The Emperor Wears No Clothes...But Will Sell You Some

As a frequent user of public transportation, I am bombarded with French advertising. Metro and RER station walls are plastered with billboards big and small, and even the vending machines conveniently positioned on the platforms boast some not-so-sly branding. And let me just say that being so bombarded with these messages, I’ve noticed some strange things. Of course, if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that, as a foreigner, I can’t possibly comprehend all the cultural references contained within. However, after many months of observing, translating, and attempts at decoding, it’s safe to say that there are three dominant advertising trends.

1) (Mis)appropriation of English

It’s been a global trend to slap English words on clothes as a seal of coolness. Yes, very cool if you don’t actually speak English, because then you don’t understand how utterly meaningless the words are in context. It’s nice to see that this predilection for wildly brandishing the English language without understanding the implications has extended to French food ads. Now, these English expressions technically make sense in context, but flub it on cultural caché (the good thing is, only the expats notice). Take for instance the recent KFC ad campaign, in which people of all ages were pictured willy-nilly, cheerfully waving confetti around a big bucket of fried chicken. The slogan? “Party Bucket!!!” Yeah, nothing says “party” as much as the word “bucket,” considering its associations with “slop” and “barf.” More like, frat party bucket. I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention the campaign for frozen pizzas that warned Parisians about the upcoming “Cheese Invasion” heralded by flying saucer-esque mini-pizzas. Our cheesey-ness is out of this world? No?

2) Consumers = Intellectuals?

Granted, the French are a just a smidge more intellectual than Americans. Yup, just a smidge. They are well read, informed on all manner of global topics, and love a good debate for debate’s sake (right down to the taxi drivers). So it’s therefore no surprise that their ads should have a cerebral bent as well. Take the pictured ad for Galeries Lafayette, a local department store legend and a symbol of Parisian shopping. This bastion of consumer culture advertises its men’s store with an image of a bare-chested man reading a book titled, “Consumer Culture.” How apt. How…meta. Not to mention, the practically naked guy (seemingly sans all possessions but a book) is essentially selling goods. This wink-wink, nudge-nudge approach that simultaneously accepts yet takes aim at consumerism would never be broached in the hard-sell free-for-all of American ads, not even the more sophisticated ones. In another intellectual twist, many ads sport vandalism – not of the tagging variety, but in the form of scrawled anti-consumerism or anti-brand potshots. “Fuck the capitalist machine” is so much more articulate than devil horns and goatee or the male anatomy scribbled on a Got Milk model.

3) Rawrrrr


While Americans revel in consumerism, we’re a bit prudish on the sexuality front. Sure, our ads may hint at sex, but only on grade-school-level innocence compared to the French. While examples of this abound, nothing epitomizes this tendency more than the recent French Orangina campaign, featuring animals anthropomorphized to the point of strip-club endowments. Pictured are but two variations on the theme: a busty zebra in bustier and garters, legs ever-so-suggestively crossed, and a thong-sporting bear with six-pack abs, lustily licking his lips (he’s the true icon of the bear community). These ubiquitous images are tame compared to the full-frontal assault of the commercial (warning: practically Not Safe For Work). A little preview: a bosomy deer (or was it the zebra?) gives a bear a lap dance, another troupe of frisky female critters ride Orangina bottles that promptly erupt with fizzy soda, and in a riff on Flashdance, the deer (or was it the zebra?) arches her back on a chair and yanks a chain, unleashing a veritable golden shower of Orangina. It’s no wonder an anti-consumerism vandal has taken a black Sharpie to the vending machine in my local Metro station, crossing out the slogan, “Naturellement Pulpeuse” (Natually Pulpy…even grosser in light of the current ad campaign) and replacing it with “Naturellement Vulgaire.” How can we argue with that logic? Hey, in America we may be prudes but at least we're not elevating bestiality to an art form.

Some Like It Mild

N and I love spicy food. We are all about powerful yet flavorful spice – we don’t eat raw chilies (although I accidentally did this once in Indonesia and it was NOT pretty) and don’t like the sensation of a mouth so on fire you cannot taste anything but. However, we have been known to generously squirt sriracha into stir-fries, ladle dollops of harissa into cous cous, slather tacos with hot salsa, favor Thai green curries over their milder yellow and red cousins, and count vindaloo as a given whenever we order at Indian restaurants. We have a stockpile of chili sauces and Cajun spice blends in our kitchen so we can elevate (yes, I said ‘elevate’) homemade dishes to a fierier level.

Sadly, our new compatriots do not share our zest for, well, zest. French cuisine is marvelously tasty and rich – for crying out loud, there is actually a category of chef, the saucier, whose sole responsibility is to perfect sauces! – but there is no room in the French palate for piquancy. Even when ordering “spicy” dishes at ethnic restaurants, we eagerly anticipate the rush of fire on the tongue, only to be met with the same, disappointing, bland result again and again: a walk on the mild side. (Apologies to Lou Reed and to all of you for that.)

Surely the people’s palates have been shaped by their cuisine, one that is so ingrained and lauded that the French President has recently stated that it should be on the UNESCO World Heritage list. It’s a solid tradition that has resisted the exotic, spicy influences of its former colonies and current immigrant populations. Moreover, ethnic restaurants cater to predominantly French tastes, watering down the kick of their traditionally fiery mainstays. This was first made apparent to us many months ago, when we ate at a fabulous Thai restaurant in Belleville with some French friends. Although N and I felt our dishes were considerably mild yet highly flavorful, our friend was experiencing some difficulty with her tom kha gai. Coughing repeatedly and gulping down water like a desert nomad at an oasis, she eventually sputtered, “Trop piquante” (too spicy) and eventually regained enough composure to ask if any of us wanted to finish her soup. I took one spoonful, only to laugh a bit to myself: if this is three-alarm spice, the sirens must be on mute. On another occasion, in another Thai restaurant in the Marais, N asked for a dish to be prepared extra-spicy, only to find this “heightened” spice level barely registerable. And I swear the sriracha in this country is even watered down, because at home and in Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants I have to dump a disgusting amount of it on my food to give it some bite. Similarly, “hot” salsa at French supermarkets has the equivalent piquancy of tomato sauce. The French themselves literally water down spicy sauces. Case in point: our friends had us over for dinner and brought out “spicy sauce”—a bowl of what looked like broth but was really water with a miniscule amount of harissa mixed in. (Kind of gross, actually.) And in a bizarre twist at a café, I ordered what was labeled a panini mexicain piquante, hoping for some kick but expecting nothing, only to find that the chicken within had been “spiced” with curry. Confused, much?

There is one reliable source of spice, and that is North African cuisine. With the abundance of such eateries all over Paris, we know we count on the small bowl of harissa plonked on the table (much like a bottle of ketchup at a burger joint) to inject our tagine and cous cous with some kick. However, we seem to be in the minority of diners who actually infuse this hot chili paste into their dishes. Halfway into the main course at a Moroccan restaurant with French friends, I offered someone a taste of my beef tagine, onto which I’d liberally applied harissa. The spice level was to my liking although I forgot to warn my friend before she bit into the large spoonful of chick peas and carrots. Needless to say, she was not happy and spent the next few minutes chugging water and eating bread. Oops.

I wish I could say that I hadn’t made that mistake twice, but oh man did I ever instill fear into the stomachs of our amis. We invited a French couple over for a home-made Asian feast of sautéed noodles with beef and a veggie stir-fry. If we were cooking for ourselves, we would’ve been far more generous with the amount of chili sauce in both dishes. However, we were cooking for much milder palates and so we purposefully kept the spice-level tame. Truly. I’m talking not even a teaspoon. Unfortunately, this supposed lack of bite only came back to (proverbially) bite us in the ass. What for us registered as a whisper, a hint, an apparition of spice rendered the food, at first, excessively fiery for one of our guests, and, after a couple bites, inedible. Needless to say, we felt absolutely horrible. This is the last thing, save food poisoning, one wants to inflict upon a dinner guest. After getting plied with endless apologies and glassfuls of water, our guest was fine, but she’s probably scared to have us cook for her again.

Thankfully, we were redeemed when we had other friends over for dinner. In a conversation about New Orleans, my Australian friend (who is half-Sri Lankan and therefore has been eating chili-infused goodness practically since birth) mentioned she’s always wanted to try Cajun cuisine. This prompted a Cajun dinner chez nous, as N’s signature dish is the Cajun classic Crawfish Monica and I can whip up a zesty yet delicate blackening rub. Her French boyfriend was also invited, and so I arduously questioned her about his palate, not wanting to repeat my recent Asian menu gaffe. He allegedly had a proclivity for spice, but that’s all relative, isn’t it? We proceeded with caution, not at all shying away from the spice but not going full-tilt with it, either. In the end, the results were fantastic. Of course, they raved about the ‘Cronica’ (how could one not?) and relished the blackened chicken. Was the meal too spicy? Not a bit. He was perfectly satisfied, while she could have kicked it up a slight notch (like us other foreigners of the not-so-sensitive palates). We have finally found at least one native Frenchman who can hang with spice-slingin’ sharp-shooters in a nation of the gun-shy. The chances of this are one in a million.

The Olfactory Death March

The French are famous for their exceptional wines and cheeses, shrunken workweek, and (as far as stereotyping casts them) massive B.O. When I moved to France, I took this stereotype with a grain of salt because, well, isn’t France also the land of perfume and cologne? (Hmm, maybe I’m onto something there…) I was relieved to find that while the stereotype (like most) has some measure of truth – as in any large city, riding the underground can treat you to quite the heady, malodorous bouquet – the French body odor problem isn’t as widespread as the insulting jokes at the frogs’ expense would have you believe.

When I told a student, several months back, about the B.O. stereotype (trust me, it was in context – I would never spring that on an unsuspecting Frenchie), he wasn’t insulted but was a bit perplexed. He’d never heard of it before and couldn’t make heads or tails of its possible source. Well. Clearly he nor I had never been to the fifth floor of a different student’s office building.

Let’s go back to last week, when I first met with the latter student on his building’s fifth floor. I walked out of the elevator and was immediately bowled over by a stench so insidious, so powerful, I almost fainted. I tensed my nostrils and tried to breathe only out of my mouth (and at moments, to not breathe at all) as I marched quickly down the hall to the appointed meeting room. I must have walked 100 feet and in that space the reek didn’t fade, but rather hovered, like a cloud of toxic gas. Yes, it was high-octane B.O. worse than any gym locker room I’ve ever encountered, worse than the worst days in my former high school classroom when 15-year-old boys would saunter in fresh from lunchtime, ripe with basketball court stench and a layer of awful cologne to disguise it. For this was a B.O. so strong that although no people were present, the odor managed to permeate the entire hallway – haunting it, if you will. I finally reached the meeting room, closing the door firmly shut behind me, wondering how on earth my student could bear it. (I didn’t dare ask. I was just thrilled and relieved to discover that he wasn’t a perpetrator of the ungodly hallway stench.)

But the subject managed to work its way into conversation anyhow. I met the same student again today on the fifth floor of olfactory doom. I braced myself and made the same quick, breathless dash down the corridor, again noting the absence of any people (hello, ghost stank!) before finding safe haven in the meeting room. So. Fast forward to about an hour later. While discussing a news article we’d read about smoking bans, my student mentioned that it recently came out that after all the cigarette-induced haze lifted from the French nightclubs, people realized the smoke had all along been masking another, deadlier scent. (Uh-huh, you guessed it.) This discovery prompted the first-ever deodorant-brand sponsored event, “Axe Night,” at a popular “discotheque” (by the way, don’t you love how Europeans still call it that?). Apparently the event was so successful that more are coming.

I may have thought the B.O. stereotype was rubbish, but it appears I’m not the only one who’s discovered proof of a higher authority on the subject. And while I hit an apparent mother lode of French B.O., I must be grateful that I’ve eluded both a potentially rank-smelling student and noxious dance floors alike.

Ladies Who Lunch...Loudly

The workweek of an itinerant language teacher in Paris can be a lonely one. Due to having different schedules in different locations every day, I never have a regular work site to return to each day. I carry all my teaching materials with me (which can be heavy), I have no computer/Internet access during the day (not such a big deal, truth be told), and I can never, ever bring my lunch and store it in the office fridge or reheat it in the microwave. I eat out for lunch every day, and at that, I usually eat alone. Sometimes this is because I only have a short time to grab a sandwich and eat it on the go, which is hardly ideal, and sometimes this is because I’m at a client’s worksite where none of my colleagues are also working.

But there are other times when my workday intersects with that of my colleagues and we can meet up for lunch. These lunches are not only fun, but also a big relief after several days of eating lunch alone in a sea of French people, continually violating the rules of French culture and standing out as an expat on my own. The "safety in numbers" format is a far better way to break the rules and have a good time doing it. The other day I met up with a bigger group of friends than normal and as a table of foreigners (two Americans, one French-American, one Canadian, and one Italian), we almost unwittingly went down a list of sacred Commandments That Must Not Be Broken.

1) Thou Shalt Not Drink Water Out of a “Humongous” Half-Liter Bottle. One of my colleagues commented on my Nalgene – positively. Imagine getting praise for the smartness of carrying around a substantial supply of water with you (the point is to stay hydrated!) and not being met with incredulity or mistrust. And everyone at the table chimed in to agree, not once forcing me to pour the liquid into a small glass even though there was an ample amount of glasses available in the café.

2) Thou Shalt Not Eat With Your Hands, Not Even a Sandwich. My Italian friend had ordered a burger, and before she started eating, said, “Sorry, I’m about to eat this with my hands.” Ha! As she’s lived in France for quite a while, she’s used to the cultural habits and is conditioned to behave accordingly, or at least apologize before breaking the rules. We all laughed at the French propensity for a knife and fork no matter what’s on the plate, as well as their scorn for eating with one’s hands. The French consider it rude…or rather, simply crude. On the contrary, you never have to apologize to North Americans for eating with your hands.

3) Thou Shalt Not Speak In Tones Louder Than a Hushed Elevator Voice. The French tend to be quiet folk. Not that they’re not chatty – but they don’t ever get loud. When in a heated debate, a laughing fit, or an excited conversation, they still manage to keep their volume knob turned down to about 4. I believe this is rooted in their education system, which conditions them to be poised, disciplined, and afraid to make mistakes (which is a matter for another blog post), and then propagated through adulthood through parental and peer pressure. I mean, even dogs are relatively tame here. Therefore, when you’re out and about and hear someone speaking or laughing loudly, you know it’s an expat. Anyhow, at lunch we were complimenting my American friend on her blouse and then she removed the sweater she was wearing on top just enough to show off the blouse’s funky sleeves. “Whooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaa!!!” we all admiringly exclaimed, in unison, quite loudly for French standards, only to draw stares from people all over the café. The perplexed and annoyed looks only succeeded in making us laugh hard, adding to our “considerable” outburst.

I can’t wait to get a big group of expat English teachers together for a cathartic, laugh-filled lunch again.

How May We Not Help You?

It’s been a long while since this blog featured an irate rant against the French banking system. This is largely due to the fact that after 7 months, we’ve grown accustomed to the inconveniences. But today I was fortunate to taste yet another flavor in the rich palate of customer non-service. Mmmmmm, exasperating banking.

I went to the bank to perform a fairly cut-and-dry task: deposit cash. When I arrived, there was a small line yet only one teller was serving customers. He went down the line, asking what we wished to do (deposit cash, deposit checks, etc), and one by one we were told that he couldn’t help us with our tasks; his colleague would have to do so. By the time he was finished, the line had grown to six people – all of whom had been turned down. Um, isn’t this a fucking bank? What do you mean you can’t help us with deposits?!

What was even more infuriating was that there were six bank employees behind the counter, performing all manner of tasks yet not one of them glanced in the direction of the line of customers waiting for their aid. This continued for…wait for it…20 minutes! So let’s review the math: six employees, six customers, 20 minutes of waiting. WTF?

We didn’t go down without a fight. Aside from the dirty looks, exasperated sighs, tapping feet, and grumbling, some of us actually dared question their nonchalance. The woman behind me called out to them, asking if it wasn’t possible for just one of them to help us. ‘No, no,’ they replied, ‘we’re very busy.’ Right. So busy that you’re willing to ignore a line of irritated customers?

Then – the icing on the cake – when two tellers finally started accepting customers, the guy at the very back of the line didn’t wait for us to get served in turn. He cut around to the teller on the side of the line, before any of us noticed – we were laser-focused on the teller directly in front of us. When we discovered this appalling (yet entirely normal in these parts) infraction, the woman at the end of the line loudly complained to the teller, who replied that it was perfectly fair because the man had been here a while before, but got impatient waiting, left, and then came back. Therefore, he was entitled to cut the line. Ohhhhhhhhhh, that seems fair. Do we have SUCKER brandished across our foreheads? Guess so. Well in that case, go right ahead and continue inconveniencing your customers. Gah!

This is one thing that after 30+ years of life in the States, I’ll never, ever get used to.