I said, thinking about baguettes can get quite fascinating (well, I find it fascinating). First of all, that last question doesn't seem to crop up in France. It's a typical German question, I believe. That's probably why we Germans are world champions in rationalising, which is such a nice word for finding means to fire people by replacing them by efficient machinery. The biggest European baking company, by the way, is Kamps, founded in Germany. They have huge bread factories and have optimised the distribution to all the Kamps shops - because Germans have this urge to re-organise and optimise processes. The French love their boulangerie, and that's why it's usually an artisanale - they make their own bread.
You could probably go further and further into French culture and always find parallels and connections to baguette. But then, you'd have to be German to actually bother.
Thursday, November 23. 2006
I'll show you the inside of my École today. You've already seen it from on side and from top, so
here it is from the front:
However, if you go in the back entrance, you can see this:
This shows the confusion with the constant changing of name. At the top, it's got the current
name. But you can also see references to EGIM (which it was before, doesn't exist anymore), the
ESIM and the ISPA (2 of 4 schools which were put together to form the EGIM), the I.M.T. (I'm not
quite sure where this comes in, but apparently that's what the building used to be called), and
then there's LATP, INRIA, Polytech and L3M where I don't even know what they are.
But let's go inside.
This is what most class rooms look like. Reminds you of school? Trust me, everything here reminds
you of school.
This certainly reminds you of school - the timetable. It's even got time blocked for sports.
The students have a fair amount of own facilities. This is the foyer, where most of the school parties take place. There's rules, though, e.g. the no-alcohol-but-beer rule.
The outside is not too special, I admit. But you can play volleyball and - even more important - petanque.
But then, you can always meet with others to form a group. They've got a backline and most of stuff you need, a couple of pianos too.
The amount of computers per student is quite impressive, but as the computer rooms also double as classrooms for practical classes there are times when you can't get a computer at all - but then you'd usually be having class yourself. All machines are state-of-the-art dell computers, without double-boot, so there's always a Linux box available. Printing's for free.
Thursday, November 23. 2006
There I am, riding to school on my bike on nice sunny morning and what do I see? I never found out
if it was a French mini-riot in an otherwise unhabitated and uninhibited area, a parking fine or
an attack by vicious fireflies, but I don't think this car is going to try and overtake me in a
roundabout.
Tuesday, November 7. 2006
On my way home from the Centrale there's a conveniently placed Lidl right on the way. I go there quite often to fill up my cheese or soap or whatever, so I know the place well enough to compare it to German Lidls, which I think is quite a good way to show differences between Germany and France.
Lidl itself could never been created in France, though. For a start, it's, well, little (sorry, couldn't resist) and French love huge supermarkets. But I want to show what France has done to our Lidls to adapt them to the local habits.
The first thing you notice are the hours: Lidl's open from 9-19.30 (less on saturdays), which is a bit less than German Lidls which are open from 8-8 everyday but Sunday. I couldn't really care less, though, so lets enter Lidl, which looks quite much like a German Lidl from the inside. Even the products are the same, often enough even the same brand (obviously imported). Most of the time they don't even bother with French labels, making me wonder if everyone in France knows the words Christstollen or Spekulatius. But you can get German beer (altough I've gotten used to French beer, even if 1,97€ for 10x0.25l should make you suspicious). Of course, there are differences: The cheese section is more adapted to France, you can get several sorts of Coulommier (Which's ammoniak emmissions I can smell right now, hmmm...), there's no bread (bread is a no-no for shops without their own Boulangerie) and you can only buy sweet cereal (which is why I always liked the family holidays to France, but right now I'd like some plain müsli). The veg section is nowhere near as good as the German one's (although I can't really compare that having only been to one Lidl) and CD-Rs are much more expensive than in Germany.
There are more typical French supermarket influences. First of all, there's the security guy. That's someone who basically just walks around with a 'Security' anorak and a walkie-talkie (no idea who he could contact in a Lidl?). Don't ask him where the eggs are, though, he doesn't seem to serve any active purpose. The more hyper supermarkets in France get, the more security guys they employ. The local Carrefour has whole armies of them running around.
Something's missing, though... ah yes, the hectic atmosphere. Unlike at home, it's not necessary for everyone to be in rush. People just do their shopping and then go to the till, no hurry. I like that, but the best bit is when you're actually queueing up. For my German mentality, this was really difficult to grasp, but once you get to the till you just take your time. If you take 5 minutes just paying, no-one will launch medium wars towards you like at home. OK, when you're in a hurry it's really annoying. But here, no-one seems to be in a hurry (unless they're driving). Paying by cheque would be banned in Germany if it would still be done just for being so slow.
The staff seems more relaxed, too. Wild stories of Lidl staff being timed at the till and having to do a minimum of X articles per minute certainly aren't true in France. The most funny incident I recall was when a woman who was already queueing up asked for an article and was directed towards it by the woman at the till (who could obviously not run stuff past the scanner at the same time), helped by the other to girls at the tills (who couldn't do anything else either) and was watched by all the customers (well, they didn't have anything else to do waiting at the till). When she finally found her on-offer batteries or whatever it was, I felt like cheering.
But everytime I come out of Lidl's, I can immediately see what's missing: bike stands. No-one here seems to use bikes, so outside supermarkets lamp-posts have to do.
Thursday, November 2. 2006
The last entry has inspired me to give a more detailed overview of where I live - per satellite. Thanks to google for doing the hard work for me.
My École Centrale. The U-Shaped building at the top left is a student's home (not mine), the rest is ECM.
My Cité U. To the right's the University (not mine). The square above it's a Resto U, where you can get decent food for decent money.
I invite you to zoom out a bit and go the left. You can see the increasing number of huge blocks ( HLMs). Welcome to the Merlan.
Our favourite place in the Calanques. This is where most people go, it's easy to get to. I can't believe I actually found it on the map....
The Vieux-Port Usually the beginning of every tour of Marseille. If you click 'Hybrid' you can find the Canebière, which leads off from the VP to the north-east. It's apparently really famous, someone wrote a song about it (so I've been told).
Thursday, November 2. 2006
It made national and even international news: Last saturday, a bus in Marseille was burnt while stopping at a bus stop. A couple of kids poured petrol into the bus and lit it up. So far, no one has died but one senegalese student was extremely badly injured.
It helps knowing that that day, it was one year that the kids died in the transformer house, which incited the riots in Paris and Marseille last year.
This actually happened quite close to my student's home. Here's a Google Map Satellite image of where I live (I'm sorry, but I don't really know how Google copyright works and I've had enough trouble with net and law, so you'll have to follow the link). The two big greyish-reddish-beigish rectangular things in the middle are footie grounds, Résidence Chatenoud is right above them, the H-shaped building (I live in the lower right leg of the H). On the right hand side you can see a road running in north-south direction. If you follow the road downwards, past the footie grounds, you can see an oval shaped roundabout. That's about where the bus burnt.
While this is pretty close to where I live, the only problem this posed to me was that I couldn't get back from the station on sunday night because of the strike following this incident. If you look around at St Jerome, no-one seems very concerned at all. However, if you have look at the news you get the impression the whole nation is at war:
http://www.netzeitung.de/ausland/449863.html
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0,36-828800,0.html
OK, around Paris a couple of busses got burnt too, so this was hardly an accident. Still, the last article suggests that politicans are using this incident to show how well they can deal with situations like this, with an iron fist and bla bla.
Temporarily upgrading the number of police patrols won't help (I didn't see any, by the way). Sorry, France, but your policy regarding integration has never been really well. Here's some additional information: The 13eme Arrondissement mentioned in the article above isn't really a very beautiful area, it's the Marseillaise version of a ghetto. Loads of HLMs, a couple of supermarkets and that's basically it. People who can't afford the better areas get plonked here and most of the time, they don't get out. So it's not really surprising that sometimes, frustration turns to violence and leaks out in cruel ways like this.
However, living at the edge of the 13eme Arrondissement isn't that bad, before or after the incidence. No-one ever assumed public transport in Marseille to be entirely safe and this has reminded us again. It still sounds better than public transport in Berlin.
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