French Laundry

There’s a divide between France and the U.S., and it has to do with how people take care of their clothes.

Let’s start with washing. Front-load washers have gained popularity in the U.S., but they have long been typical in Europe. They are easier on your clothes than top-load agitators, which really tear them up. However, washing times are longer. Mine has a 15-minute freshen-up cycle, but the shortest real wash cycle takes over an hour and the longest is three hours. That’s in part because the machines heat the water themselves, rather than take it from a hot-water heater.

The models sold here are getting bigger, but they are still a lot smaller than in the U.S. Our old washer held a maximum of four kilos–just under nine pounds. Our new one has a maximum capacity of twice that. According to Consumer Reports, capacities in the U.S. are as high as 28 pounds. (French vocabulary lesson: a laundry room is une buanderie, a laundromat is une laverie and the old-fashioned outdoor laundries are lavoirs. Dry cleaning is nettoyage à sec, and the place that does it is un pressing or une teinturerie.)

Another difference is drying. Plenty of people don’t even have electric dryers. I put towels in the dryer to keep them soft and fluffy but try to hang everything else outside–again, it’s better for your clothes, better for the environment and it’s free. Sheets definitely go outside. It makes them smell so good!

Related to that: walking around in the mornings, you see windows open, even in the dead of winter, and duvets hanging over the window sills to air out for at least 15 minutes. Bedrooms tend to be minimally heated (and back in the day weren’t heated at all), and we don’t have bitter temperatures, so it isn’t very wasteful.

A lot going on here: the bed linens getting aired in the open windows in winter–you can see the photo was taken at Christmas time. The drying rack is set on the sidewalk to get the job done faster. Carcassonne is still the kind of small city where you can leave your stuff outside safely.

One reason my friends cite for avoiding dryers, besides making clothes last longer, is the cost of electricity. Looking at my bill, we pay between 6.38 centimes and 10.43 centimes (about 7 cents to 11 cents) per kWh before tax (which is 20%). The tariff varies by time of day, with heures creuses, or off-peak, discounted. I set the timers on the washing machine and dishwasher to run during off peak. Surprisingly, residential rates in the U.S. are higher–an average of 12.90 cents per kWh.

One reason many Americans I know do use dryers: to avoid ironing. Some don’t even own an iron or ironing board. When we briefly lived in the U.S., the Carnivore was delighted to discover a setting on our apartment’s dryer called “fluff,” which he adorably pronounced “floof” the first time. He was so excited about how things came out with only minor wrinkles.

By contrast, Europeans tend to be not just wrinkle-free but to have knife-edge creases. Even jeans get ironed. The Carnivore is very talented with a steam iron (see the ads below). Personally, I hate to iron but have been doing a lot of it lately, pressing the sheets for our rental apartments. We want them to be impeccable.

While I iron my own clothes, I don’t do my kid’s. Some of the local mothers would iron their children’s clothes even for toddlers–who wear things for about two minutes before getting dirty. An extremely scientific survey of my gym class showed most spend two to three hours a week ironing.

Ironing isn’t limited to France. I remember being impressed by the teen boys in Rome, perched on their Vespas, wearing immaculate white shirts with crisply creased sleeves. Nothing slovenly about them.

When I lived in Brussels, my apartment faced a lovely row of hidden gardens, “Rear Window” style. In a window across the way, a woman (housekeeper, I think), would iron for hours, including the tiniest flouncy baby dresses. And sheets and sheets and sheets.

Another time, I was at the big department store El Corte Inglès in Barcelona. The household appliance department was animated by many demonstrations. There was a woman carving candles. All kinds of shoppers, including families, watched her work. Some of the candles sported the typical curls, while others represented couples in a sexual act. This was something I never saw in the U.S.

And there was a guy ironing. This was no simple steam iron but what the French call a centre de repassage–an ironing center. A big water tank was fixed to the base of the ironing board “so you can iron all day!” my friend marveled. A dozen people–men and women–watched the demo intently.

This baby goes for a cool €700.

Do you hang laundry outside? Do you iron? Do you pamper your clothing?

 

Spring and School in France

As part of the U.S. gets hit by snowstorms and Australians start thinking about winter, here’s a ray of hope: some pretty spring pictures. Since there isn’t much to say about them beyond their captions, today you get completely random pictures while I write about a topic for which I don’t have photos: the quirks (at least in my eyes) of French elementary school.

In France, universities appeared before primary schools: The University of Paris opened in 1160 and the one of the world’s first medical schools opened in 1181 down the road from us in Montpellier. It wasn’t until 1698 that Louis XIV ordered French children to attend school until they were 14.

Already getting green

I won’t write about secondary education until I have the value of hindsight. But for the lower grades here are things that blew my mind.

Taking this photo, I sensed somebody behind me and turned around to see:

They start young–two years old, as long as they are potty trained (propre–clean). It’s preschool, with an emphasis on learning to be civilized, and it’s free. And it’s all day. I thought, how dreadful, but my kid could not wait to get in there, and loved being there all day. As one mother told me, “They get to do all the messy things you don’t want them doing at home” like painting and playing with clay.

The government tries to have a preschool and primary school in each village, close to home. For small villages, that means combined classes. In our village, each classroom held two grades. In tiny villages, a single teacher might hold down the fort with kids ages two to 11, like Laura Ingalls Wilder.

In our village, about half the kids go home for lunch, and the lunch break is two hours long. That means kids get out of school around 5 p.m., which seems so late. But it’s good for working parents; their kids can eat at the cafeteria. Before and after class, there is also government-subsidized and -organized daycare, often in the school building or an adjacent one (no transportation issues). Tariffs for the parents’ share are based on hours spent in daycare, family income and number of kids, and range from €5 to €13 a day around here.

They learn more than manners at the maternelle, or preschool. Our kid’s teacher in grand section (five-year-olds, like kindergarten), or GS, had the kids make a “passport” and they spent the year filling it in with different countries: they learned about counting and colors and the alphabet via a trip around the world. They were read stories from different countries, cooked and tasted foreign foods, sang songs from other countries, built huts…it was wonderful. One day when we were in Carcassonne, our kid, still in GS, spied a black man and got all excited. “Do you think he’s from Africa? Which country? There’s Cameroon. And Congo. And Senegal. And Côte d’Ivoire. And a lot of others. I wonder whether he likes winter here. And the food….” On and on it went. Not fear of “the other” but interest, curiosity and excitement. (Our little village isn’t exactly diverse.)

Snowy white blossoms

The grades are not 1, 2, 3, etc. There are, in typical French fashion, a bunch of acronyms instead: The two-year-olds are in TPS for très petite section (very small section), followed by PS, or petite section, then MS, or moyenne section (medium section), and GS. How wonderful to be grand–big–when you are just five years old.

It gets more confusing as you climb through the grades. First grade is CP, for cours préparatoire. This is where they learn to read. Second and third grades are CE1 and CE2, for cours élémentaire 1 and 2, the idea being that the second round is a revision and deepening of the first. Fourth and fifth grades are CM1 and CM2, for cours moyen 1 and 2.  Then they go off to middle school, called collège, where sixth grade is sixième–6th—but seventh grade is cinquième–5th–and so on through lycée, or high school. All these mental gymnastics now can’t help but ward off dementia in my old age.

Here’s what really shocked me: already in maternelle, they went on overnight–TWO straight nights–field trips. The first one was to the beach (I thought: are the teachers out of their minds? A pack of preschoolers by open water??? Not to mention keeping them slathered with sun block and hats on). The next year they went sledding in the mountains.

In CP and a few other years, they went cross-country skiing, also in the Pyrénées. (This sounds illogical, but there is no snow here unless you go up in altitude; around Carcassonne, this winter’s snow arrived between 7 and 8 a.m. two Saturdays ago; by 8:30 it had melted.)

A vineyard enveloped not in snow but weeds. Pretty anyway!

In CE1 or CE2, I forget now, they went rock climbing, with ropes and helmets and everything. In CM1 or CM2, they went spelunking, not just to the pretty cave that has nice paths for tourist visits but also to caves that are wild and unlit (everybody had a helmet with a lamp), where a false step in a dark corner could send one plummeting in a gaping hole to the middle of the Earth. And no cell phone service.

All I can say is that when I was in elementary school, one year we went to the natural history museum and another we went to a pasta factory. There was none of this adventure stuff, and no overnights.

Pruning the grape vines. They stopped and blew me kisses when I stopped taking photos.

As PTA member/room mother, I got to accompany many of my kid’s class outings. The last night would usually involve a boum–a loud dance party–and the kids would get to stay up late. By design!

On the cross-country ski trip, we stayed in a dormitory, girls on one floor, boys on the other. Dinner was in a big cafeteria. I figured we parents would have to keep an eye on things. Far from it! The kids were at their own tables, and the cafeteria ladies set out big dishes at each table; the kids were expected to serve each other–no help from the cafeteria ladies nor the parents. This should not have been so surprising; it’s how the school cafeteria operates. The parents, meanwhile, were at a separate table on the far side of the room (not in peace because two classes of kids–about 50 in all–create a deafening noise even when well-behaved), furnished with carafes of wine. The meal, just like at school or at any restaurant, had a starter, main course, cheese, dessert, and for the adults, coffee–I forgot the exact menu, because it’s been years.

Can you make out the snow-covered Pyrénées?

The same field as above (different angle), a few days later, already growing.

Unforgettable, though, was when one of the dads took a sip of the wine, grimaced, and left. He returned with a jerry can of his own wine; he’s a winegrower and never leaves home without a supply of reliably good stuff, I guess. I could not imagine this scenario playing out in the U.S., not even in Napa Valley.

Is it just that the school I attended was bare bones and that such activities were wild and crazy back in the ’60s and ’70s? Do all schools have field trips like this nowadays? I suspect that the French, and perhaps other Europeans, are far more laissez-faire about letting their kids experiment with independence. They don’t do helicopter parenting; it’s more like autopilot, taking control only when there’s a crisis. It seems to work OK.

 

 

 

Written in Stone

After living here for so long, I forget which things I found different about France. Maybe it’s because I’ve been a francophile since my first Madeline book.

The culture shock has been urban vs. rural rather than Anglo-Saxon vs. French. We arrived from New York City to a village of 700 next to Carcassonne, which itself is no metropolis at 45,000 (not counting the 2 million tourists each year).

I found it hard to adjust to strict hours for everything After living in the city that never sleeps. The stores open at 10, and even the supermarkets don’t open until 8:30 and close at 8 p.m. Smaller shops close between noon and 2 p.m. Many people still go home for lunch. Everything is closed on Sunday. Run out of milk on Saturday night and you’re out of luck until Monday morning. In bigger cities, there are more options.

At the same time, people are clearly lucky to have an incredible level of stability in their lives, thanks to this inflexible schedule. Work hours are written in stone, often 9 or 10 a.m. until noon and 2 p.m. until 6 or 7 p.m., for a 35-hour workweek. No scheduling software that dictates at the last minute that you’ll work late tonight and early tomorrow. Dinner time is dinner time. Nothing is open, hardly anybody works late. They go home to their families.

Sundays are dedicated to a big, multigenerational family meal. There might be outings, to a vide grenier (a kind of mass garage sale) or biking or hiking and picking mushrooms or wild asparagus in the woods or visiting one of the many village festivals.

You can tell the value system by what professions DO work on Sundays: bakers, florists (so you can take a bouquet when you go to the in-laws’ house for Sunday dinner), restaurants. Basically it’s about eating. Everything else can wait. And what is eating but an occasion to share a pleasure with friends and family?

I would like to say all this shows the French aren’t into mindless consumerism, but they have succumbed as much as anybody else. There are solderies selling the same cheap, cheaply made junk you find in the aisles of big-box stores elsewhere. The only difference is that homes here are smaller than in the U.S., which generally puts a cap on how much stuff can fit.

While I consider myself a city person, I have to admit there are some lovely qualities about French village life. There’s a softness to the people here. A niceness. Yes, I said it: French people are nice. Also a slowness, because why stress? There’s plenty of time. It’s definitely life in the slow lane.

Maybe I settled easily into my adopted country because its values appeal to me. Family first. Good public schools. Good health care for everybody. Clean environment. The system works pretty well and things are in pretty good shape. Competence and professionalism are rampant. When frustrations arise, they usually stem not from ineptness on the part of a bureaucrat or shopkeeper or customer service representative but from that person’s unbudging adherence to some set of rules that might make sense some or even most of the time but that allow for no exceptions. This becomes less surprising when you look at how French verbs are conjugated: there are general rules, and then not so much exceptions but ever-more-specific subsets of rules. No one-offs. The rules are written in stone.

RF = République Française

This Gallic certitude, this ability–even penchant–to say non, is inextricable from the French savoir vivre, knowing how to live well. Some rules of French life:

1. Everything should be made as beautiful as possible. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but aesthetics count, whether it’s how you dress or how you serve dinner or turning down the lights in the evening and lighting a candle for ambience.
2. Take your time. The French won’t be rushed (maybe behind the wheel, but that’s a different story). Stop for a drink at a café with friends. Linger at dinner. Do your beauty routine.
3. Smell the roses, literally. Use your senses to pull pleasure from every opportunity. The French are particularly strong in the taste department, but not limited to that.

Of course these things can be done anywhere. If you want to feel French this weekend, then put together a good meal of honest food–it doesn’t have to be fancy but it shouldn’t be heavily processed–and share it with some people you care about. Set a pretty table. Take your time to enjoy it all. Voilà!

 

 

 

Carcassonne Curiosities

This is likely to be a recurring theme, because I constantly spy odd little details that make me smile. Like the “51” pastis-flavored macarons from Pâtisserie Greg, who’s at the corner of the market near the Halles on Saturdays.

I can walk past something hundreds of times, and then one day it jumps out at me: this wouldn’t be found in America. Sometimes it wouldn’t be found in Paris, even. Quirks, quoi.

Like the raw milk fountain on Saturdays. I love that it’s BYOB. Raw milk is unpasteurized, FYI. Night and day as far as taste. Of course, pasteurization (invented in France!) cut deaths from germs that had contaminated milk. But that was in the 1800s, before refrigeration and vaccines were a thing. Healthy people can drink raw milk without fear.

At le (B): “Here everything is fresh and homemade and when there’s no more…we close.”

Le (B) sandwich shop boasts bagels; it’s new–and there’s another new bagel place on the same street a couple of blocks away. Carcassonne has discovered bagels! While it might be a little oasis of NYC in the south of France, some details are resolutely French. Like closing early when you’ve run out of fresh, homemade goods.

“Closed Mondays. Nothing left for today. Reopening tomorrow (Sunday the 9th) from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thank you.”

Sometimes walking down the street, I nearly trip over these, because the sidewalk is barely two feet wide, and some places just a foot across, and I think, this would never happen in the U.S.:

To keep vehicles (first horse-drawn carts, then cars) from scraping the wall. The corner is pretty tight.

And actually, when I start to look down, I realize how incredible the foundations are. Huge stones, little fillers. Yikes.

Clearly christened by more than a few dogs

And then, there’s Place de Lattre de Tassigny, named after a World War I commander, just around the corner from our apartments. It used to be a parking lot, and now it’s an outdoor living room. I love it.

Which quirks do you find endearing in your home? In France?

Urgences

We are a little too well-acquainted with the emergency rooms. The most recent visit comes after much time spent in U.S. hospitals last year (as visitor). The differences are striking.

U.S.: imposing marble lobby, with a volunteer playing a grand piano. Food court. Gourmet coffee stand emitting good smells. Carpeted halls. Rooms that look a bit like hotels if not for the high-tech control panels and machinery. Heated blankets. A sofa in the room that turns into a kind of bed for a family member keeping watch. Another hospital went for an earthy, natural décor, with lots of warm wood, and tiles and wallpaper that had grass or leaf designs. Very zen.

France: sun-filled linoleum lobby. Linoleum, in fact, is the most prevalent material. Wall-to-wall carpet is considered a germ trap in Europe. Plastic seats–no upholstery. No attempt at décor (white walls with a green accent wall, pale gray floors) except in the pediatric wing, which had animal decals on yellow walls. The emergency room at one private hospital did, however, have as decoration framed x-rays of unusual objects, which provided a distraction. It also had wood paneling. In the patient’s room: a small table, a rigid plastic chair, a very ugly lump of an armless chair that unfolded into a surprisingly comfortable bed for a family member keeping watch. A sheet but no blanket (certainly not heated) nor pillow for said family member. No food court, and the lobby vending machines are locked up after hours (i.e., after 6 p.m.).

Carcassonne’s new 496-bed hospital opened in the summer of 2014.

So far, it sounds like the U.S. is better, BUT marble lobbies don’t make a person well. And they might make one sick when the bill arrives.

On the other hand, the bill for an x-ray of a possibly (but thank goodness not) broken shoulder? Zero.

And the bill for an overnight after our kid passed out on a school outing (why breakfast shouldn’t be skipped…lesson learned)? Minors who lose consciousness are required to be kept for 24 hours of observation. Zero.

And the latest–meningitis, which turned out to be the viral kind, not the deadly bacterial kind? Until the blood test confirmed that, our kid was treated with a speed that was amazing. And kept overnight for observation. Again zero.

This isn’t to say that we don’t pay for health care. There are mandatory social charges in the form of a 6.5% tax on income of self-employed workers; salaried workers pay 0.75% and their employers 12.8% of their wages, for a total of 13.55%.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average cost of health insurance benefits to employers was 7.6% of total compensation, but that ranged from 12.6% for union workers to 6.9% for nonunion workers. On average, employers of higher-paid workers cover a bigger share; lower-paid workers get less.

It’s hard to get an average percentage for the employee contribution in the U.S. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that average annual family coverage premium is $17,545, with employees paying $4,955 of it. And the average deductible for a single (they didn’t give family figures) is $1,077.

There are no deductibles in France.

There are co-pays, however. The full price of a doctor’s visit in France is €23, of which the government reimburses 2/3, or about €15. I suspect it’s set up that way–patients have to fork over the €23 and wait for reimbursement–to set the bar just a little higher for whether one really needs to see the doctor. You can buy supplemental insurance to cover the co-pays.

In the U.S., the average copayment is $24 for primary care and $37 for specialty care, for in-network providers, according to the Kaiser report.

In France, all providers are in-network. You get to pick your doctor, from any of the doctors in France, not from a list provided by your insurer. And no surprises coming out of anesthesia to discover a bill bigger than your annual salary because most of the doctors who touched you were out of network. Obamacare has put a cap on out-of-pocket expenses (the sky used to be the limit): $6,850 for an individual and $13,700 for a family. However, medical bills are still causing personal bankruptcies in the U.S.

Note the covered sidewalk. The old hospital had one as well. A brilliant idea, in rain or sun.

Two people I know in France have hereditary kidney diseases. One just got a transplant; the other has been hospitalized a lot but isn’t yet at the transplant stage. One thing they don’t worry about is the cost of treatment. Ditto with friends who have cancer. One quit her job–but she didn’t lose health coverage because that has nothing to do with where or whether one works.

It seems logical to separate health care from employment. And to pay for it with a tax so that those with more money pay more and so that your health expenses aren’t at the mercy of your job or the genetic lottery. For those unfamiliar with the U.S. system, the New York Times a couple of years ago ran an excellent series titled “Paying Till It Hurts.”