BLIND CRITICISM

J’en ai marre !!!!!

The tourist season has officially begun here on the French Riviera. What always arrives with the hordes is the inevitable and harsh criticism of French driving habits.


I’d like to intercept a bit with this blog before the Anglophones really start getting flagrant down here!

Everyone knows that anyone’s life can be irrevocably destroyed by an intoxicated or mentally disturbed driver on the road in any country by a driver of any nationality. My question is why have the French, in particular, been given such a bad rap as drivers?

I have been recipient many times of French driving hospitality. What I have found is that my French friends and acquaintances have displayed skill and grace at ever turn…so to speak. It’s no wonder, I later learned, considering what they have to go though in order to earn the privilege to drive in their country.

How may of you who have criticized the French actually studied for the French Permis de Conduire?


Too scared, right?


And I’m willing to bet…too broke!



Then, that means you don’t know bupkis about anything French.

Want to know how I came to this conclusion? Because it is expensive, difficult and studying for it would actually result in an evolution of thinking that would cause you to realise that you had no prior knowledge of what it takes to understand of the Gallic approach to manoeuvring safely through life in France. My philosophy is in order to criticize the French you should have been educated in France and taught by the French. How else can one understand the cultural nuances of a country which has the power to seduce millions of people through its doors, whether they be rich or poor, yellow green or blue, to a place which is probably the most complicated in all of Europe? Even people from rich and powerful countries are willing to test their fate in a country which for years will render them functional illiterates!


Years ago I took the driving school plunge…so I know of what I write.


I can’t overstate the fact that the pursuit of the French Permis de Conduire is an expensive, lengthy but profoundly informative study of the psychology of the French population. Believe me, studying this will enhance one’s relationships with the French people you encounter, do business with or with whom one becomes intimately involved. It will even enable one to distinguish a foreign driver from a French one.


Imagine that!


Case in point:

One sunny afternoon, a fellow student, who is also an American, and I left another gruelling session of La Code de la Route to stop at a corner café. As we approached the curb, a car came screeching towards us in a completely misguided attempt to park in a no parking zone.

Mr. America, hisses, ., “Look at that. After they get their permits, all rules fly out the window. How typically French!


My response was, “What makes you think the driver is French?”


He pointed to the French License plate on the Italian Fiat, and said, “Look… 06 (the code for the Alpes Maritimes)!”

As if on cue, two men emerge from the car, sharing a typically boisterous conversation in Italian!

Typically French, right?

So, this is the advice from yours truly…the Expat Curmudgeon Writer on the Côte d’Azur…to American drivers in France. Stop criticizing…stay alert and either take your bigotry and pack it in your little back packs and go back home… or just get off the road and take the friggin’n bus!

Domestic Quarrels



July 21, 1926- April 13, 2001
Josephine Premice 






"Never let a man tell you 'You look so beautiful stiring the soup' "
~Josephine Premice

Bad Manners

google images

(Subtitle) Bad Manners and Repugnant Behavior According to Whoopie Goldberg


So, yesterday I finished reading Whoopie Goldberg’s book, Is It Just Me? Or Is It Nuts Out There?

This, to me, was a hilarious book which basically implied that the United States has become a nation of arrogant and smug Philistines!

I would like to share with you a joke from her chapter: "Buddy is the new Nigger:"


A little black cherub is up in heaven and is kind of cruising around, and God comes walking by, and the cherub flies over and says, " Hi, God !"

God says, “Hey how are you doing?”

The cherub says, “Fine, God. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” says God.


“Am I an angel?”

God says, “No, nigger, you a bat!”



Do you find this funny?


Is it me…or is this simply a sly reference to the American majority population’s opinion of President Obama?

What Is An Expat?

Nice, France google images

Who am I?

What am I? Expat? Refugee? Immigrant (certainly felt that way living on the weak and erratic dollar for the past 8 years)? Artist? Gringo? Defector? Adventurer? Long time resident of the French Riviera? An American who enjoys living France?

Below are two definitions of Expatriate that I found interesting:

*one who lives outside one’s own country; One who has been banished from one’s own country; To banish; to drive or force (a person) from his own country; to make an exile of; To withdraw from one’s native country; To renounce the rights and liabilities of citizenship where one is born … en.wiktionary.org/wiki/expatriate

*ex patriate – A person who has abandoned his or her country of origin and citizenship and has become a subject or citizen of another country. http://www.irishclaims/

Most of the Americans I have met, proudly call themselves Expats! The word itself has come to represent glamour, exotic choices, worldly intellegencia, café life… But you see, my problem is with the prefix!

EX-!

When I think of “ex”-something…I think of EX-husbands, EX-friends, EX-boyfriends, EX-roommates…EX-change…uhh …oh…never mind… but I think you get the point.

In the mid eighties, I took a vacation to visit the beaches of the French Riviera. I fell in love….no… not with a Frenchman, I was already happily and firmly married…with the light and colors of the Mediterranean. From Monaco to Saint Tropez. I was captivated by the foods of the region, the markets, boutiques, the souk of Nice (the Old Town), the laid back pleasures of the South. The politesse of the population. I kept coming back to the area until my husband and I were able to move here in 1999. I sold my business, published my first novel, my husband retired, and we left Dodge City (New York City) to move to the sunny Côte d’Azur.

Permanently?

Who knows.

Am I an Expat?

I am an American.

An eighth generation American, female of African, Irish, Native American ancestry, who lives in France with my American spouse of Russian, Scottish, English ancestry, because we love the food, rocky beaches, cheaper travel options…and the National Healthcare System.

Aging Gracefully

Recently an acquaintance of mine who lives in Germany commented on my blog concerning the “Chic of French Women.” To encapsulate his quite lengthy response which was sent to me through my private email, he basically stated his opinion on what he felt was the self -deprecating tendency of American women to use facelifts as beauty enhancements in order to combat the aging process.

What came to mind was how ironic his opinion was considering the fact that we both live among the antiquities of Europe.

Image what living here would be like without the nips and tucks of European restoration efforts. The way I see it is that we’d all be living as if we were in the bowels of the slums of Cairo.


(photos from google images)

Racism In France. Is It Racism or Historical Precision?

(google images)

A word of advice to American Blacks in France. Don’t let Africans bait you with issues of racism in France. If you are an American and Black in France, confronted with this bait, I suggest you resist the temptation to discuss something we are entirely unqualified to discuss.


I suppose you’re wondering how it would be possible for a Black American living in France to be unqualified to discuss racism.

First we are not French. Nor are we from a former French colony. We are not looking for work or any

support from a people who had colonized our African country. Our primary experience has been American Institutional racism which has continually evolved for over 500 years.


Obama, not withstanding.

According to the media and immigration patterns, Africa is riddled with ethnic strife. Racism! The kind of ethnic strife between blacks in Africa has resulted in huge numbers of Africans from various tribes fleeing to every continent on the globe.

Why would Europeans who have had to relinquish their African colonies want to deal with the same people, now in Europe, who threw them out? What kind of ethnocentric arrogance would demand that European tribes be less racist than any African tribe?

Despite the fact that from the very beginning American blacks’, who were imports from various African

societies, purpose was to help build a brand new country for Caucasian people at the expense of Native Americans, we have never been considered Americans” We are simply a kind over ever-present reminder of Caucasian moral transgressions, in every way from the diverse characters of our features due to miscegenation, to the fact that we can actually survive all manner of insult and condescension, with a pride and flair which elicits envy, respect and admiration throughout the world.

No African in Europe has had to deal with the systematic racism that has tortured black Americans for over a half of a milleneum. They never sat on the back of the bus in Europe unless they wanted to.
On the other hand, black Americans, produced and harvested the nation’s produce, built the cities, nurtured the children and handled all the dirty work of the nation with minimal rewards. We faced fire hoses, lynchings, police dogs at voting booths and lunch counters in our very own country.

It has only taken a few decades for France to confront its own racism, America is still tackling ours.
And don’t get all excited about a post racial America, simply because we elected Obama. Obama is an African American. The majority of Americans who chose to elect Obama reminds me of something my Grandparents and Parents told me. You see, back in the days of Jim Crow laws which didn’t allow blacks in restaurants and hotels among other places, it was a well known fact that if a black donned African or Middle Eastern garb, they would be welcomed into the same establishments in which black Americans would be refused.

Chew on that for a while.

It appears to me, with the rate that France is confronting its racism, she will probably elect a black French President long before America elects an indigenous black one!


another point of view: http://deloryswelchtyson.blogspot.fr/2012/05/all-up-in-my-kool-aid-and-dont-even.html
(all photos from google images)

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