Martin & Marseille

The French cuisine has a very high reputation in Germany, definitely so near the border but probably all over. It's justified, French people just have loads of good ideas to turn loads of stuff (including some slimy little animals with a low speed or green ones with an affinity for jumping) into really classy meals. Some things, like cheese or wine are also a very important export factor.
The French know this. I'd bet that most restaurants are genuine French ones (sounds obvious, but how many restaurants you've been to actually serve and specialise on German or [put in own nationality] food?). However, I found the reputation slightly overrated. I suppose your average French full-time mum can still do the most wonderful things if you get invited around. Among students, I mostly saw the same affection for food as amongst German ones.
French wine selection is incredible. A huge French supermarket will have several kilometres of wine shelves, a full range of prices, regions and tastes. This is fine as long as you don't want any foreign wines. Some people French always think their wine is the best - I say they don't know there is any other. Amongst the aforementioned infinite lengths of shelves I spotted a section 'Produits du monde' (Products of the world), about 70cm wide. 70% of these wines were French, too (well, I suppose France is a part of the world), but no German or even South American ones to be seen. If I had to stick with one sort of wines for the rest of my life it would probably be French, but the world of wine would not be the same without a good Chilean, Spanish or German one.
The cheese however is unrivalled. The reason we get good cheeses in Germany is because we generally quite happily import stuff from all over the world (including vocab), but the first time I went to a German supermarket the shopkeeper and several employees came running to see if I was fine lying in front of the cheese counter, crying.
Funny French cuisine hasn't managed to be more successful outernationally. How many French restaurants do you know outside France? Yes, they exist - but in Germany they're way down the list after Italian, Greek, Turkish, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Spanish, Mexican, Indian and probably even German. Well, they brought us the Crêpe.
As I wrote earlier, French bakers have an important role in their country. So, is the average French baker better than the German? NO, he's not. True, your baguette, croissant and pain-au-chocolat isn't the same here, but even the big baking chains smell wonderfully of brezels and good German bread, of which the variety is incredible. The first thing I bought here was half a loaf of bread which cost more than your average Döner Kebap and which still isn't empty even though I had some of it every night, enjoying it immensely.

The best way to pass as a Frenchman (if that's what you want) is to stick to group of other French people and not say much. However, you still have to get past the greeting ceremony - and that's more difficult than I ever thought it was.
I never thought much about greeting rituals, but they are more complex than I ever imagined and deeply integrated into local culture.
In Germany, we hardly ever say anything at all. A little wave or a nod to everyone in general is usually enough, perhaps accompanied with a little grunt or something along the lines of "'ello" (like "tach" or "yo"). Perhaps this is because of our efficiency-driven way of living; having to greet each other for ages would soak up valuable time we could put to work.
As if to confirm this, I read a description about some small island where the people seem to be particularly nice: "In a place where people having nothing else to do, they greet each other all the time.". It was a French journalist who wrote this, so I find it difficult to imagine - from my point of view, French people spend loads of time greeting.
The greeting ritual is still a mystery for me. A rough description: If you meet one or more people where it's not too crowded or awkward, you give all the blokes a handshake, all the girls the right number of 'bises' together with an appropriate micro-conversation about how you're doing. Sounds easy, but the details are difficult. If you're just greeting someone at the bakers for example, all this doesn't apply but a different set of rules becomes valid, that's when you start with the Bonjour-thing, but I won't go there for now.

First of all, you have to judge if the whole greeting ceremony can be shortened down to just giving the nearest people or even no-one at all the full greeting monty without being considered impolite. Of course if you're seeing someone the other end of a crowded bus, you don't have to walk over but if you're meeting someone in the corridor you're the right level of close to you can't skip it. If you don't know the person that well a verbal greeting might suffice, but not if it would leave an awkward gap (e.g. if you're waiting for the elevator together). The threshold for bises seems to be higher than for handshakes, but you usually wouldn't shake hands with a girl (I think).
Of course this is all different for formal occasions, luckily - I just couldn't imagine doing the bises before opening a bank account. In high-ranking positions it's something else: you will often see politicians doing bises if they want to make the closeness in a relationship clear. Bises between men are not at all uncommon, but luckily not compulsory. Now I think about it, I've seen that in Germany, too, but mostly with Turkish adolescents for some reason.

The next bit is what to say. I usually try and get out of this by being the first to say 'Salut, ça va?'. That way the other person has to think of an answer giving me some time to improvise the next bit of the conversation.
Like in some other countries (I've seen this with US-Americans, but I couldn't say this is generally true) the question 'ça va?' (meaning 'how are you?') is mostly not really an in-depth inquiry about your physical and mental health, but more like the near-dead 'how do you do?'. Again, this is very dependant on the type of relationship. The closer you are, the more details you may reveal. The most common is one of these: "Ça va? - Ça va.", "Ça va bien? - Oui, ça va" or variations. If you're a bit closer, it could be something like "Ça va? - Ouais... il faut... " (You alright? - Yeah... well... not much choice really....). However, you can't reveal serious problems, of course. If you're good friends OR you're extra-polite, you could say 'Comment vas-tu?' which this time really means "How are you?" (Ça va? literally means 'It goes?'). If the question was asked less out of politeness and more out of general interest, you may go ahead and answer honestly.
I don't know if it's a local thing, but Marseillaise people have a special answer for when they're alright: 'Ouais, tranquil...' ('yeah, easy-going...'). This would be a typical Marseillaise thing to say, explaining that the best possible state is when nothing really is happening.

The number of bises, by the way, seems to be regionally constant and is usually 1 on each side (at least here it is).

So, who would have imagined that I could write so much about greetings? I wonder if the German greeting has so many sides to it. I'd appreciate some input from some non-Germans, here.
I know one thing, however: It's not compatible to France. My way of greeting friends I see in the street at a medium distance is usually by yelling something short and easily perceptible like "hey!". Not being a complete cultural equivalent of the famous elephant in the china store I don't usually do that to French people, but I still do when I see Germans. Trouble is, to French ears it sounds a bit like "hey you, stop that or you'll meet my friend Desert Eagle" - this whole article is actually inspired by the 3 French guys I gave a jump when I was just greeting a fellow ERASMUS student.

Wow, what a quote. I'll break some journalistic rules and start with both a quote and a joke:

A US-American, a Frenchman and a German are sitting on a bridge. You want to make them jump down. What do you say to them to achieve that?

To the American: "There's a 1000$ down there"
To the Frenchman: "It's forbidden to jump off this bridge"
To the German: "Jump"

Where's the connection between the joke and the quote? Easy: this is an article about rules and German and French people.
Everyone knows the German are a law- and rule-abiding people. Well, at least everyone says so. And I have more than once done something like stopping at a red pedestrian light even there's no car around in the middle of Brazil, for example. I had a little chat with the secretary for internships here and she immediately started telling me about her trips to Germany and of course some anecdotes about German law-abidingness.

My observation: it's all true (I leap right back into the over-generalisation without any data backing me up again). But there's a twist, and here's my theory: Germans are more rule-abiding, but they also have more sensible rules.

France is by no means short of rules. You get them everywhere and by the hundreds and loads of them are ridiculous (in my humble opinion). So no wonder French people don't stick to rules: they couldn't budge a meter without breaking one. So hey, why not break a couple more while you're at it.

I think a typical French procedure is something like this: there's millions of rules, you stick to those you can care to do so, then someone 'in charge' will come complaining, you start a discussion and bargain out some understanding. When I organised a birthday party for someone from the student's home I had to sign a piece of paper that there wouldn't be any alcohol at all, I wouldn't invite more than 15 people, there'd be no noise and the room would be handed over spick and span by 23.00 tops. Quite impossible to both do a birthday party and stick to those rules, but I was assured by some people who do parties more often that you just have to have a quick word with the security guy and it would be OK... (and I didn't invite more then 15 people, they just came).
Rules are everywhere. There's traffic lights and crossings I wouldn't even notice without the lights. You're supposed to stop at zebra crossings if someone wants to cross, but there's one every 25m. My student card has some space just for general rules (in Karlsruhe the space is rented out for advertising). You automatically ignore them because there just not enough time to read them all. I am not allowed to attach an electric hotplate in my room, but a microwave oven is fine. A fridge is not. If you want cars to drive 40km/h because the road is dangerous there's a sign limiting to 10km/h.

So far my unqualified observations. There's lots of stuff I'd like to know, e.g. if the law system is something like that (see the quote), and if they started off with lots of laws and started ignoring them or if the many rules were introduced to compensate for the ignoring.

The title is (ironically) a quote by Charles de Montesquieu, a Frenchman (you've probably heard of him, he's the one who came up with the division of the administrative powers executive/legislative/judicative). Quite a loose translation, the German translation is "Wenn es nicht notwendig ist, ein Gesetz zu machen, dann ist es notwendig, kein Gesetz zu machen." His favourite author, Tacitus, also had his opinion on this subject: "The most rotten countries have the most laws." And here's the catch: this country is far too nice to be called rotten. At least French people don't blindly jump of bridges.

The title's really just to get some attention. I really like France in general and Marseille in particular. However, there are - of course - some things that might theoretically drive a german student nuts. Just talking in theory, though

I've compiled a small list:

• French bureaucracy is just incredible and makes me feel like doing some stuff at the Stadtverwaltung Germersheim to relax. A lot of you might know the film Asterix erobert Rom (sorry, only know the german title) where Asterix has to get form A39. Just to remind you: Asterix is originally french, meaning the author didn't have to exaggerate much. The difference is that in the Asterix movie, everything was in the same building, here you have to dash across town and others even have to go to Aix-En-Provence for some of their paperwork. I'm not mentioning any of the trouble the non-EU-students have to go through.


• French driving is just generally a minimisation of used space on streets. Here, leaving more than 10cm between cars is considered a waste. For the first time in my life I was actually stuck in a traffic jam - with my bike! I couldn't move for at least 5 minutes. Same goes for parking (that's what the pavements are there for). A famous quote about french driving goes something like this: 'Traffic in France is just a matter of vocabulary', although I believe it's a lot worse in Paris than here (so I've been told).


• Standing at the till in supermarkets. All of a sudden, the same person who was wildly honking his horn at everyone in the same district will calmly load his stuff into plastic bags, chat with the person at the till, think a couple of minutes about how he's going to pay, decide to use Carte Bleu if he's in a hurry or Cheques if the next person in the queue is, fill out the check slowly and double check it was right (although the tills have printers for checks), say goodbye to everyone and then pack the rest of his stuff.


• The way there's always loads of food and half of it get's chucked away. Would anyone enlighten me if it's good manners to leave food on your plate or just habit?


• AZERTY keyboards


• The little liberty École-Students have. I'll write an entry about that sometime later.


• The fact that as soon as someone knows I'm german, he or she'll start quoting random phrases they remeber from their german classes ('Guten Tag! Gesundheit! Ich liebe Schokolade! Jawohl Herr General! Heute hat es geregnet!' - never omitting the exlamation marks'). Don't mix this up with french people who just want to have a chat in German to brush it up - I like that, especially as those kind of people are more likely to correct me when I'm doing mistakes.


• The bread. It goes stale after 12hrs and doesn't fill you up in the first place.

I'm not doing a list of stuff I like, though - it would be too much. Southern France is great!