Ma Vie in France

Imagine the scene. You arrive at a house or an apartment for a party. It’s loud and hard to hear over conversations and music playing in the background. You only know one or two people in the entire room. If this scene were to happen in the U.S., you would probably walk in, say hello to the host or whoever greeted you at the door, and find the person who invited you. If you wanted, throughout the evening, you could drift in and out of different conversations, and sometimes introduce yourself to people, maybe shaking hands. If this scene were to happen in France, there would be a key difference: just after arriving at the party, you would go around the room and systematically kiss every person on each cheek, saying something to the effect of “Hi, (your name).” These kisses in France are called “les bises,” and the act of greeting people with kisses is known as the expression “faire les bises” (make/do kisses, the translation ends up sounding a little odd…). My description above ma...

As I found when I first moved to France, you don’t have to look far for ‘cultural’ or artistic events and activities. One great example is a parade I attended this past weekend which was the opening ceremony for a Biannual Dance festival. I went to the parade knowing that it mostly highlighted performances from local dance studios. I don’t know much about dance, but the performances were really surprising to me. Obviously hours had been poured into the choreography of the different groups, the costumes, the timing, the music, and I thought on the whole it was really well done. What surprised me, though, was that for a very big, well advertised parade the choice of dance was contemporary, and at times, just plain weird. In my mind, contemporary art in any form remains fairly inaccessible to the general public. This kind of thing doesn’t shock people here, but I have a feeling it would be less well received in the US. The question is, why? Not so much why wouldn’t a French person f...

The past two weeks in France could seem strange to a tourist visiting the country: within days streets that were empty for weeks while most of the country was on vacation all of a sudden became busy again. It’s that time of year again: back to school!  La rentrée (literally the return, or rather, start of the school year) is no small matter in France. Rather than a progressive return to school over the course of a month or so (as I would describe the process in the U.S.), back to school in France happens all on the same day (September 4 this year).  This, like many other things in France, is due to high centralization and the massive establishment that is known as l’éducation nationale. In keeping with the cultural interest of this blog, I’d like to begin to dig into this beast that is l’éducation nationale. As a foreigner, I’ve been lucky to get an inside look into the school system here, both at the high school and university levels. I’m convinced, from what I’ve...