Ma Vie in France

Did you know that today is Pentecost? Do you think anyone you know who is not Christian knows it? I can guarantee you almost every French person, Christian or not, knows that this weekend is Pentecost. Why? Because the day after, called Pentecost Monday, is a bank holiday in France.   France has, in addition to Pentecost Monday, five other Catholic bank holidays in the calendar year: Christmas, Easter Monday, Ascension Thursday, the Assumption of Mary in August, and Toussaint in November. Any tourist visiting France can also plainly see its ties to Catholicism in its magnificent cathedrals. And yet, in spite of this visible Catholic tradition in France, one of the most paradoxical things about living here is the effort the state makes to erase any signs or references to religion. Officially, the French state is laïque , a term which can be roughly translated to the (enforced) separation of church and state. Laïcité is technically a term used in the French constit...

After several days of a sore throat and increasingly creaky voice, I decided today it was time to go to the doctor. This wasn’t the first time I’ve been sick in France, or the first time I’ve gone to the doctor. But in coming home from the pharmacy, I got to thinking about how illness, something which seems straightforward, is actually viewed differently from country to country. First thing’s first-I’ve found that many of the actual illnesses I’ve had since I’ve been in France are different from what I’ve had in the US recently. In other words, the germs here are different. I’ve had infections and illnesses in the past several years that I’ve either never had before, or haven’t experienced since I was a child. This also leads to the next difficulty: vocabulary. I quickly learned that it’s not as simple as only translating whatever symptom or illness I had in English into French. This was evident right away when I tried to understand the difference between a ‘rhume’ and ‘enrhum...

French news has been full of politically incorrect topics lately, from antisemitism from the comic Dieudonné, to rumors of teaching ‘gender theory’ in French primary schools. But it’s been a while since I’ve seen something in France that truly shocked me. Well last week, I found something. It was while I was walking through the subway station and read the following advertisement in passing : I stopped in front of the poster for a minute, contemplating the term extra-conjugale and then said to myself ‘no, that can’t be right. This can’t be an advertisement for an extra-marital dating site’. Alas, it is. I checked with a French person to make sure I hadn’t misinterpreted the poster. No, and what’s more, these kind of sites are apparently à la mode right now, people are ‘owning up to’ infidelity. Before discussing this further, I’d like to delve deeper into the text of the poster itself. It uses the cheeky imagery of a bitten apple, and the text at the top...