Crocs With Socks And Other Crimes

I seem to have missed out on the 'elation' stage mentioned by expat experts and gone directly to stage 2, officially called 'Resistance', which for me is very, very irked and irritated.

The crimes so far:

1. First and foremost, Prague has failed the first two tests, the availability of Vanity Fair and anchovies (I have my priorities) but we do have a shop that sells only rope very close by. I am still trying to think of ways to use such an amazing variety of rope around the apartment.
No comments from Paul - who I am sure can come up with a lot of inventive ways with rope.

2. Annoyingly the FM cunningly organizing his schedule so that he has in fact not seen a packing box, except about 3 boxes full of his work that I have refused to unpack and are still awaiting removal to his place of work.

3. The moving company, Team Allied if you want to know and I still don't want to talk about it.

4. Socks with sandals or possibly worse, socks with crocs really does exist here in excruciatingly large numbers and it appears that this is de rigueur not only for locals but also tourists.

Apparently when you buy shoes here, on the receipt is a list of regulations for wearing shoes, included in which is that shoes are not meant to be used outdoors.
Aha, so that’s why everybody wearing sandals or Crocs with socks, it's the law and one is forced into it in order to protect proper shoes from improper wear.
So I imagine Czech people are very well shod indoors. I will get back to you on this, if I am ever invited indoors.

5. One month for the internet set up, and then only in Etienne's bedroom, and the FM had the audacity to ask why I had it set up there – well that would because they couldn’t set it up in the bathroom, of course.

6. Czech language, OK I know I’m not the world’s most gifted linguist, but signs are not looking good, after one month I can say: Hello, Goodbye and two beers please (don't know how to say one, or any other number for that matter).

So for all those who aren't discouraged by the above, bring ham, anchovies and Vanity Fair and stock up on condoms as they are only sold in packs of three.

Christmas With The Family Who Wish To Remain Anonymous

The person that was organising Christmas with the family who wish to remain anonymous died then someone with whom the FWWTRA were meant to be spending Christmas with was diagnosed with lung cancer then someone else whom the FWWTRA did spend Christmas with was beaten up by their boyfriend the night before Christmas Eve (who said he ‘saved her from committing suicide’), then someone from the FWWTRA had their wallet stolen the day after Christmas (for the second time in Madrid) then the FWWTRA’s top floor apartment was broken into via the balcony door on New Year’s day at 5.30am when the FWWTRA were sleeping, a discovery that was made thanks to the baby monitor (intruders were heard via the aforementioned device) and was then told by the police – well you live on the top floor, happens all the time. The FWWTRA would like to recommend the Philips SCD489 Baby Monitor as a backup security apparatus.

The Impossibility Of Good Bread

I started out by asking people in the street where to get good bread, a perfectly reasonable question in France, but I was getting very strange – why on earth would you want to eat bread anyway? – looks. It turns out that the Spanish only eat ham. Seriously, who knew they ate so much of the stuff? There are as many shops selling ham here as there are pharmacies in France, and trust me, that is a lot. My favourite is the museo del jamón (which if my Spanish serves me is the museum of ham) which is either a really popular name for a shop selling ham or it’s a chain. Our closest Museo del Jamon is open from 8.00am – 2.00am. Try that on a 35 hour working week. So we are back on lovely white sliced bread, which at the moment, possibly due to slight translation problems comes in slices as thick as, well I don’t even know how to describe how thick it is. Basically you have to put an awful lot of ham in the sandwich to be able to taste the ham; luckily we are in the right country for that. The bread is very sweet and sticky obviously not meant to be eaten with ham, so I’m guessing you’re just meant to take you ham straight up.

Grocery shopping is lucky dip at the moment as I am shopping on the internet. It takes a long time and a lot of dictionary consultation and I am taking delivery of a lot of things I can’t remember ordering. The brand names are ever so slightly different like Cif for Jif, Dodot for Pampers and Kalia for Vanish. Toilet Duck is obviously Pato W.C.
I am pleased to report that anchovies are widely available but I just can’t find those Kleenex tissues with balm yet.

Dogs are banned here like children are in Paris, in restaurants, shops and other public places. Parisians definitely prefer dogs to children. No children, but come on in with your smoking dog.

I can’t comment on Spanish television yet but as this is the birthplace of Hello (¡Hola!) where the big news is at the moment is Carlos y Camilla I have high hopes of entertaining quality television.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in that fashion disaster that was the 70’s and had an orange vinyl waistcoat with matching orange vinyl miniskirt – yes I really did, presumably to match my hair colour and it was my very best outfit, I have the school photo to prove it, alas available only in black and white, that I find the children’s fashion here so alarming. In Madrid it’s like stepping back in time, far beyond the horrors of the 70’s. The outfits the Madrileño children are wearing are borderline ridiculous. The boys are wearing long shorts with braces (naturally) with long socks and plaid shirts with button-down collars, girls are wearing (in soft pastel blue or pink) very short dresses with frilly underwear, little cropped cardigans in very fine wool, ballet slippers and large satin bows that make their heads look like Easter eggs. These outfits are worn to the park and not just on Sundays. Of course they all have those tailored overcoats with velvet collars and if they belong to the same family they will be wearing exactly the same outfit.

Protests and pigeons

Undoubtedly Paris is a breathtakingly beautiful city; and the shopping is great once you have navigated the pitfalls of a 35 hour working week.
Is it closed on a Monday or a Tuesday?
Of course it’s closed on Sunday.
Does it close for lunch from 12.00 to 14.00?
Or 13.00-15.00?
Or maybe 12.00-15.00?
Then you can go to Madeleine Gely at 218 Avenue Saint-Germain, a shop selling handy little fur lined umbrellas and custom made umbrellas, or to Maria Luisa at 19 bis Rue Mont Thabor, the only stockist of Manolo Blahnik in Paris, carrying a small but perfectly formed collection, Or my favourite shop in Paris, BHV, though I have to admit they have reasonable opening hours; they are open on Mondays and lunchtimes. BHV is a department store (8 floors) with a fantastic Aladdin’s hardware cavern in the basement.

I’m sorry to have to bring this up but why do Parisian men have to pee on the streets?
Clearly it’s a guy thing to pee outside. Here they mark there territory on the street, that’s obviously if for some inexplicable reason they can’t do it in a car park which seems to be the preferred choice, more discreet perhaps? Or maybe it’s just a seasonal thing – car parks are preferable in the winter?

Something else inexplicable, why were the Foreign Legion marching wearing what appeared to be butchers’ aprons and carrying axes during the 14th July parade?

Protestors are out in force as we approach the strike season, there is even a website: www.lesgreves.com to ascertain who is striking this week. The organisation of the protests is impressive. Groups from all over France arrive at different metro stations, and then make their way to the starting point on foot. Off they go, marching in an orderly fashion with flags denoting which region they have come from. They sometimes have balloons. Maia has become quite a fan, especially if they have balloons. They are followed by police who are followed by the street cleaners.

The beautiful wide boulevards of Paris so ideal for protesters and parades were not in fact built for the citizens so much as against the citizens. They were designed to be too wide to build barricades across, and straight enough to aim a canon at any citizens that might be uprising in the streets. Protestors didn’t have the support they enjoy today back in the time of Napoleon III. Paris was redesigned by Haussmann, a city planner. Personally I see a pattern, city planners against the people. It continues to this day, in one of the universities, pebbles are embedded in concrete to make it too slippery for protesting students to stand on when water canons are being aimed at them.

There are principally two problems with Parisian parks; firstly you’re not allowed to sit on the grass except for one small over subscribed patch of grass in the Jardin de Luxembourg, that leads to the second problem of trying to find a park bench that is not enshrouded in pigeon fertilizer.
The Parisian pigeons seem to be a lot larger and sleeker than the London pigeons I remember, but that could just be a cultural thing, obviously the Parisian pigeons are more concerned with grooming whilst the Londoners are out drinking on the rooftops.
We are talking about big fat fornicating birds, and I do mean that literally. All they do is chase each other, for shagging purposes and eat what I fervently hope are conceptive pills. It’s a vicious circle; they are supplied with copious amounts of baguette crumbs by the little old ladies of the hood, which then makes them too fat (or are they all pregnant?) to get any decent elevation when flying. Consequently when chased by children, they barely make it over the children’s heads (that surely could be intentional on the part of the pigeons). The little old ladies `tut tut´ and feed the pigeons more bread, possibly deliberately, to keep them flying low over the children’s heads.

I also have been living on bread as it is so magnifique and proof man can live on bread and, wine and cheese alone, with maybe an occasional salad thrown in. Surely more agreeable than the Otago University researchers who tried to prove that man, or possibly they meant students, a different species altogether, could live on beer and fish and chips, allegedly they all got scurvy. It’s amazing I haven’t turned into a smelly wine soaked baguette by now, but it could possibly take a little longer, I will press on with the study.

I have recently spent time in the suburbs (banlieue) of Paris, a very scary place for someone with absolutely no sense of direction; I need mappy to go to the supermarket.
Yes, if you live in the suburbs you can have a garden and therefore dogs – not that the lack of a private garden prevents the inner city dwellers from rampant dog ownership. Or you could live in the suburbs and have three dogs all needing psychoanalysis. Two big dogs, one of a nervous disposition whose fur falls out and eats her own tail, the other big one has halitosis and a taste for small dogs and the small dog that lives inside and thinks she’s a cat.
And yes, you could even have you own private swimming pool. Or you could have a swimming pool full of gold fish, which would be tragic if it wasn’t 13°C in July. It was tragic last year (during la canicule) when it was so hot that the acorns simultaneously decided to commit suicide one night at 10pm.
So I am looking forward to getting out of la banlieue and back to the city and into our apartment. Just as soon as our band of Portuguese builders and Romanian cabinet maker (certified at the University of Transylvania) leave. Five months and counting.

Detropicalization

Detropicalization: to adapt to non- tropical regions, esp. in regard to a return to Europe, esp. Paris with recently acquired apartment under renov. for an est. 4-5 month period, after three years or more in tropical regions

I’ll start at the top. No humidity (comparatively speaking) – so my hair is fabulous.
Moving on, my ears have gotten larger (no it’s not an age thing). It appears I have an allergy to cold weather. This is preposterous, for although my homeland could be described as a Pacific Island, it is by no means a tropical one and that’s not even taking into account over a decade spent in London living in a climate very similar to the one here.
I'm guessing it was the three year hiatus in more equatorial climes. In fact it happened once before in KL, just before we left. I was holding an ice cold bottle of coke on my delicate, lightly tanned, bare arms (the pigmentation was sucked out of me within hours of arrival here) and I got a strange rash in the shape of a coke bottle which took a couple of hours to clear.
It starts with my ears, they get itchy and swell (think bright red rugby player cauliflower ears), then my cheeks get red and itchy though don’t seem to puff up much and then – this is the fun part – my lips. We are talking about collagen injected inflatables. It takes about 10 minutes of exposure to reach stage one (the ears) though this can easily be averted by wearing a hat, and a further 10 minutes per stage. It takes an hour to deflate. Not exactly debilitating, yet strange all the same.

Now that Spring has sprung and all is well now on that front, however Spring has separate concerns for us. As it is now light until 9.30pm at night Maïa is having light sensitivity issues, which I guess explains why she never got jetlag. This is easily remedied with blackout curtains.

Speaking of my Little French Girl, she has become obsessive about wiping her feet. The LFG can’t walk past a door mat without thoroughly wiping her feet. I’m not really sure why this has come about as the sidewalks are remarkably free of crote de chien (the same of which cannot be said of park benches and pigeon excrement).
The streets and sidewalks are comprehensively cleaned and positively sparkle. I initially thought water mains were bursting all over Paris and commented to the FM (no longer known as the GM) what a terrible waste of water it was, when it was pointed out to me that the people in green suits were deliberately turning on the water, letting it gush down the street, and then giving it a good scrub – a fine use of water, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Sadly the LFG has finally lost her movie star wave – she just wasn’t getting the accolades from her fans when waving from a bus. The only appropriate response she got was from a boatful of tourists (mostly Asian) on the Seine. She is now focusing more on little old ladies, some of whom do in fact stop to say how cute she is especially if she is wearing her very cute (if I do say so myself) raincoat with matching boots ensemble.

The LFG hasn’t inherited the cold allergy, luckily for her as she does have an allergy to gloves and hats. She will wear a scarf, although this could be an innate chic French thing (who knows how they tie the things, I will have to wait until she is old enough to explain it to me). LFG also likes coats, then again this is fashion linked – one also needs a matching bag.

Now that the LFG and I fall under the category of mobility challenged people (have child and large buggy), we get around town via disabled bus routes. It slightly limits where we can go but at last we don’t have to ask for help from the unfriendliest people in Paris, working women. I don’t know what they are doing on buses at that time of the day – shouldn’t they be at work? There they are, not only ignoring us but being actively unhelpful whilst maintaining a disdainful expression – try it, it’s not as easy as it sounds. The men are falling over themselves to help – I guess they can’t help themselves though – woman and child in distress.

LFG’s language skills are improving more rapidly than mine, is anyone really surprised? Strangely she doesn’t seem to pick the easiest words. For example she prefers to say chaussure rather than shoe, chaussette rather than sock – you can see where her interest lies.

LFG is of at that delightful stage where she is repeating everything she hears (happily I am not driving around Paris so I’m not involuntarily contributing as much to her expanding vocabulary as I used to). We were listening to a breakfast radio discussion about the lyrics to a 50 Cent sing (the ones they don’t even print on the CD). They were going through it word by word, I was shocked - living too long in a censored society I guess – still it was only breakfast time.

And speaking of French radio brings me to French music. It isn’t quite what I thought it was – you know the same as Vegemite, an acquired taste that must be ingested from birth to be fully appreciated. Well it is if you have been subjected to the same French radio stations I have, Nostalgi and Cherie FM – dreadful, truly dreadful French songs (they really have a thing for the 80’s) and songs in English that you have never heard before, and that would be for a really good reason, that they are so naff.

And so to French television, first the fabulousness.
There is a channel (cable unfortunately) called Jimmy and they have back to back Dynasty and Dallas – great for my French skills. Unhappily now we just have regular French television which is basically variety shows and talk shows and boy can they talk. A normal talk show is 2 hours and I am not talking about an Oprah thing – I am talking about a bunch of guys (usually they’re men) who sit around a round table and argue about something for 2 hours minimum, and this is televised. One show I saw, not in it’s entirety you understand, was entitled La frite et la mode. The chef they were interviewing was dramatically disguised, in case the frite mafia got him, I suppose. One other show is presented by a gentleman with the most serious mono-brow I have ever seen – how is that allowed? I have never been able to watch it long enough to discover what it is about as I find the mono-brow too disturbing. This is Saturday night television.
Abysmal because that’s the governments cunning plan to get French people to go out and spend money.

On being a boy

I write on little bits of paper that get coffee stains and fruit juice on them that also come in handy for wiping up spillages, however the absorbency of my little bits of paper could be improved. I carry them around in my pocket and occasionally try to pay cabs with them, maybe once I’m a famous writer that will be more effective.
My brother’s address book works on much the same system, it’s actually his wallet, he keeps all those little bits of paper that people give him with their numbers on, and that’s it. It never gets transferred into an actual address book. One time I went through it with him and he had three separate bits of paper with various, different numbers on them for me, so maybe it’s a family thing.

It got me thinking about growing up, thus I got out all the letters I had kept – you have to remember we grew up in a pre-email era. One of the letters was from CP and she has drawn a picture of a telephone on it labelled ‘a very cheap phone call’ because she couldn’t afford to call me – what a weird world we grew up in. I can make the following conclusions from the letters:

· Despite what has been said all my life, I did write, though obviously not to my parents.

· I was witty (everybody says so! – one person said I was as mad as a kiwifruit, but I think that’s positive).

· Everybody (male and female) was obsessed with the opposite sex, even if the boys just list conquests the girls wonder ‘if he really likes me’.

· I seem to have had some kind of reputation for drinking alcohol.

The great shame of course is that I don’t have my letters, I can only guess at the literary masterpieces (one was actually referred to as just that – I have it in writing) that have been lost forever. I know that one should write about what you know, I shall have to make it all up – obviously I have big blanks due to excess alcohol consumption as a teenager.
The GM has suggested I should use a pen name, but I already have one - Francesca Dubois (a little too Harlequin Romance perhaps?).
When we went skiing at Tekapo, there would normally be an odd number of people and one person always had to share the chairlift with a stranger. So you had 12 minutes to weave a complete fantasy life to your unsuspecting lift mate. We kept the same names in case we happened to bump into the same person again, but I don't think I could ever have kept my glamorous life details straight had that occurred. This all came about after a particularly traumatic episode for me when I told the truth. I was 12.
I was in my first year of boarding school when I took the lift with an old woman (at least 20). And so it begins:
‘What school do you go to?’
‘I go to boarding school in Christchurch’
‘Oh - do you go to Christ's College?’
Crushed 12-year-old girl with horrible short hair because someone forced me to have it cut off before I went to school (what is that all about - sending me off to school looking like a convict? - oh I get it) replies:
‘No, actually I go to St Margaret's College (pause - waiting for embarrassed apology)’
‘Oh - I went there’
Me thinking – ‘oh my God, what am I doing at a school where people come out as stupid and insensitive as you - you wrinkled old hag!’
It's enough to drive anyone to write romance novels, or alternatively take a 12-minute flight of the imagination on the chairlift at Tekapo.

But that wasn’t the last time it happened. About 10 years ago (grown woman now with small but perfectly formed breasts and hair 10 years long) I got caught in a bit of a downpour and returned to work looking like a drowned rat with hair plastered to the side of my face. This guy I worked with stopped suddenly and said in a shocked voice – ‘God Caro I never realised how androgenous you looked!’
I looked slightly horrified (mind flashing back to chairlift and earlier unmentioned childhood trauma playground scenario – ‘let the little boy go first’), and Michael says ‘Oh no – I meant it as a compliment’ Ah yes - of course, that was the look I was going for. Michael was, and I am quite sure still is, gay.

Childhood Trauma

I know if it's not Bridget Jones it's all too Absolutely Fabulous, but I had always wondered why I couldn't remember my early days, it's not like I'm vague or anything. You know how people remember being born or their third birthday party, or whatever, for me it's always been a blank. I could only remember the really traumatic things like:

• Dissecting sheep and seeing how far you could stretch the intestines.
• Killing rats in a grain silo and hanging them up by their tails from the wire around the outside of the silo.
• Me screaming my head off on my runaway pony Bambi, he was already called Bambi when I got him. My parents were obviously trying to kill me; I mean who gives a scrawny wimpy little kid like me a 4 year old car shy pony as their first pony? My parents. Your first pony should be a 100 year old Shetland pony; they are very short and therefore closer to the ground, with arthritis. Bambi and I were going for a walk and a car went past, he takes off, I start screaming, he speeds up, I scream louder, you get the picture. I was screaming so loudly that neighbours were able to call up my mother when I screamed past their houses. The houses being about 800 metres from the road Bambi and I were racing on. I imagine she cackled.
• My sister M nearly drowning.
• My sister L nearly drowning.
• My brother getting lost and a search part going out at night to look for him. I think he was found eating carrots that were probably poisoned to kill rabbits.
• Nearly dying of exposure when my parents dragged me over the Routeburn pass (a track I am sure only experienced climbers should attempt, not scrawny little wimp kids like me). Actually I also remember a woman who came on the 'walk' with us who had no kneecaps, she had had them removed for some reason I can't remember. Maybe she was a mafia moll and was 'kneecapped' (well you never really know someone). Anyway the woman with no kneecaps had great difficulty going down hill (think about it) and this was a walk across the Southern Alps for God's sake - it's obvious now - she was definitely tied up with the mafia, she must have been on the run, why else would you walk from the east coast to the west coast of the south Island with no kneecaps?
• All my pets dying unnaturally - my dog was poisoned, my rabbit was eaten by a cat, my bantam eaten by a dog, my pet lambs were eaten by the entire family with mint sauce made by my mother.
• And of course Aloysius the exploding lamb.

So you see it's all deeply disturbing and writing about it would only uncover the good and no doubt deadly dull things that happened to me. Perchance I could have been Janet Frame; I have the right hair colour, if only I hadn't been bundled off to boarding school...