Flophouse Favorites#1bis - Ready for the New Year

I stopped by the salon this afternoon and asked Sabine if she could show me how to put my hair up in a "chignon" so I could be elegant for tonight's festivities.

Sabine sat me down, served me an espresso and went to work.

The result was, well, quite amazing.

Happy New Year everyone!

Victoria

Choosing a place

My eldest Frenchling is in her last year of high school here in France. She has passed the first part of her baccalaureate and will pass her final exams at the end of this school year.
For the next step, she is much better equipped then I was at her age. When I was 17 I spoke one language and had never been outside of my home country. My daughter has lived in three countries, is bi-lingual and has two passports. France or the United States are within easy reach. In addition she has family and friends in both countries that will help whatever she chooses to do.

But that is indeed the conundrum because this time around she will have to choose for herself.

Will she stay in France? Move to the United States? Or will she find a Third Place?

A suivre….

Flophouse Favorite #1 - L'Or de Saba

I am often solicited for advice about Paris - nice places to eat, good shops, salons and so forth - that are a bit off the beaten path.  These are places that were recommended to me by friends, colleagues and vendors (thank you, IBM...) or in a few rare cases I discovered them myself when I was tootling around the city.  These are places I like enough to go back to on a regular basis.

L'Or de Saba (39 rue Taitbout, 75009 Paris)

Since 1989 I have been looking for a really good hair salon in Paris.  My first haircut in France (I was living in Courbevoie at the time) was a complete disaster.  I obviously misunderstood the customer/service relationship.  To make a long story short, I asked for a short hair cut and the hairdresser violently disagreed.  "I refuse to make a woman look like a boy," she said.  She won, I lost, and it's been the same depressing story with every salon I have been to since.

Until I found the L'Or de Saba.  This is a very small salon near the Galeries Lafayette run by two charming ladies, Laure and Sabine. The service is excellent.  Sabine has a sense of adventure - she will try just about anything you have in mind because, as she says, "It's just hair and if you don't like the way it turns out, then we'll do something else".  To date she has never had to resort to a plan b.  Everything she has done to my hair has turned out spectacularly well.  Laure gives amazing facials and has managed to make my skin look as good as that of the Parisien women I work with.

So, if you just happen to be shopping in the 9th arrondissement near the "grands magasins" and you have a couple of hours free, stop by and see if they have an opening.

Always a Resident. Never a Citizen

This subject comes up every time I have to renew my French residency permit. I just received my third 10 year Carte de resident which means I am entering my third decade of association with this strange tribe. Inevitably I am asked (at the prefecture, at work and at home) why I don't just apply for citizenship. After all, they say, it would save me a lot of paperwork. To which I reply, "Let me see if I understand the reasoning here? You are suggesting that I should become a French citizen so I don't have to deal with your bureaucracy once every 10 years?" And we all have a good laugh.

Occasionally the conversation takes a negative turn. “Perhaps it is not interesting to be a French citizen?” And then I must summon all my powers of diplomacy to soothe hurt feelings and ruffled fur.

Because it’s not rejection – I love France. If I didn’t have the deepest respect and love for this country and its culture I would have never have raised my children here.

But I love being an American citizen. I am often asked if I suffer here because of anti-Americanism. Not really. I realized long ago that the French preoccupation with the U.S. is actually quite a compliment. There is an entire industry, armies of intellectuals, which study and critique the U.S. When people here meet me for the first time they are never neutral about me or my country. Love it or hate it, they are positively obsessed by it. Which I personally find rather fascinating and it makes for great if sometimes heated conversations every single day.

And regardless of the country I live in, I am passionately attached to my country of origin. Nearly 20 years of wandering has not changed one whit my deep and abiding love for the US of A. As an American living in France, I can revel in my status as Exotic Beast and enjoy a high level of intellectual stimulation. If you balance those two things against the rather tepid arguments from my French friends and family about the benefits of becoming a French citizen, the status quo wins hands down. I am simply having too good a time and enjoying the show way too much to want to trade in my residency papers for a passport.

The Multi-cultural Omnivore (or why Pollan is wrong)

One summer in the U.S. my youngest daughter was taken to the petting area at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. The petting area is a place at the zoo where small children can touch and hold farm animals - a real treat for city children who may have never seen, much less touched, a chicken, a goat or a rabbit.

According to my daughter when she entered the pen she was greeted by a zoo volunteer who leaned over and asked her, “ So, do you like rabbits, little girl?”

To which my daughter replied, “Yes, my mother serves them with mustard.”

Moral of the story is something you pet in Seattle is something you put in the pot in Paris.

So how does a bi-cultural family (one with at least two food traditions), resolve what Michael Pollan calls The Omnivore’s Dilemma? Or to put it another way, with so many delicious possibilities, how to choose what to eat?

This may be heresy to Mr. Pollan but I honestly think that you can do better by combining traditions.

Standard French food is lovely but home cooked American food from a generation or so back is also quite good. Thinking about my great-grandmother’s buttermilk pancakes, my mother’s baking powder biscuits and my step-father’s fried chicken makes my mouth water.

So what might a Franco-American meal look like? Well, as an example, how about what we had for dinner on Sunday night?

Whole rabbit cut up, slathered with dijon mustard, wrapped in foil with a bay leaf and cooked in the oven for about an hour
Whole wheat buttermilk biscuits with butter and honey from the market
Big green salad with homemade vinaigrette
And because it was Sunday (chocolate night at the Franco-American flophouse) a small chocolate cake from a local bakery.

There now, that wasn’t all that hard, was it?

Could we be any more deluded?

Diverse comments on things I am hearing in the U.S. and French press and in the various EU blogs I frequent about the world financial crisis.

Idiot Idea #1, WE are not that badly impacted. The problem is out THERE somewhere.

This I have been hearing for months from the French press/government and the French public continues to believe it. The message (and the hope) was powerful enough that I actually left my investments where they were. I won’t disclose how much I lost but I can say that in retrospect that was a pretty stupid move. I should have remembered the old line, “Promises engage only those who believe them.”

Idiot Idea #2 WE will pull out of the crisis the fastest.

What I hear is that many people believe that the U.S. will recover more quickly. Maybe. Hard to say and the people who are saying it are generally so ignorant or have such a lousy track record for predictions that I sure as heck wouldn’t bet my money (what is left anyway) on it. The day I truly believe it I may buy a ticket home but we are not there yet.

May I respectfully suggest that no one, not the national governments, not the EU, nor the economists have a clue as to which countries will suffer most (or least) and which countries will recover fastest. What seems likely is that every country will suffer in its own unique way for the time it takes until recovery. In the interim, everyone will find a reason to envy and loathe his neighbors.

It all makes me personally very tired.

Now we can continue to waste our time blaming each other and explaining to the rest of the world (as if anyone was listening or cared) why we are so SPECIAL and DIFFERENT.

Or we can quit arguing about who is is the tallest midget in the room.

Because, let’s face it, sports fans, we are all in a world of hurt right now.

How to raise Frenchlings

The Franco-American Flophouse is a bi-lingual, bi-cultural family (even the cats understand English, French and Frenglish.) Contrary to what some people think it was not obvious when we had children that we would succeed in making it so. It takes more than one foreign parent to create a truly bi-cultural family in which everyone is “at home” wherever you decide to live. Success depends on your persistence and on your awareness of the forces that are aligned against you (schools, family members, the dominant culture). Here are four strategies that we have used that we think were particularly effective:

Language Equality - my husband and I use the One Parent, One Language method (OPOL). He speaks French to the Frenchlings and I speak English. This is the foundation but it is far from sufficient. Over the years we have come up with other strategies that we have added to OPOL:
*My husband and I are bi-lingual and we demonstrate daily to the children that we are competent in both languages. Since we live in France where the dominant language is French my husband and I reinforce English by speaking it to each other at home.
*French and English books and movies are always read/shown in the original language (no cheating and turning on the French soundtrack to Harry Potter :-)
*Recognize that language is a very emotional topic in many countries and that the larger society (in particular the public schools) has interests that are not necessarily compatible with your multi-lingual, multi-cultural goals. This has been my experience in both the US and France (in the latter I was scolded by the teachers when my children were young for speaking English at home). My advice is to not get into it with the schools or argue about it with family or friends. Just smile, thank them for their advice and then go home and do what you think is right.

Staying Connected
Language is only half the battle, culture is just as important. Frequent visits to the Other Country are indispensable. Our Frenchlings spend part of their vacation in France (Brittany) and part in North America (Canada and the U.S.) where they stay with grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends. This not only enriching from a cultural standpoint but it keeps the extended family firmly in the present.

Choosing a Third Place
Three years ago we packed up and moved to Tokyo, Japan for two years. It was the first time we lived as a family in a place where none of us were citizens and none of us spoke or read the language. The home court advantage was completely erased. For the first time we could see the subtle advantages that my French husband has when we live in France or I had when we lived in the U.S. It also gave us a completely different perspective on European/North American cultures which, seen through the eyes of our Asian friends and co-workers, are not so different...

The Grass is NOT Greener
The grass is not greener on the other side of the Atlantic. We do not live in France because it is a nicer place than North America and we do not spend our days filled with regret that we are not living in the U.S. This is what we believe and what we teach our children: there is no “better” place, there are only different places with different charms and challenges.