Over the weekend I was flipping through The Riviera Reporter, the Côte d’Azur’s English-language, what’s-on rag. Inside was an interview with an American living in the area, a guy called Robert Adelson, the curator of musical instruments at Nice’s Musée du Palais Lascaris.
The Riviera Reporter had a simple question for Mr Adelson: How does he like living here?
The American answered like a diplomat. He called his experience “transformational.” There were good things, and there were bad things.
People don’t really get to know their neighbours, he said. That was his bad thing. (Same here, as I’ve already noted on this site: A Most Charitable Neighbourhood, posted 15 December 2008. No one baked chocolate chip cookies when we moved in either.)
Adelson’s good thing about living here was his chance to slow down a bit. The French cherish their personal time. They burn less midnight oil at work. A lot less. And instead they invest their hours with their families.
Put into enlightened phraseology, the French work to live – not the other way around.
This is all good stuff, Mr Adelson, I agree. But let’s talk about reality.
It’s bad enough that everything closes on Sundays around here. Sunday is, after all, not an uncommon day for shops to close in some parts of the civilized world.
It’s bad enough that there are no grocery stores or cafes open 24/7. In the early days, I admit I was hopeful. I’d seen a few shops advertising their hours as “non-stop.” But that’s hardly 24/7. “Non-stop” simply means attendants don’t skive off each day for a two-or-three-hour lunch break.
But in the south of France, it’s worse than that. Much worse.
Here, most places close for a long lunch and on Sundays – AND on Mondays, or maybe Wednesdays, or maybe Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and then whenever the moon is full or the barometer falling, and if an inkling for some free time should strike. It’s the sort of thing that really bugs a modern person.
And while there is some reprieve from this French regime during the feted “season” (which is basically now through August), I’ve spent hours contemplating how on earth businesses can make a go of it. At one point I began to fear that our little family of three had moved from a properly functioning, world-class city to some old-fashioned, backwater, seaside resort.
But then, our time here has unfolded. The longer we’ve stayed, the more we’ve become part of the place. There’s a great cohesiveness to the whole machine and – I hesitate to say it – I think I might actually begin to get it.
“Family time”: It’s not just that Europeans like to go on holiday. Holidays alone, I fully agree, are a terrifically admirable cause. Work hard (or as hard as you can in a 35-hour French work week) and play hard. It’s a terrific motto. We all recognize the two-week-a-year American holiday phenomenon is shear torture. (I’ve had upstanding college friends who would regularly quit jobs just to take extended, overseas holidays, and then return to the US to pick up something new. I, myself, holed up in London for most all my banking career with five-plus weeks of holiday each year. At one point, I shunned a perfectly good job offer because the holiday allowance would slip by a week.)
No, this concept of “family time” is more than holidays. I’ve begun to twig that it actually forms a fundamental link with some basic customs in French society:
1. Families stick together. There’s a lot less of the far-flung family thing here, with parents stationed in Indiana, sister working in New York, father once-a-month in London, and brother taking an NGO job in Uganda. Folks stay put.
In fact, things are so local in the south of France that they redefine the meaning of the word. A while back I was visiting with some members of our local port, la Port de la Salis, asking questions about the neighbourhood’s history. One chap, a retiree with a gift of the gab, told me he had no idea what had happened here. “C’est pas mon quartier,” he said. It’s not my neighbourhood.
So where are you from? I asked.
He pointed backward toward Antibes’ own Fort Carré. Over there, he said. On the other side of the peninsula.
Ah, of course. Foreign, very foreign, indeed.
That family units stay in one place is highly practical when it comes to children. With our own four-year old in tow, we’ve figured out this message with clarity. Extended family allows Rules Two, Three and Four to exist in French society:
2. Many (most?) French schools – such as Laurelle’s – operate on a four-day week: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Wednesdays are off.
Try floating that one in Manhattan.
But here in la Côte d’Azur, it’s no problem. If Mom and Dad are tied up during the work week, there are inevitably grandparents and aunts and uncles nearby to fill in with the kids on Wednesdays. Andrea, a cute, four-year-old boy in Laurelle’s class, gets dropped off and picked up at la maternelle by such a variety of extended family that I’ve stopped trying to keep the relationships straight.
This prompts a corollary to Point Two:
2a. French children enjoy serial school breaks. We’re not just talking about two weeks off at Christmas and one at Easter. No, sirree.
In France, there are ten days off at Toussaint (All Saint’s Day, November 1st). There are two weeks off at Christmas, another two weeks in February for les vacances d’hiver (winter break – why not?), and yet another two weeks off at Easter (a break which, this year, didn’t actually coincide with Easter, but heh, who’s splitting those hairs?).
Who deals with the kids on these extended breaks? I think you know.
3. The French love striking. We all know this. Les grèves are a national right in France, and the people use them quite adeptly, as featured in En Grève, my blog dated 26 November 2008.
Generally speaking, the ripple effect of une grève should be enormous on daily lives. But not here. Les grèves are part of the fabric, and there are ways to deal with them. Schools shut while teachers strike? Parents can’t get home from work because the trains have stopped? No worries. Extended family fills in.
4. Ditto for les jours feriés. National holidays have hit France with a vengeance lately, wiping out nearly every attempt at industriousness during the month of May. Same thing for the so-called ponts, or bridges – the extra national holidays that creep in on a Friday when Thursday is a public holiday, or on a Monday when Tuesday is a day off.
Take l’Ascension. This year the public holiday fell on Thursday, May 21. Friday, the 22rd, naturally formed un pont, creating a sweeping four-day weekend – at least for the region’s children. Families – often generations of them – bought ice creams and spilled out onto the local beaches. Meanwhile I ask myself who had the vaguest idea behind that holiday weekend that everyone celebrated with such glee.
But again, hiccups to the normal week are no problem. There are relations.
These breaks from normality are, in short, one reason why foreign folks like us – those who truly are not from le quartier – have a tougher time in France. We have no in-bred (literally speaking) support system. First we have to figure out the place, and then we have to figure out how to deal with it. (And thus there’s one good reason we employ a nanny.)
5. Families work together. Mom-and-pop shops here are hardly getting wiped out by French Wal-Mart. A full 93% of French businesses have less than 10 salaried employees, garnering enough popularity to deserve their own acronym in French economic statistics: les TPE, les très petites enterprises (very small businesses). To be fair, it’s la PME, la petite et moyenne enterprise (small and medium businesses, those with 10 to 250 salaried personnel) that are the country’s workhorses; they create a full 2/3 of French jobs. But the mom-and-pops remain a vital organ in the functioning of the French system.
“Our” boulangerie, for example, the one just down the road, is owned by a family. A sister café opened recently down the street – and is run by the brother of the boulangerie owner. Several blocks away, Café Kanter, our favourite Antibes bistro, is linked with a restaurant of the same name in neighbouring Juan-les-Pins. A mirror-image, mile-high millefeuille dessert was our giveaway: the two Cafés Kanter are owned by branches from the same family tree. Meanwhile in nearby Cannes, Bernadette and Cathy, a mother and daughter team, own Dimension, my favourite women’s clothing shop. Bernadette’s two sisters have similar shops with their own daughters in Antibes and St Tropez. These are a tiny smattering of what’s out there – and represent places our family frequents.
Which brings us back to that beloved issue of shops closing at lunchtime – or any other time that darned well pleases the owner. The excuse may be food. It may be a doctor’s appointment. Or – and I pull this one out of reality as I’ve often marveled at the daredevils who jump waves off Antibes’ beaches on gusty days – the kiteboard may be calling: The wind has kicked up, the waves are surging, and a go on the sea is simply a predestined right.
No worries. You own the shop? You’re the boss. Just shut the doors – without explanation or notice.
Sometimes folks schedule days of closure midweek, every week, because it suits the family structure. Like the husband and wife team who run Le Coquelicot, another of our favourite bistros. They keep the lights off every Wednesday. School’s out and, what else? The owners have a kid.
French business has priorities. They aren’t necessarily profits.
Family businesses, generations in one place, Wednesdays off school, grèves and an endless series of public holidays – all these elements work together in unexpected harmony. I’m not sure who’s the chicken and egg here – it’s all a tangled web really – but the pieces seem to fit together. And, as we’ve witnessed firsthand, the whole mess is something you only truly appreciate only after living here.
So family time it is. Mr Adelson has a point – and his thought becomes stronger once we unpack it.
If I’m honest, it still bugs me when I find half the local shops closed on Mondays or for a few hours every midday, but I’m beginning to understand why it happens. I am also getting used to the helter-skelter. I shop in the mornings now and fully expect, beforehand, that I’ll get about half as much accomplished on Mondays. And I thrill in watching the kiteboarders, admiring their courage and their lust for freedom – and the fluidity of the system that allows them out onto the surging waters.
Shortly our family will leave the haphazard, strapped-together madness of la Côte d’Azur. Once resituated in Toronto, Canada’s big smoke, will I rejoice in my life’s newfound efficiency?
Or will I wonder what happened to all those things the world loves to hate about France?
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