Where there's smoke there's fire (or a Frenchman)

C'est la rentrée. After a week or so in cold, windy England, I'm back in (cold, windy) Bordeaux, I'm back to work and I'm back with a new-found sense of purpose. I've been uncharacteristically proactive since I've got back- I've sent off job applications, finally started organising my university work and sorted a few things out for next year back in the UK.

It's translated to my language learning too- I've finally got started on a Spanish conversation exchange and I've been picking up a lot more casual French as well. My new favourite French phrase would have to be 'pédé comme un foc,' which translates roughly as 'gay as a sail.' Apparently, the origin of this has nothing to do with sailors being camp- in fact, it's because when a sail on a boat is catching the wind, it's... 'taking it from behind.' You stay classy, France.

Despite that, it's still been a bit strange readjusting to French life after a week back home. It's always difficult going back to work, and getting back into the swing of speaking French all the time took a day or two, but the biggest change was something that wasn't immediately obvious. Just a couple of days in France after a week in the crisp, clean English spring air and I only had one question on my mind... why the hell do the French smoke so much?

It's not an insignificant difference for non-smokers like me. Last year, after returning to England for a couple of weeks over Christmas I ended up going to the doctor to get a persistent cough looked at that hadn't disappeared in nearly three months. After doing a quick test which showed I was slightly short of breath as well as having the permanently sore throat I'd gone to complain about, they asked a few questions to try and work out what had caused it... to no avail. That is, until I mentioned at the end of my appointment that my home address had temporarily changed to France.

Just in case you've never seen one before

"Ah. That'd be why."

I've since been given an inhaler to use for relief from French smoke irritation, which I've admittedly completely ignored as I've mostly got used to it by now. It is still, however, pretty much constant wherever you go and it's difficult to understand why smoking's so much more prevalent over here than it is in the UK. I was discussing this with someone recently and they suggested that it's just irreversibly ingrained in French culture, pointing to this song as evidence.

Sympathie by Pink Martini seems to be one of the most quintessentially French songs out there- it's annoyingly catchy and really second only to Je Ne Regrette Rien in terms of sheer popularity and in how it just makes the French feel even Frencher. It's probably better known as the 'Je ne veux pas travailler' song, so it's not difficult to see why this obscenely strike-prone country has taken it so much to heart. Either way, it's deeply ingrained in the national consciousness, and the chorus goes like so:

It's admittedly far less cheerful-sounding when you translate it to English; either way, I'll be honest and admit that I don't really follow the logic regardless. I'm not entirely sure smoking will really help anyone who just wants to forget- if it's memory loss you're looking for, several million students worldwide would testify that alcohol's usually a far more reliable option.

This does seem to be pretty typical French smoking logic though; whereas in England a large proportion of smokers seem to smoke simply to keep nicotine cravings at bay, the French seem to do it whenever they've got a lighter and a free hand to hold a cigarette with. It's a pretty significant psychological difference between our cultures- while the French kill time by rotting away their lungs with nicotine and smoked tar, the English rot away their brains throwing Angry Birds at cartoon pigs. Everybody loses there, really.

The smoke hasn't been the only big change between living here and being back home though- for me, being back in France means living with small children again. They're not always here, but at the weekends there's usually two toddlers and a two-month-old baby in and around the house. This could easily have gone spectacularly badly- I've always been blessed with an unusual talent for babies scream and cry with nothing more than an attempt at a friendly smile. My parents both told me I was mad for deciding to live with kids, presumably after their own traumatic experiences looking after young children (Mum and Dad, I know it's over two decades late but I'm sorry for everything) yet it's actually been a lot of fun.

Probably the best thing about kids is the unflinching, pull-no-punches honesty that becomes socially unacceptable at about the same age that using a potty does. Even in France, people are generally far too polite to give a completely honest opinion on anything if there's any chance it might offend you. Children, however, don't hold back at all, which was something I learnt pretty much as soon as I moved in here after one of the resident three-year-olds told me that I spoke funny, she couldn't understand anything I was saying and that as a result, I was just really boring. In a way, the honesty was kind of refreshing... but at the same time it was a brutally frank reminder of just how much I still needed to learn. But yesterday, everything changed.

Her and her mum were about to head out the house and go somewhere, when I heard a knock on my bedroom door. I opened it and at first I couldn't see anyone, but after a second or two I heard a quiet, timid voice and looked down to see her standing outside my room looking very sheepish about something.

"Je voulais dire au revoir..."

We said goodbye and had a short conversation, with her understanding almost everything I said and asking me a few quick questions about my day before breaking out in a big smile, saying "au revoir, Paul!" one last time and finally running out after her mum. I've met a lot of people and seen a lot of things while I've been here, but nothing has even come close to being as heartwarming as that breakthrough from near-incomprehensibility to pure, honest affection. Despite the crying, the noise and all the chaos... it's a happy kind of chaos. And maybe, just maybe... kids aren't actually too bad after all.

So I'm running a marathon...!

No, seriously.

In what could easily be described as either an uncharacteristic stroke of sporting ambition or a far more characteristic stroke of unbelievable stupidity, I've just signed up to run the Médoc marathon in a few months' time. Alongside my good friends Bridget and Carlos, I'll be spending the summer preparing for something I've wanted to do for as long as I can remember- a long, painful 26-mile slog for charity, pride, and boasting rights at dinner parties.

It's not for a few months yet so I'll probably start bugging you all for money slightly nearer the time, by which point I'll hopefully be a bit more prepared for this whole thing. Right now, a 26-mile run already seems impossible enough for someone as worryingly unfit as me, so I was pretty horrified when I saw that the Marathon du Médoc actually prides itself on being 'the longest marathon in the world.' After some slightly panicked research, it thankfully turned out that they haven't just thrown a couple of extra miles on the end for good measure- 'le plus long du monde' is actually best translated here as 'the world's slowest,' with runners encouraged to focus on soaking up the atmosphere rather than setting the fastest time.

There's orchestras on pretty much every single street corner, with ice-cream, cheese and even foods like steak and oysters offered to runners en-route. What's more, there's wine-tasting stalls dotted every couple of miles along the course, making it possibly the most quintessentially French sporting experience imaginable. It'd be easy to make some sort of joke here about the French not even being able to stop drinking and sober up for a marathon, but I'd thought that'd be unnecessarily stereotypical and offensive.

Oh so classy

Not so, apparently. Even the event's official homepage features a cartoon runner drunkenly stumbling along the course with a bottle in hand, so the oddly-enticing idea of completing a tipsy marathon remains a possibility. Fancy dress is compulsory too, which seems to be a cunning trick to try and distract participants from the terrifying reality of running 42 kilometres with a stomach full of red wine and steak. Right now, it's not working.

Not that I've got anything against fancy dress. Very much the opposite, in fact- having recently celebrated a friend's birthday by handing out home-made eggy bread in the city centre while dressed up with a suit, shades and cigar as one of four members of the 'French Toast Mafia,' I'm actually pretty excited about the whole costume thing. That said, Bordeaux's not a huge city, and the worryingly large number of my students who saw our mini-Mafia patrolling the city on Saturday afternoon has already resulted in an unfortunate number of classroom witticisms at my expense.

Not that I'll have to worry about that for too much longer. My contract finishes in April, leaving me with less than six weeks of teaching left and I've got no doubt that come the beginning of May my life will be far more laid-back than it is right now. The various stresses of being a teacher in France were exemplified perfectly this week with a event I'd never been told or warned about- 'Le Père Cent.'

'Le Père Cent' is the name for the day one hundred days before the beginning of the Baccalaureate- it signifies the beginning of study leave for Terminale (final year) students across the country. For reasons unknown, students nationwide celebrate it every year by running out in the streets and throwing flour and eggs at random passers-by, making it a pretty hazardous day to be outside even if you're not working at a school. Naturally, being a teacher makes you a prize target for vengeful teenagers, meaning that many lessons are cancelled and some schools are even closed completely as teachers across the country cower under their beds at home.

But despite that and all the other various difficulties life as a teacher has entailed... I've loved it. Whatever I end up doing career-wise in the future, I can't ever imagine working anywhere more vibrant, dynamic or fascinating than the school I've spent the last six months at. Admittedly teaching teenagers is a bit of a challenge, but I feel I've learnt more from my time here than I have working anywhere else and I'll be absolutely gutted to leave. Weirdly, more than anything I'll miss the cheeky classes- the ones that always manage to learn something but seem to have fun at the same time. Probably the most memorable example of one such class came up just last week, when I was playing a game where each student took it in turns to add a single word to a story on the whiteboard. I'm sure you'll agree the result was a work of narrative genius.

One day I'll learn to stop playing these silly games

Regardless, assuming I don't end up becoming part of some extraterrestrial banquet over the next few weeks, my contract is about to come to an end and my official 'year abroad' will be over. Most language assistants I've met here will be heading home as the holidays approach; visas expire, summer jobs begin and lives simply move on.

But me? Not yet.

Sure, running a marathon in September is going to be a huge challenge, but now I'm staying until then it's far from the only one I'm going to have to face. As most of the incredible, English-speaking friends I've made here all start to leave, I'll finally have to face up to the one thing I really came to France for; total French language immersion. And while that's still an absolutely terrifying prospect, it's an opportunity- and it's an opportunity I'm now committed to tackling head-on.

So even if my official year abroad finishes in a few weeks... I'm not going anywhere. I'll head back to England for a few weeks, sure, but I've got things to do here before I go home. Find a job. Run a marathon. Learn some French, goddammit.

Summer in the south of France? Oh, go on then.

Confessions of a salad-o-phobe

My brain hurts.

In a good way though. In the same way you feel sore but great after going running for the first time in ages, or the satisfying sting I'd imagine you'd have in your knuckles after punching Piers Morgan in the face. Living with seven French speakers for the last couple of weeks has been pretty intense, but I feel I'm already making some significant progress language-wise. I'm understanding far more than I was before and my vocabulary's expanded a lot too, but perhaps the most noticeable change is as worrying as it is encouraging... I've started swearing in French.

Yep, my usual repertoire of 'fucks,' 'shits' and 'twatfaced bastards' has been inadvertently replaced with a more continental mix of 'putain,' 'bordel,' and the delightful 'va te faire foutre.'* Even better, the French seem to like mixing up their swear-words just as much as us Brits do- 'putain de bordel de merde' seems to crop up surprisingly frequently, which I'm sure will delight all the feminists wondering why the French need about six different words for 'bitch.' Swearing aside though, I've learnt plenty of other things about French social culture recently too- notably, the French view on lager.

*Translated as 'slut,' 'whorehouse' and 'go fuck yourself,' if anyone was wondering

In England, lager-drinkers tend to have a pretty awful reputation as a whole. Fosters and Carlsberg are pretty much canned piss, anyone who drinks Stella Artois definitely beats their wife and Grolsch has a stupid name that sounds like the noise a German tramp might make when he projectile-vomits over your shoes. As far as acceptable lagers go you've got maybe two or three that are relatively safe bets, and one of the safer ones to order would probably be a Kronenbourg.

Not so in France. Kronembourg is the one lager that seems to be available on tap pretty much everywhere, but ordering one in male French company seems to be a pretty serious social faux-pas. I went out recently with a group of French guys, and whilst everyone else in the group decided to order obscure-looking beers that in terms of alcohol percentage were probably nearer wine, I saw the reassuringly red Kronenbourg tap and asked for a pint of that. From the disgusted looks on the faces of everyone around me, you'd have thought I'd asked for a dead orphan steak and a Smirnoff Ice.

Anyway, I had my birthday a few days later, which proved to be a lot more fun. I'd been expecting a quiet night, but I got jumped in a pub by a group of amazing, fantastic, wonderful friends who sang me Happy Birthday before whisking me off for a surprise evening bowling. And it was incredible. In a night full of highlights, my personal favourite was probably one particularly wayward bowl from a certain Miss Chula which somehow ended up missing the entire lane and scoring a surprise gutterball for the next team along.

SURPRISE GUTTERBALL

Despite the fact that I was still feeling a little sore from the night before and even though I lost (badly), I had an incredible evening celebrating finally becoming a proper adult in the best way possible... by indulging my inner eight-year-old. Twenty-one, and as mature as ever. Unfortunately, a few days later something happened that made me worry about something I've never really worried about before... growing up.

Several of my housemates had exams or lots of work to do for Monday, and as someone whose workload could very fairly be described as 'minimal' it fell to me to prepare a meal for them on Sunday evening. Unfortunately, being a Sunday all the shops were shut apart from a couple of local épiceries, and the gas for our oven had run out to boot, making my options painfully limited. A quick look in the fridge revealed my options for improvisation were pretty minimal too- there's only so much you can do with a bottle of Orangina, a jar of strawberry jam and some mayonnaise.

In a panic, I ran out to the nearby épicerie and looked around, unsurprisingly finding nothing but stacks upon stacks of vegetables. This was far from ideal- I've always prided myself on proudly following in my Grandfather's footsteps by avoiding eating anything green as it's either a) mouldy or b) rabbit food. But here I was, a few days after turning 21, faced with a painful dilemma... betray my youthful anti-greenery principles, or go hungry? With a head full of shame and a heavy heart, I picked up a mishmash of the least brown-looking vegetables I could find, got back and chucked them all in a bowl with some jam and mayo and dolloped a ladleful of it on everyone's plates.

I'm not going to pretend anyone was blown away- but there were nods of approval all round, with one housemate offering up the backhanded compliment 'pas mal... pour un anglais!' Given that I share a house with a chef in a country which is arguably the food capital of the world, I'm probably never going to blow them away either, but as a self-confessed culinary retard I'm perfectly happy with 'not bad.' And you know what? Even though it goes against every single one of my principles... I liked my jam salad. And I'm going to make it again.

Grandpa... I'm sorry. Please forgive me.

The whisky-fuelled misadventures of Genjamin Bell

I'm finally back in France after the Christmas holidays, and it's definitely been an interesting couple of weeks. We had a huge family gathering, an amazing Christmas together and best of all, everything was in a language I actually understood for once. But probably the most blog-worthy event of my two weeks in England was our New Year celebrations, which I spent looking after a friend who may have inadvertently drunk a little bit too much. For the purposes of maintaining his anonymity and dignity, in this blog I'll be calling him... 'Genjamin.' Or 'Genjamin Bell,' to be polite and give him his full name. Anyway, quite early on in the evening Genjamin decided for some reason that downing a full glass of neat whisky was a good idea.

Needless to say, it wasn't. A few minutes later, we found ourselves explaining to an ambulance crew in great detail how he'd fallen down the stairs, burnt his mouth trying to smoke the lit end of a cigarette and then collapsed in a particularly pungent heap. Indeed, when we finally arrived at the hospital one doctor refused to treat him until someone had found some Febreze because "you could get drunk just sniffing that." Regardless, I ended up spending four hours on New Year's Eve by a hospital bedside, bringing in 2013 itself with a hug from a sympathetic doctor and a bite-size Mars from the bottom of a box of Celebrations.

Oh, Genjamin

Anyway, having spent the first few hours of the new year watching paralytic, vomit-drenched 15-year-olds being stretchered into A&E back in the UK, I've finally returned back across the channel to a country that, unlike England, definitely doesn't have any sort of under-age drinking culture whatsoever. Thank God for that. I've also managed to move into my new place nearer the city centre without too much trouble- apart from almost murdering the neighbours' cat after accidentally locking it in our house over the holidays with no food or water, it's gone pretty much without a hitch. I've got an actual house to live in, an actual fridge to keep my food in, some really cool housemates and the neighbours' cat is still alive and well... if maybe a little wary of coming anywhere near our house ever again. Things are on the UP.

Not only that, but after only a few days, living with French people 24/7 has already shown me a completely different side to France. I've spent the last few months making cursory visits to tourist hotspots, ordered the same old overpriced drinks in touristy pubs and spent far too much time speaking English, just like the lazy tourist I'd always tried so hard not to be. I've had an amazing time over the last few months, but in terms of what I've achieved and learnt it's all been worryingly superficial. Much like reading the script for an adult video, you get the idea- but not the point.

But over the last three or four days I think I've learnt as much French as I did in the entirety of last term (ie not as much as I could have) and I've started to learn a bit more about some of the little quirks of French life beyond chain-smoking and drinking wine with every meal. I've been watching French TV, read French newspapers, listened to French music and (more predictably) gone out to socialise in actual French bars. Perhaps the biggest revelation has been the demi-pêche, a neat little combination of lager and sirop de pêche which somehow achieves the impossible and makes even Kronenbourg taste genuinely amazing. I've still yet to try and see whether or not it makes Fosters drinkable, but I'm not optimistic- even miracles only go so far.

But regardless, a couple of days of French immersion and it's become painfully clear that what I've learnt over the last few months has barely scratched the surface of what I could (and should) have been doing all along- stop living like an Englishman and embrace the local culture for once. In the same way that doing some weed and fucking a hooker doesn't mean you've 'done' Amsterdam, excessive Camembert and passive smoking doesn't mean I've learnt anything significant about life in France either. With the new year comes the perfect opportunity for fresh starts, so as terrifying as it sounds my resolution is simple.

When in France...
...do as the French do.

Bordeaux, fucking bring it.