How terribly amusing to read about your American forays into Europe . You will never understand . Henry James is the only American who understood Europe .

Your families sacrificed their culture for the idea of freedom . Freedom is a terribly noble word , but what your families really wanted was MONEY . Nothing wrong with that of course . But that heritage means that you have lost Art . And you have no culture of your own in strictu sensu .

Hey, they have like a 1000 year head start... give us a chance to catch up! Now that we have some money, we can buy us some culture.

france and culture are 100 years apart and repelling each other by ever increasing orders of magnitude.
The french traded their culture for imperialism then fascism, and more recently for multi-cultural-ism that's coming home to roost in such a way that french will mean nothing at all.:ninja:

The French...in my experience, are a very rude and arrogant bunch, even when they're in someone else's back yard. They can shove their culture up their clacker and get some manners through the back door.

If they ever decide to apologize for blowing up the Rainbow warrior or Islands in the south pacific, they might get me (and maybe others) to care about their so called 'culture'.

It turns out there is a continuing low level of violence in the Paris suburbs. 3000 police wounded this year. An average of 112 cars PER DAY torched in France this year.

When I was in France, in 1985 there were a few things that stood out to me.
First was how filthy Paris was. (In comparison to NYC , my point of reference) People just dropped their trash as though mom were right behind them.

You could easily spot the metro stations by the thousands of discarded yellow tickets on the ground right around the entrance. It was as if the staircase was vomiting up yellow tickets and hadn't wiped it's face. Looking back on it, I wonder if the riders somehow felt contaminated by the thought of holding the ticket any longer than was absolutely necessary.

The second thing was how politically active the yutes were. (ages 18-28) e.g. (this is a simulated exchange)
a: Hey there's a demonstration tonight over in the 15th arrondisment wanna go?
b: What are we demonstrating against?
a: The standard weight of a baguette has changed from 550gm to 500gm.
b: The batards! I'll be there.

Rocks were thrown, wine was drunk, barricades torched and the next day everything was exactly the same.

Cherbourg was very different.

In both places I failed to detect the hostility that is usually ascribed to the Frentch. (Again, cf NYC)

One thing in my favor was that I had a few weeks of intensive accent drills courtesy of my employer, an American who had spent a decade in paris and could speak perfect French but was illiterate in French.

When I found out I was going to France (another long story) he said to me "you haven't got time to learn to speak, but you do have time to work on your accent, so for the next four weeks we'll speak English, but with a French accent. That way, any French you learn will sound right."

So for the next four weeks before my trip we spoke all day at work in French accents. He would not teach me to say "I don't speak french" He said that phrase was a dead end. Rather he taught me "Je ne comprend pas" Because of my awesomely accurate accent the upshot was that people thought I was either hard of hearing or mildly retarded. No one ever spoke English to me.

A FOAF I was visiting was an American who was teaching French in France, that is how good her French was. When we went out, the French would routinely answer her in English, me in French.

Anyway, that is my France story, as much as you're gonna get anyway.

But they love to drink, but not get drunk, they like to be politically active but not accomplish anything, and they like them some food.

In baser chakra terms, it's all about the foreplay. Orgasm? I've had mine, you're on your own. (metaphorically speaking, of course)

Christ, UT.....that sounds like Iraq. :eek:

anywhere in Italy
 

I spent a year stationed in the vicinity of Catanzaro Lido, Italy and would much rather be there than Paris. I realize the French culture is "truly superior" to anything to be found in Southern Italy, and if the French didn't have the "superior attitude" to match their culture I would probably have enjoyed the week I had planned to stay in Paris in the fall of '66, but after a single morning I moved on to Amsterdam. If I had been able to afford doubling back, I would have spent another week in Italy (in my mind, either Rome, Naples, or Catanzaro Lido would have been preferable to Paris). :greenface
Don't forget, that most French asset of all, French Cuisine, is based on the skills of the chefs brought to France by Catherine di Medici:

http://www.naciente.com/essay93.htm

note - I have been told the phrase you want, especially if you have a good French accent, is " Je ne parle pas Francais". It seemed to work well for me during the week I spent at Villefranche sur mer (where people were slightly less obnoxious than in Paris)

Jerry Murdock

Shame you missed Paris in May 1968 , Jerry . You could have thrown paving stones at everyone who annoyed you there .

"let he who is without sin cast the first stone" (not me)
 

No, thanks, I generally just try to avoid people who annoy me, and I am really hard to annoy. I especially try to avoid riots (kept my head down in a taxi in Panama in '64). There was a lot of serious hatred for Americans in France during the mid-late '60s, and I never found any other place where I felt that uncomfortable.
I did get back to Europe in '69. My ship spent 2 days in Naples & then went to Lisbon for several days. I got off in Naples & divided 12 days between Naples and Rome & then went to Lisbon for the remainder of the time the ship was there.
I always got the impression most American sailors dislike Naples, but it is one of my favorite cities - probably because it is so convenient to Pompeii (and maybe just a bit because of the delicious calamari, gamberi & such and the beautiful ladies) ;)

Jerry

No passionate love ? No closed shutters ? No lovely smiles from lovely girls who brought a slice of melon too . Or a cold beer , and a quick and lovely smile from a girl you knew could never be your wife ?

Of course all that . The fastness of love when, you are young
It has to be fast
Because
We are all going to die .

That's the spirit Ibram. Enjoy, you're going tourist class! I've briefly worked in France; but, never got to Paris. :sniff: My time was spent in, around, and over the Normandy region. It all happened during multinational military exercises for me. I had the advantage of having attended the Defense Language Institute (Presidio of Monterey, CA) course in French and my language skills were marginally acceptable at the time: I even got "adopted" by a couple of families who were exploring American culture and took me home as a guinea pig. One farmer and his 6 year old son even brought me breakfast in bed (he brought a picnic basket out to the poncho hooch where my A Team was camped on his land). A French lieutenant I worked with brought myself and another team member home for dinner with the wife and kids. Somewhere during the exercise [strategic reconnaissance] I managed to jump (maybe I was pushed) out of enough French aircraft that their government awarded me the French Military Parachutist Badge. Except for the one time that the French Air Force put us out too low and too fast for a static line jump causing one team member to hit the side of the aircraft and lose some equipment, another team member to tear an inguinal ligament upon landing, and yet another team member to break a leg, we all had a really good time (afterwards, they were buying all the drinks!). I hope that your experience in tourist class will be as rich and diverse as mine was in working class. It probably couldn't be any worse. :D

Moral of story: be sure when you purchase your airline ticket you pay for a takeoff and a landing.