Patriotism.

The night before we left, everyone got together for a final group dinner. Before long, as always happens at such functions, conversation wound around to our thoughts about leaving France. Some of us avions hâte (“had haste”) to return to the States; others were more saddened that it had come to an end. At one point, someone asked, “What will you miss most about France?” Although I said nothing at the time, my answer was definitely “the people”. As I have said before, I believe that learning a foreign language is all about learning to listen—decoding others’ ways of speaking, if you will. This trip only confirmed my beliefs, as I listened to some incredibly interesting people during my time in the country. Their stories amaze me and made me grateful for the professors over the years that have taught me how to listen to French.

One such story came from Madame D, whom we met at the Museum of Resistance and Deportation. Mme D was not even a teenager when World War II broke out, but she became a Resistance fighter in Lyon. She was raised speaking both French and German because her father believed that World War I wasn’t over, and if the Germans came back, he wanted his family to be prepared. Whenever they complained that other families didn’t have to learn other languages, he replied, “Il faut parler la langue de l’ennemi” (“It’s imperative to speak the language of the enemy”). But it wasn’t just at home that she learned how to fight the Germans: at school she was taught that France was the most beautiful, most intelligent, most strategic country on the planet. If she and her classmates stayed in school and then used their knowledge as employees of the State, they would make France a formidable opponent for Germany.

With such patriotic and idealistic talk swirling constantly around her head, it’s no surprise that Mme D began believing it. When Hitler and Pétain signed the armistice on 22 June 1940, 12-year-old Mme D (at that time, Mademoiselle D) was already looking for a way to fight the Germans. She didn’t have to look long before she was given a task: Libération-Sud, a Resistance group in Lyon, gave her clandestine newspapers to distribute every evening. Each morning, Mlle D went to school like every other 12-year-old girl in her country, innocent as a butterfly. When school let out, she rode her bike to the secret headquarters of Libération-Sud to collect an armfulof newspapers, which she distributed swiftly to other members of the Resistance group, a vital cog in the greater communication machine. This 12-year-old girl was willing to put herself in risk of death every afternoon because she loved her country and believed in its potential for victory.

We U.Va. students were floored as we listened to Mme D’s tales of bravery. She didn’t tell them in a proud way; she didn’t even seem emotionally affected by the words coming out of her mouth. I found myself wondering, Would I have been willing to do what she did? Would my students be willing to go to such great lengths for freedom and country? Is this woman extraordinary for answering the call of duty, or would most of us do the same in her shoes? I have to admit, I don’t really know the answers to any of those questions. But I do know that people her age often have much more patriotism, regardless their native land, than those my age and younger. Why is that? Have we become spoiled in our less war-torn era? Are we only willing to do that which increases our own social or economic statuses? Have we simply become too angry about the decline of the global economy? Is the crevasse between the political parties eroding our love of country? Why don’t we put our hands over our hearts when we hear the anthem? Why do we only think about our country during national elections, heated political discussions, or while watching Harrison Ford action thrillers?

Not that the situation in France is any better. On Bastille Day, as I was enjoying a fireworks show at one of the grad students’ apartments, someone asked my theatre professor whether she was feeling especially patriotic. She said, “Absolutely not. Today everyone gets drunk, lights fireworks, and sings ‘La Marseillaise’ [the French national anthem]. That’s all. And that’s such a violent, xenophobic song. None of these things inspire patriotism in me. Besides, the fireworks aren’t even good tonight.” N, one of the grad students, said that he had heard several other French people answer his question similarly. Somewhere between the Mme D generation and the Professor B generation (the two women are about 40 years different in age), the patriotism evaporated.

Of course, the fierce nationalism that brought on World War II is to be avoided at all costs. No country is inherently better or more valuable than another, and that’s important to remember lest we start feeling too sure of ourselves. And a more peaceful world is certainly a goal worth working toward. However, what country can withstand national trials and hardships without a basic love of homeland? Can we survive without patriotism?

Adieu.

French, like English, offers its speakers a number of ways to say goodbye, most of them dependent on when you expect to see each other again. A tout à l’heure has one of the smallest lapses of time between departure and reunion: it translates loosely to “within the hour,” although in conversational French it’s just used for “see you very soon.” There is the weekday staple a demain!, which means “until tomorrow.” From there, you have your generic goodbyes of indeterminate length but with certain reunions, expressions like salut for your friends and au revoir for your superiors. Then, there’s the scary one. It connotes a forever goodbye, quite literally translating “to God,” as in “I commit you to God.” This is a very certain goodbye, not one that had ever been said to me, not even mistakenly from a student, until today.

E and I were at the market for the last time this morning, picking up our final selections of bread, cheese, fruits, and vegetables. On our way out, I stopped at the Bread Man’s stand because I just couldn’t pass up being his customer one last time. Besides, he had my favorite bread, pépites au chocolat, which he hasn’t had since that first week. It was a sign.

When we approached his display, he said, “Ah! You were in Avignon, no?” Surprised at his remarkable memory—he must see a few hundred people pass by every Sunday—we replied that indeed we were. “You went to see the plays of the festival. I remember. I went there myself once, spent an enjoyable weekend there. This is a good tradition of France.” We agreed that we too had had a great time in southern France but that we were glad to be back in Lyon. I ordered my pépites au chocolat loaf and then informed him that it was our last market visit before returning to the States. “I had to come back once more for your bread!” I said with a smile.

He raised his eyebrows. “Your last market?” He shook his head. “When do you return? You are American, no? Going back to America?” We told him he was right and that our planes for America would leave on Saturday. “What city will you go back to?” For simplicity’s sake, E and I just gave him our home states. “Well, I must take my breads to America then! You have nothing like this in America. All factory breads!” We all chuckled as he handed me my box. “Well, I guess this is adieu then,” he said with a regretful expression. “Yes, adieu.” I nodded, almost tearing up, and echoed his goodbye.

It’s amazing that someone I spoke to for only a few minutes each week could cause such emotion in me. But this, this is why I chose language for my career. You learn a language so that you can hear other people speak: their stories, their joy, their pain, their fragility. You learn a language so that you can appreciate the Godlikeness of other people. You learn a language so that you can laugh with them, understand them, be welcomed by them and welcome them in return. That’s why it’s so close to God’s heart. He said at the dawn of mankind that it’s not good for us to be alone.

The Bread Man and I never spoke more than ten minutes at the time. We don’t even know each other’s names. But for four weekends, we looked forward to seeing each other and exchanging a few words of conversation in his native language. He clearly enjoyed regaling E and I with brief stories of traveling to Avignon and America and with proud claims of the superiority of his bread to anything else at the market or across the ocean. I enjoyed hearing it. That, if you ask me, is a little bit of God showing up in everyday life.

French Food.

There’s no doubt about it: France lusts over food. From the hours spent preparing it to the hours spent consuming it, food crosses the French mind every day à plusieurs reprises (“at many repeats”). On any block in France, you will find store after store devoted to alimentation—bakeries, butchers, dairy shops, confectioners, produce markets, and so on. Cafés never lack patrons, even in the middle of the day. French air is overflowing with the aromatic mélange of roasted chicken, garlic, bread, sautéed onions, cheese, coffee, chocolate…Can you smell it yet? It only fits, then, that many of our activités culturelles obligatoires (“required cultural activities”) have centered on consumption and “palate education.”

Sunday, 20 June: Huge group dinner at the Le Nord Brasserie Bocuse, a four-star restaurant in Lyon. Our reservations were at 7:00 p.m., but we didn’t leave until after 10:30—which is actually common in France. If you want to have dinner at a restaurant, not just a café, you’re expected to make reservations. The restaurant, however, only accepts as many reservations as there are tables. After it fills up, the doors are closed and customers can stay until all hours. And it’s a good thing: the food at Le Nord was absolutely delicious. It took all three and a half hours to eat it slowly enough to savor every bite and enjoy the company, too.

Thursday, 24 June: Small group dinners. Our group opted for traditional Lyonnais cuisine, so our professor made reservations at a bouchon, an establishment that serves exclusively Lyonnais food. There again, the meal was incredible. I had French onion soup, quenelle (a soufflé made of cheese, a rich white fish, and spiced cream), and profiteroles au chocolat, the largest chocolate dessert I have ever seen. (I wasn’t sure exactly how to translate profiterole, so I looked in the New American Oxford Dictionary: “a small hollow pastry typically filled with cream and covered with chocolate sauce”. Ohhh, yeah.) Much of Lyonnais cuisine is that which I imagine is served at the gates of hell: tripe sausage, tongue, fish heads, cow brains, and so on. Nonetheless, it’s possible to find more edible dishes, which was the case at our bouchon. I will post pictures when I get back home.

Sunday 27 June: Cheese tasting. You’ve probably heard rumors that French cheese is some of the weirdest and stinkiest on the planet. I concur. But much of it is delicious, despite the olfactory displeasure. Our job on this particular evening was to amble around the room, trying different cheeses, and describing each with words other than “strong” or “stinky.” That left us hard pressed for appropriate adjectives. However, I found a fantastic cheese made of sheep’s milk that had a nutty, buttery taste. That stuff was incredible with some water crackersand a sip of white wine. Three or four of the cows’ milk cheeses were also fantastic: smooth, creamy, and slightly salted. All of those were the perfect compliment to a baguette. Of course, there were others that tasted like feet, acid, and/or poisonous mushroom, so I stuck mostly to my favorites.

Monday, 28 June: Cooking workshop and winetasting. That’s right: I attended a cooking workshop with a professional French chef. We prepared a chicken-and-pesto main dish with sides of tomates Provençal (“Provence tomatoes,” which are roasted in olive oil, garlic, and basil) and sautéed zucchini. The other half of our group made a sushi appetizer and a raspberry cake with warm compote of tomatoes (yes, tomatoes) and strawberries for dessert. It was terrifying to be in the kitchen of a French restaurant with a guy who does it for a living, let me tell you. It’s amazing how much school they have to go through to be hire-able in the restaurant industry in France. Very intimidating for those of us who struggle with our microwave oatmeal. Anyway, while one group was cooking, the other was in a wine tasting. We did essentially the same thing with the wine that we did the night before with the cheese: describe what we smelled and tasted. Naturally, I liked the white wine best—it was fruity, floral-y, and crispy. We also tried a rosé and a red; the red was surprisingly good. It’s weird to describe a drink as peppery and smooth, but that’s exactly what the red wine tasted like. Too hardcore for me, but I could tell it was of exquisite quality.

Thursday, 1 July: Couscous dinner. Couscous? Is that really a meal, you might ask. Well, no, not usually. Usually it’s a side dish, similar in style (but not in taste or consistency) to rice or other grains. However, at L’Étoile de l’Orient, it is the main attraction. The servers first brought us green aperitifs with a minty-lime taste. Although small, they were refreshing since we were positively baking on the top floor of the restaurant. The meal was served family-style: a dish of plain couscous occupied the center of the table, flanked by a giant bowl of vegetable stew and a gargantuan platter of baked meat. Everyone dug in heartily and delighted in the spicy Moroccan specialty. The portions were so much more than I could ever eat, but I ate until I could hardly wiggle. Before the night was over, one among us who is Canadian sang “O, Canada!” (his version deserves an exclamation point) in both French and English to celebrate Canada Day. To quote Jen from CakeWrecks: “I didn't even realize that the US celebrated Canada with its own day.”

Sunday, 4 July: French-style Independence Day feast. This was just an E and I thing, not the whole group. We wanted somehow to celebrate our patriotism, but the hot dogs here just wouldn’t cut it. They’re served on baguettes. That’s right, baguettes with wieners inside. So, E found a café whose plat du jour was moules-frites (“mussels and fries”). We figured that was as close as we were going to get. I mean, hey, it had fries with it. (Yes, I understand the irony of being in France, trying to find American food, and ordering “French” fries. [Which are not French, by the way. Just wanted to clear that up.]) It was a lovely evening, sitting there in front of the Saône River, chowing down on mussels and fries. But I don’t think I’ll ever order mussels in America: they looked too much like insects with soft flesh.

Tuesday, 6 July: Ice cream. There is an ice cream shop here in Lyon with over sixty flavors. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Baskin-Robbins. Granted, some of their flavors would never make it in the U.S. because they are, in a word, weird. Exhibit A: flower flavors. At the Nardonne ice cream shop, you can order rose, violet, or orange blossom ice cream. Another graduate student, braver than I, ordered violet. She let me try it, and all I can say is that it tasted like smelling purple. I ordered mint, hazelnut, and Nutella, which formed a winning combination. Assuming E and I go back on our own—the chances are pretty high—I think I’ll try dark chocolate, salted caramel, and cinnamon. So many flavors, so little calorie allowance.

Reading back over this, I have three thoughts: 1) How in the world have I lost eleven pounds since being here? 2) The next few days we’ll be in Avignon at the theatre festival and eating most of our meals at the YMCA. Good thing we’ve been stocking up on delicious food up until now. 3) I’m seriously hungry. Time for dinner.

Stupid Boys.

Nope, I’m not going to rail on the male species. I rather like them, especially my husband and dad. Believe it or not, what follows is a story of Franco-American relations in an Anglophone pub where E and I went to watch the U.S.-Ghana quarterfinals. After the Internet troubles we’d had earlier in the day, we really just wanted to sit somewhere fun and watch the game. Since we were going to be cheering (in English) for an English-speaking country, we felt it only fitting to choose an English-speaking pub. We made our way out to Vieux-Lyon, the old part of the city, and ambled into an Irish pub called the James Joyce. We’d heard it had a good atmosphere, and besides, on an English-language schedule of the day’s games, it said, “Welcome, Americans!” underneath the U.S.A.-Ghana game info. Perfect choice.

Unfortunately, within moments of choosing a table, we rued the decision. An already-inebriated Frenchman dressed in a bright blue polo and a plaid kilt turned from the bar and started speaking some very loud French in our direction. Nothing offensive, just the noisy, opinionated ramblings of a late-afternoon drunk. “My father, he was Scottish, and my uncle, he was French. But I, I learned how to dance the Riverdance!” Frenchman bellowed. Regrettably, he felt the need to demonstrate his paltry talent. E and I tried our best to ignore him and just keep up our conversation, but he did not take kindly to that. Before long, she and I were practically yelling at one another over the ruckus he was creating. Finally, we simultaneously made unsmiling eye contact with Frenchman, hoping he’d see the general lack of mirth he was causing.

Moments later, he silenced. But it wasn’t because of our scathing nonverbal message; it was because two more men entered the pub, an American and a Brit—looking rather stereotypical, I might add. American was in cargo shorts and a T-shirt and spoke with a Texan accent. He ordered himself a glass of dark ale and settled heavily on a barstool. Brit, in his pressed khakis, followed suit (no pun intended). Frenchman watched all of this with a sparkle in his eye. He hurried back over to his barstool and eavesdropped on the two men for a few minutes, trying, I suspect, to pick up a nugget to start yelling about again.

American and Brit wondered aloud why the word “football” is used to denote both “soccer” and “American football.” American said, “We mostly throw the ball in football. In soccer, you actually kick the thing around, so it would make more sense to call soccer ‘football.’” Brit agreed, of course. He said he was accustomed to using the term “football” for “soccer.” American continued, “I prefer the game of football, though.”

That was all Frenchman needed to hear. He turned around and boomed, “Stupid boys! American football is stupid boys!” He reverted to his slurred, loud French for the rest of the insult. “You throw the ball, you make the scores, you throw the ball, you make the scores. So easy! This is something any person can do! In soccer, you never stop running, kicking.” He held his index fingers and thumbs in the shape of two tiny circles. “This is what stupid American football boys looks like,” he said in thickly accented English. “Little, little.”

As any football fan knows, it is never safe to trash talk another fan’s team. But to trash talk the entire sport? That, citizens, is anathema. Predictably, American seethed. “Oh yeah?” he replied in English. “Where’s your ‘football’ team, huh?” he asked, air quoting the word. “They’re at home, watching the game on their TVs because they lost. Because they’re no good. My team is still in the running, even though it’s soccer. So who looks stupid now?” He looked at Brit, and both rolled their eyes.

But Frenchman wasn’t done. Although he seemed not to have understood much of what American said, he was busy decrying football again. This went on—literally repetitions of the above conversation—for ten minutes. It was frustrating to watch: two adults who couldn’t even understand each other arguing about games. It was as if one had insulted the other’s family; they were fighting with that much vehemence. Stupid boys.

And then it hit me: they had insulted each other’s families. For many of us Americans, football is a major part of our lives, whether we’re fans or not. The vast majority of us watch the Super Bowl (or the ads). From August to February, we see commercials for games regardless of the channel we watch. Our spouses, parents, children, friends, cousins, and siblings talk football. We remember the glory days in high school of marching band, cheerleading, or playing on the gridiron…or being the best friend or significant other of someone who did. Most of us claim allegiance to a college team. Pro football players are in the news, on magazine covers, and referred to by DJs. You have to admit that it’s a big part of our culture—and that much more for someone who is a fan, like American. Football is a part of his identity as much as being a husband or being an international traveler.

Of course, it’s the same for the French with their soccer.

So as the sports insults kept flying—to the point that Frenchman was eventually escorted out for public drunkenness—I started thinking about what (not so much “who”) started it. Clearly, Frenchman was looking for a battle from the beginning, but American did us no favors by insulting Les Bleus, the French soccer team. It reminded me of something another Frenchman said to me eight years ago. His name was Jean, and he was the father in one of our host families. I asked Jean what the most surprising thing was about American culture. He told me, “The movies. In French movies, we solve problems like difficult relationships. We see how families work and how couples work. At the center of every French movie is a relationship.” (By the way, he wasn’t exaggerating.) “In American movies, you’re usually saving the world. Yes, I can go see American romance movies if I want to, but usually you’re saving the world. And you don’t usually let people of other countries help you. Just a team of Americans saving the world.” Jean was right. Perhaps that’s why Frenchman was picking a fight: he’s tired of teams of Americans.

On the other hand, American is probably tired of being despised just because he’s from America. E told me that the other day she was in a bakery and the woman at the cash register, upon hearing E’s French, asked her where she was from. E told her America. “Oh, well, that’s not that bad,” the woman commiserated with a watery smile. No, it’s not! It’s not bad at all because no nationality is inherently bad or good…or even better.

I lack the words to conclude this post because I’m still thinking about it all.