French women (don’t) get fat.

French women don’t get fat.
French people are all cultured, charming, and exquisitely dressed.
French men make the greatest lovers. They are sensual, intellectual sex gods.
French cuisine? Divine.
The French have no sense of time, they are more relaxed.
La vie en rose, la joie de vivre, la poésie et la beauté. The French have an art of living.

Many of the above are accepted as common truths about French people. Or at least, they are on the other side of the Atlantic in the States, where France is more of an abstract, quaint European country. Cobblestoned walkways. Delicate grannies walking tiny coiffed yorkshire terriers. Dark-eyed women in smart Chanel skirts. Debonair men cradling the ubiquitous cigarette between sullen lips.

This picture is France. But there is another France, one that not many people know about. The one where McDonald’s is always packed at midi, with high school students, college kids, and businessmen alike queueing up for un Big Mac for lunch. The one where free, public bathrooms outside of restaurants don’t exist. Where women over forty commit the fashion faux-pas of wearing cheetah-print tights under checkered miniskirts.

I will never forget the time when I was making an omelette in the common kitchen in my residence in Poitiers.

This was in 2009, when I was living in a dorm with many other students. A girl came into the kitchen, looked at my frying pan, and asked me in French, “What is that?” I looked at her incredulously for two seconds before replying. When I told her it was an omelette, she inquired “What’s an omelette?” and asked me how I made it, what was I going to put in it, how many eggs I used. I almost blurted out, “Shouldn’t you already know this stuff?”, but instead I answered her questions and asked her one of my own, “Are you French?” “Yes,” she replied, taking her frozen dinner out of the microwave oven. Smiling, she wished me “Bon Appétit,” and went off to her room.

Now, a quick Wikipedia search shows that the omelette is a dish of “far east” origin, whatever that means. But I think what struck me the most that day was that “a French girl didn’t know what I was cooking”; I was scandalized by her lack of savoir-faire. At the time, when she walked in the kitchen, I half-expected her to give me a scathing look and a condescending suggestion of how to properly set the eggs.

So I’d like to show another picture of France. A picture you don’t see represented in films, French textbooks, or travel novels.

French people aren’t Parisian. Parisians are French people. Though, like New Yorkers, many would prefer to claim their city as a nationality.

So many people ask me how my “trip to Paris” was when I come back to the USA. I’ve lived about 2 months in Tours in 2007, 1 year in Poitiers from 2008-2009, and one year in Orléans from 2010-2011. France has so many different regions and cities with different types of cuisine, architecture, fashion, and culture. The City of Light is amazing, but there is so much more to France than its capital. The pictures above are of Biarritz, a Basque coastal town in the southwest of the country, bordering Spain.

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• Novels and films portraying l’amour in France fail to convey a very important fact: The French are reserved. Small talk is not a French thing, so the meet-cute that may sometimes bring American couples together is not a French reality. If the French don’t know you, they won’t talk to you. The basic rule of thumb is that if you haven’t been introduced to someone, chances are you’re most likely not going to talk to each other because it would be considered “weird” and “impolite.” This rule goes for bars, cafés, and most gathering places. There are some exceptions. For example, clubs are different as it’s rather difficult to dance with someone without having some sort of verbal exchange. House parties are more sociable, as it is understood that all who are invited are friends of the host. And in general, people will naturally be more talkative with foreigners.

  People believe that the French are sexually promiscuous or more “liberated” sex-wise. This is true in the sense that the French are more open when it comes to talking about matters concerning sex and their own sex life; magazine covers of women’s naked breasts and exposed male backsides are common. However, it is completely false to believe that the French are regularly seducing each other with esoteric philosophical banter, ripping their clothes off and jumping into each other’s beds.

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• French bathrooms are sketchy. What’s more, they are few and far between. Clothing stores don’t have bathrooms. Shoe stores don’t have bathrooms. Sporting good stores don’t have bathrooms.
  

  Train stations do have bathrooms and showers- but you have to pay a fee for the privilege to use them. Ironically, the actual trains have free restrooms. Shopping malls generally have one bathroom area, but, alas, you have to pay to use these toilets too. Open-area strip malls will have a free, outdoor public facility that automatically cleans itself by spraying its insides with disinfectant…meaning that the floor–and walls–are often wet.

  
  Bars, however, take the cake. This is because the majority of the time, they have a unisex bathroom. Some with a urinal on one side, a stall on the other, and a sink in the middle of the room. Meaning that while a girl is washing her hands, a man could be peeing to her left. (As a sidenote, how many men actually wash their hands after peeing? 1 out of 5? The sink’s there for a reason, boys!)

  In apartments and homes, the toilet is generally separate from the shower and the sink. However, this is slowly starting to change, and more bathrooms are being done in the ‘American’ style.

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• French people eat while they walk. Yes. They do. I remember being shocked back in 2007 when I first witnessed this. A year before, my high school French teacher had given us a stern lecture on the American failure to sit down and properly eat a meal at a leisurely pace. Yet, here were the French people of Tours, scarfing down street-bought beignets, nibbling on footlong sandwiches, and gorging on chunky, Nutella-covered waffles. Let’s put it this way: if there weren’t a market for crêpe stands or roadside sandwich shops, you could be sure they wouldn’t exist. But, as it is, as soon as lunchtime hits, groups of people start queuing up outside these spots.

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• France is a gorgeous country. But– dog. poo. is. everywhere. You see this lovely architecture?
  
  From the tram stop where I took this photo to the cathedral, there was a whole canine-deposited obstacle course to navigate through. Francophile literature tries to philosophize les crottes as a physical manifestation of the French’s insouciant attitude towards such trivial matters. I call it bulls–t.

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• French women get fat. French men get fat.
  
  There are certainly less overweight French people than American people, but they’re there. I think that it would be impossible to live in the country that invented moelleux au chocolat and not be tempted from time to time.

  The French may be tempted less, however. In supermarkets, snacks such as cookies and candies are sold in smaller packages than in the U.S. and are more expensive. Whenever snacks are advertised, a little notice is made at the end advising people to avoid eating between meals in order to maintain a well-rounded, balanced diet. Because the national health care system is responsible for medical costs, the government has more of an incentive to ensure that its public is healthy. But that doesn’t stop the Frenchies from indulging in their favorite treats from time to time.

  In short, the fat Frenchwoman exists, and the fat Frenchman does too. And that’s okay. People’s bodies are all different; a diet that keeps one man fit may add extra paunch to another man’s figure. What I think is the most significant is that French people who are larger or ‘overweight’ don’t look uncomfortably or unhealthily so. The French walk more, they eat food with wholesome ingredients, their bread is fresh. Thus, the curves they have are most likely those that their genetic makeup has blessed them with. Not a product of gorging on too many foods with fillers, additives, and high fructose corn syrup.

I hope this blog post has shed a little more light on France and her alluring people. I certainly wish that some of the travel novels I used to read had been a little more in-depth. But, alas, many of these books tended to have a reoccurring formula: English-speaking girl moves to Paris, falls in love with an irresistible Frenchman, moves into his tiny apartment and lives passionately ever after. (I’m not going to lie though, they became something of a guilty pleasure.)

I hope this post hasn’t offended anyone, as some of the humor was tongue-in-cheek and not meant to be offensive.

What are some common stereotypes people have of France or French culture that you’ve found to be false? What are things about France that surprised you?