A French Rant

I left my laptop in Amsterdam to lighten my load and have been computerless, on the move and without the money to sit down and write a decent email. Now I´m in Spain speaking Spanish for the past week, the week before in an english school teaching some strange version of the language and now I´m struggling to type. I will leave my Spanish piece until they kick me out of this country or I end up back in Bangladesh, this little rant is about France where I spent about three weeks. I am glad I finally visited the most touristed country in the world to dispel some of my earlier preconceptions about this place. If France receives an un-necessarily harsh verdict it is in part due to been after the gangadome of Holland and before fiestaville Spain which is turning into one of the best places I have ever visited. From Amsterdam to Paris, from toxic ganja to none. With the benefit of a few weeks away I will try not to be too condemning of a city that was not for me. Walking around a city on my own, full of couples living a preconceived collective fantasy, tick box tourism in a country that I found intimidating means that you should prepare yourself for a pick axe attack. The city reminded me of St. Petersburg, when they built St. Petersburg they were probably thinking of Paris, a grand cry of power to make me shrink to a pin and slide through the earth back home to the other side of the world. A grand past, a decaying old empire feel, one enormous museum with people still in it, the only thing new were the cars, no admission price and no service, the only people who I could muster a conversation with were Arabs or Sudanese. A place so full of tourists is truly a waste of time, the only point of visiting this city is to say you have been there, so lets move on. I organised a lift online to Nice in the south, the driver, friendly enough, discovered he had no wallet an hour into the journey and we were off to the police station where he filled in a few forms. He asked if I could pay for the petrol and the tolls, he would repay me in Nice, 120 Euro´s gone to some cunt with an expensive car and mobile phone. This country had a truly disastrous start, at this point France had taken a clear lead in the all time most shithouse country stakes. All my preconceptions about the French were coming true, travelling is about reinforcing prejudcies, not wrecking them, Nice was full of people pretending to be beautiful, Monaco a sweltering lump of concrete that deservs an earthquake and no one in this whole fucking country wanted to talk to me. Luckily at the suggestion at Natascha and Paul, friends who I stayed with in Holland they suggested I try out this WWOOFing business. Willing Workers On Organic Farms, this name is just about stupid enough to be invented by an Australian, from computers, comatosed on a couch with a bit of golf to farm laborer. To the hills behind Nice, some truly beautiful countryside and a farm full of olives, some grapes and a handfull of onions run by a retired teacher Claude and her 80+ year old mother to melt away my earlier disasters and preconceptions. Staying in a 350 year old farm house looking up to a village painted on a hill, home made wine and some excellent conversation made for a U turn in the space of thirty minutes. There is a satisfaction to farm work that I never imagined, sweating and cursing through the day, burning under the sun to turn around at the end of the day to a picture of progress. Covered in flies, standing on a terraced hill with the smell of goat shit looking down to a quilt of small farms where contiguous is an anethma I realised that this was pretty cool. Claude had a 12 foot boat that we floated around the coast of Nice in, a day to have the boat blessed by some ancient and now unrevered ceramic Saint. A view of Nice from a distance without binoculars to hide the people and turn it into pastel town, a colour scheme from a place with too much sun. Moments that dispel my doubts about why I´m travelling that I hope will be etched into multiple neurons for long term preservation. Around this point I stopped sweating, let my guard down to realise the French are complete fuckups like everyone else. They have more front than hip hop and a vein of stupidity as wide as the universe and deeper than the time of those who believe in an entropy death. Claude had only travelled in "her civilisation", around the northern meditterainian. My feeling of inferiority disappeared as I saw them sit down to the same mindnumbing television and displays of petiness on a truly grand scale. The food can´t compete with my Mum´s although I´m converted to cheese and bread, wine at lunch and an inevitable siesta. Perceptions of refinment gave way as an 80+ year old grandmother taught me how to cuss in French, although there is a formality in peoples behaviour, in the serving of food, greetings and farewells that I would like to emulate. The reverence for the past is more than stiffling, I wouldn´t like to be young in this country, a process of fossilisation is under way but who I am to criticise if they want to leave in a museum. Claude can´t stand the way the language is disintegrating, "a language so unambiguous and gramitcally correct that there is no point for intepretation and as such was the language of international treaties", her nephew and nieces interspersion of English and Spanish were not welcome. To the "social model", this has soem really cool points, the local council is controlled by communists who a rebuying the land and renting it at low cost to young families to keep them on the land, the patchwork of farms that leaves everyone as individuals but living close by and retirement at 55. A controlled society with the Appellation system that defines what you can grow and how much, although this was not the case around Nice. Wine and cheese are proscribed by the area, building codes are strict, although some Dutch people built a mini-medieval castle the Claude decried. Nazi´s are banned, and the Hijab, if worn, is done quite fashionably and accompanied by bum hugging pants. A country of intergrationism not multiculturalism, if you move to France you know the deal, you assimilate and become French, this is a country of traditions, it is built on secularism and if you do not buy that then you should not come. It is collective liberty not individual, the fight to drive the Church from society will not be lost by its reintroduction via another religion. The EU consititution was voted down because the whole project has gone astray, the social victories of the last hundred years are been usurped by Brussels and capitalism as it becomes increasing arrogant after the fall of the Soviet Union. Underhanded tactics to force the privitisation of French electricity, gas and water and a duplicitous sell that it is a process to avoid war. I find it interesting what different socieites choose to restrict and permit, the historical compromises and schims that lead to civil wars and the enforcment of the victors ideals. This is all very clear cut in France, although it is a truly contradictory country, slightly myopic yet universal in its perception of humanity at the same time. Both exceptionnaly nationalistic and international at the same time, a very mixed up place. Claude bemoans the lack of challenging new French writers and movies who only produce unrealistic fairytales, for her the drive of new hard hitting literature and movies comes from America. For me this is the result of constantly lookign to the past, so much is invested in preservation that it is impossible for anything new to develop. The engine of the new is fusion and reinterpretation, the excessive emphasis on tradition stiffles creativity. My attempts at learning French were a disaster and I think Claude was slightly disappointed with my efforts. Although in my broader understanding of the evolution of English I am thinking that French is the closest language to English, the amount of words that English has borrowed and simply pronounces differently is staggering, forget my earlier comments on Dutch, the Germanic is the ancient root, half the words with more than four letters come from French. If I could produce a French accent I would by 75% on the way to speaking the language. I can understand why my initial efforts at engagement with the French were a failure, the country is overrun with tourists. Claude and her family were extremely open and friendly, I think this was for more than the free labor, those I were introduced to were friendly. Like many places it is having an in to avoid surface travel. On the surface this country is truly brutal, in the bus terminal I needed to do a piss, the toilets requried coins which I did not have, none of the ticket counters would give me change, the tourist information could not either, nor give me any suggestions to where I coudl get change, I walked out of the bus terminal onto the main street, turned aroudn and pissed on the building. I´m on a borrowed computer and have run out of time, I had many an interesting conversation with Claude and some new inspiration for writing from an American WWOOFer Brian also staying on the farm. I will finish with the life of cheese. It all started in a baby cows stomach back in antiquity when prehistoric man was using it as a bag to carry round some milk and discovered, not at a moecular level, that the enzymes in the baby cows stomach turn milk to cheese. When Claude dropped me off at the bus station she left me with a question, why am I travelling, all the world is the same with slightly different currents, if I have not found it by now then what I am looking for, why do I keep on travelling? I remember when I first started leaving Australia I was on a mission to understand humanity so that I might be in a better position to change the world. I had completely forgotten about this mission and am not a metric nor imperial unit closer to understanding my fellow homo-sapiens. It has only led to more confusion as the complexity of the world destroys the map before me, still I believe in utopia, just no closer on a way to get there. To her question, I don´t want adventures to stop, everything must be more exciting than the last, I am not prepared to start the long haul to retirement in a permanent state of remebering the time. Click for photos of France

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