England Is An Island! Who Knew.
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So I’m currently on board this big ferry with our car, making the crossing from France to England. This is the first semi-decent Internet I’ve had in days. Anyhow, been having lots of fun so far, saw an Uncle and Aunt in France I haven’t seen since I was about 2 and noticing some odd things about Europe:
1. They don’t check your passport at any of the borders except to England
2. There are hardly any cars on the highway (compared to us) and I don’t know what the heck Eurocops do because I haven’t seen any.
3. Europe is very Ikea, designwise (this is a positive to me, but I hadn’t realized how strong that aesthetic is)
4. Italy has squat toilets. This is unacceptable.
5. Venice is proof positive that man is amazingly able to adapt to his surroundings.
6. French people WILL NOT speak English. I’m not being the ugly American here. In the countries I’ve been in so far, I use as much of the local language as I can and the people often respond with the English they know since they recognize immediately I’m American (I’m wearing a bright burgundy Redskins coat and I’m a big fat black guy, its no mystery). But not in France. They don’t do it in the rude way we stereotype them as, but sheesh, there’s not give. Total opposite of what I’ve seen in Italy, Czech Republic, and Germany.
Anyhow, I’m off.
25 Responses to “England Is An Island! Who Knew.”
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© 2000-2011 Oliver Willis
I think is *is* more about being American (and British, in my case) than you think. Like you say, it’s not out of rudeness, but the French are as staunch defenders of their language as any group of people in the world. Couple that with the fact that like the average Brit (or Yank) the average Frog doesn’t speak a word of any other language, beyond maybe ‘please’, ‘thankyou’, ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and I know plenty of Brits who would struggle even with that!
That said, I holiday in France almost every year, and I have to say I have more luck than you seem to have done. Students in particular are more than happy to speak English when they realise where you’re from.
Anyway, enjoy your time here! We’re having the coldest winter for 30 years, but I’ll bet it’s just a slight chill compared to what you get in the US. At least it’s a proper winter – everything white and frost with clear blue skies – rather than the grey wet misery we’ve had in recent memory.
No Eurocops? Try running a red light in Florence. Mussolini will stop you on his cycle.
“Italy has squat toilets. This is unacceptable.” ?? Never found one in three months’ stay. The Vatican has the most luxuriously appointed men’s rooms I ever saw.
Never been to France, always wanted to go. Four and a half years of French, though, and the only bits of it I speak are a few curses.
A.
I haven’t seen any squat toilets in Italy either. Been there 5 times (I married a woman with relatives in Tuscany! Yeah!!!) and only ran into one public WC that wasn’t decent.
Now, with all due respect, being “a big fat black guy” in Europe, firstly how were you treated, and secondly, how was the food?
It’s always about the food…
I’m glad you’re having a good time
#1 is caused by the Schengen Agreement. The Nordic countries have had a similar system since ’58, and it works pretty well, encouraging and speeding up travel considerably. Of course, it’s also abused by illegal immigrants, causing them to go through whatever country is the weakest link when it comes to enforcing immigration laws.
#2: I haven’t seen US traffic myself, but quite a few of the big cities are centuries old, and thus were not initially designed for cars. Consequently, while many do own a car, there’s a sizable segment of the population that uses public transportation, staying off the freeways.
As for cops.. With the relative rarity of guns, response times are not as crucial and thus there’s little or no random police patrols. Day-to-day peacekeeping is mostly done via private security cameras and guards. In general, it’s less like Serve & Protect and more like Log & Cleanup. If the stereotypical U.S. cop is like Mills from Se7en, then an eurocop is like Somerset.
“1. They don’t check your passport at any of the borders except to England”
It’s called the Schengen treaty, and eliminated most internal borders in Europe. It’s nice to not have to change money any more either.
“2. There are hardly any cars on the highway (compared to us)”
The mass transit systems are much better, especially the trains. If we had the level of Metro systems that most major European cities have, I wouldn’t need or even want a car.
“6. French people WILL NOT speak English. I’m not being the ugly American here. In the countries I’ve been in so far, I use as much of the local language as I can and the people often respond with the English they know since they recognize immediately I’m American (I’m wearing a bright burgundy Redskins coat and I’m a big fat black guy, its no mystery).”
France has substantial communities of African and Caribbean immigrants, so as a black person you wouldn’t stand out there the way you would in most parts of Europe.
“But not in France. They don’t do it in the rude way we stereotype them as, but sheesh, there’s not give. Total opposite of what I’ve seen in Italy, Czech Republic, and Germany.”
Maybe they can’t speak English. In general, I found Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians all speak English, but when you get to Spain, Italy, and France, many people don’t, and you need at least a few words in the local language to get by.
A slight correction. Great Britain is the island comprising the countries of England, Scotland and Wales.
french people spoke english to me when i went to paris.
The mass transit systems are much better, especially the trains. If we had the level of Metro systems that most major European cities have, I wouldn’t need or even want a car.
Also, I understand that the cost of petrol per unit is MUCH higher in Europe.
The automobile and oil industries have made sure that Americans are dependent on cars. Our public transportation system is like our healthcare system: a sick joke, and the boys in the boardrooms are hell-bent on keeping them that way.
Mostly the french will help you out if you make an effort to speak their lingo. Buy a phrase book. I was once in Caen on the way home from a french holiday on my own with time to kill. I went into a 2nd hand book store and said “Excuse-moi, Je suis anglais, Je suis perdu, Je voudrais acheter des disques de Saint-Saens”. After that the guy showed me what he had, and then, having nothing I wanted, directed me to FNAC (a great record store). His english was better than my french, but my effort was appreciated. I think they have a good attitude towards government, because they will man the barricades to make their points.
His english was better than my french, but my effort was appreciated.
My only trip to France was many years ago, but this describes my experience also.
“French people WILL NOT speak English.” Umm why would they since they are French and live France? You have to remember you are a guest in their country, so do as they do.
It’s cool though that you are traveling all over Europe. Please take a lot of pics and share.
My wife and I went to Paris and Nice for our honeymoon in 2006. I would always say “Bon Jour, Parlez-vous anglais?” and about 75 percent of the time they would deal with me in English (note that we generally were in very touristy areas…)
Now perhaps our appearance had something to do with it; I generally wore my black leather jacket and my wife’s hair was (is) dyed bright red – so we often were mistaken for Germans (a bit of irony on one level as I’m of Hungarian/Ukranian Jewish ethnicity)…
“A slight correction. Great Britain is the island comprising the countries of England, Scotland and Wales.”
Nope…Great Britain is the archipelago comprising the countries of England, Scotland and Wales. Britain is the island…the local small islets combined with Britain is called “Great Britain”.
In the 21st century no island is an island (with props to John Donne and Earnest Hemingway).
Regarding squat toilets in Italy, we were there last spring, and only encountered them once, as public toilets in a small Tuscan town.
All others, whether in hotels or restaurants, were the regular variety.
It’s been a long time since my one visit to Paris, but I still remember the waiter who was horrified by my attempt to order une verre de thé.
After failing in several attempts to understand my final syllable, enlightenment arrived, and he responded “THÉ!” I couldn’t hear any difference between his pronunciation and mine, but the waiter only spoke to me in English from then on.
Once I was in Bologna and saw a briefcase in a store window. I needed one and the price was right.
I don’t speak Italian, but I didn’t want to be one of those jerk Americans who expects everyone to speak English. I hauled out my pocket dictionary, looked up “briefcase” and “window,” entered the store and said very carefully to the clerk: “La cartella en la fenestre, per favore.”
To which he replied, in a Brooklyn accent: “Sure. The brown one or the black one?”
There’s a flipside to this, too: The fool who thinks he or she is the only one around who understands English.
I once had a colleague who is American, but is married to a Frenchman, lives in Paris and speaks perfect French. One day she was riding the subway and there were these two American girls, sisters, sitting across from her. One of the sisters began telling the other about her sex life, and in graphically intimate detail. I mean, think of stuff that would have gotten censored from “Sex in the City”—the HBO version. My friend thought about coughing and saying something like “Nice weather today,” or whatever, in English, just so they would know she could understand them. She didn’t, but she could feel herself getting redder and redder.
David Sedaris has a funny story along those same lines.
He was riding the Metro one day when an American couple standing next to him started talking about him as if he didn’t understand English. They made all kinds of rude remarks about his hygiene and his probable propensity for criminal behavior. Now they’re the stars of one of his funniest essays.
One of my fond memories from my first visit to Paris back in the late ’80s involved the English/French issue. I was in a department store and asked the saleslady a question in my rather shaky French. She answered in French. Another question to clarify her answer (in French). She said, with great tact and courtesy, ‘We couid speak English if you’d rather.’
I’m sure that if I’d started out with English, she’d have eaten ketchup rather than admit to being able to speak it.
My dad told me a story. He used to be part of a team of security people at the main postal sorting depot (millions of pounds flowing through this building). There were people from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds. Some of the guys would only speak Urdu to one another, and if you were the only non-urdu speaker it seemed rude. So my dad and the Irish/scots started doing the same thing with gaelic. After a week, english was standard.
The Urdu speakers did a similar (Dave Sedaris style) deconstuction of one of the cleaners once, little realising he had gone to his local mosque a few years before and had become a fluent speaker of classic(koranic) arabic, Urdu and Farsi. When he held the guy up to the wall with his mop and remonstrated with him about his opinion, the Urdu lads’ faces were apparantly a picture.
Somehow, Olivers’ comment about the French not speaking English reminds me of IV, “Seeing the World” from this.
What kind of car have you got? If I were over there I’d rent a Citroen.
Happy trails!