Letters From Languedoc

Howard Burton

• Verlag: Open Agenda Publishing Inc.
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771701389
• Thema: Développement personnel
• Thema: Voyage

In this engaging epistolary memoir, Howard Burton describes his early experiences of moving with his family to a medieval hilltop village called Le Pouget in Languedoc after years of running Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. The Languedoc region is sometimes referred to as the "real South of France"— thanks to its largely unspoilt, breathtakingly-beautiful countryside, traditional wine-making villages and slower pace of life. This delightful book details what it is really like to move to France and try to build up a new life in a culture that Howard and his family thought they were familiar with until they encountered countless surprises, some positive and some negative... In addition, Howard provides a hilarious dose of social commentary on the very unique political and educational system in France.

Going Native (slowly)

October 7, 2007

Dear N & L,

We live, as the Chinese are reputed to cryptically say with some regularity, in interesting times.

This past week began with both Irena and myself becoming slowly yet steadily consumed by the growing drumbeat of despair that is naturally associated with the increasing awareness (and concomitant feelings of guilt) of having summarily dumped our children in the equivalent of educational purgatory.

By Thursday evening, buffeted by the daily ritual of picking up our despondent children, we had come to the conclusion that the whole Languedoc immersion experience simply wasn’t working and it was time to simply yank them out of their pernicious scholastic environments and investigate other alternatives, come what may.

First, however, we had to tackle yet another barrage of unsavoury administrative tasks on Friday in nearby Montpellier. Montpellier is, as you are probably well aware, a bit of an odd place. The old centre is unquestionably charming and engaging, replete with beautiful old buildings along wending cobblestone streets that seamlessly integrate the classic with the modern, yet the outlying areas which ring the old city are almost uniformly dingy and unappealing. The University of Montpellier, with its celebrated medical school, has long been a star in the international educational firmament (I believe Petrarch studied law there), yet these days the principal academic areas are quite removed from the centre which seems almost exclusively geared to shopping and tourists (of which there are zillions, particularly in the summer). It is obviously a growing city, doubtlessly propelled by its enviable southern location, with construction going on virtually everywhere, but seemingly in an incoherent, almost random manner.

Infrastructure is a curious combination of very good and very bad. The public transportation system of trams appears to be both modern and efficient, while numerous convenient and easily accessible underground parking lots have been constructed to accommodate even the mighty hordes who descend each summer. On the other hand, there is, rather bizarrely, no real “ring road”, so that anytime one wishes to drive around the city en route to anywhere else, one is forced to confront endless suburban roundabouts and sit in lengthy traffic queues on inappropriately narrow roads.

Our first destination was the airport to retrieve some additional bags that my mother had graciously shipped over. We drove down with some trepidation, convinced that French officialdom would force us to provide them with an itemized list of the contents (which we didn’t have), our cartes de séjour (which we still don’t possess), or some other as yet still-uncontemplated document that eluded our wildest bureaucratic dreams/nightmares.

In a desperate effort to prepare ourselves for the bureaucratic unknown, we equipped nonetheless with passports, driver’s licences (Ontario and Dutch), our rental contract, bills from France Telecom addressed to us in Le Pouget, sundry bills addressed to our Canadian address, copies of our marriage certificate, photographs of the children and sundry other documents that vaguely testify to our existence on planet earth.

An hour and a half and several dozen roundabouts later, we managed to locate the Air France Cargo outlet, a facility that has all of the imposing presence as that of the Le Pouget post office, which we discovered was manned by one lonely fellow in a small poorly lit room who was immersed in a crossword puzzle.

I introduced myself and he seemed particularly pleased to see me, from which I could only surmise that I was one of the very few customers he had this week (month? year?). As I thumbed through the labyrinth of our accompanying paperwork to see which document I should provide to identify myself, he hurriedly pressed two sheets of paper into my hand and told me to go upstairs to talk to customs. Vaguely disappointed that I still remained officially unidentified (you see what this place does to you?), we mounted the stairs to penetrate the customs office—here, presumably, the real fuss would start.

We entered another room that was unoccupied save for a back office where two kindly middle-aged ladies were engaged in a discussion, while a small dog scurried about. The dog, having spied us, rushed over to greet us while we were left uncertain as to how to proceed (Knock on the counter? Gradually raise our voices to higher auditory levels? Cough loudly?). In the end, I elected to simply pick up the dog and play with it, thereby demonstrating my palpable Canadian friendliness together with a potentially eye-catching manoeuvre to attract the necessary attention from the authorities.

Some five minutes later, one of the ladies eventually noticed us—or perhaps the lack of the dog in her orbit—meandered over and apologized profusely for the delay, asked us whether or not we liked France and unthinkingly stamped our documents. All of this while her interlocutor came over and repossessed the dog, shaking her head while informing us that he was hardly the sort of beast that belongs in a customs office, given his propensity for merrily going off with n’importe qui. Maybe, the other laughingly suggested, they should try training him to sniff for drugs and contraband instead.

I smiled wanly, inwardly charmed by the situation but still very much instinctively terrified after so many years of waiting in airport queues reading signs sharply informing me that ANY PERSON WHO MENTIONS FIREARMS, SMUGGLING OR NARCOTICS IN THE PRESENCE OF A CUSTOMS OFFICIAL IS SUBJECTED TO IMMEDIATE SEARCH AND LIKELY INCARCERATION. At any rate, five minutes later, we were back downstairs with the sleepy Air France Cargo man who glanced briefly at our customs stamp, asked us to pay 42 Euros as part of the ubiquitously mysterious “airport tax” and promptly hauled out our bags to the nearby loading dock before returning, presumably, to the land of crossword puzzles, exhausted after fully utilizing his customer-service skills for the week. The whole thing took perhaps 10 minutes, and most of that was spent playing with the dog.

Of course, this bureaucratic smoothness would not last. From there, your intrepid correspondents marched off into the bowels of administrative hell—straight into the heart of the Montpellier Mobistore where I was now a quasi-regular, having been there twice before already (once to order my phone line and discuss various internet “package” possibilities and another time to officially sign my fancy “internet contract” with livebox—the fancy apparatus, I’m led to believe, that actually allows one to use an ADSL connection with one’s computer).

Some background, sadly, is required here. As I believe I already mentioned to you in a previous missive, unbeknownst to me at the time, the France Telecom technicians had not actually installed an ADSL phone line when they connected us (on The Day of the Decapitated Bunny, you may recall), leaving me unable to use any of the home internet apparatus that duly arrived by courier several days after The Signing of the Big Contract (What is it with French bureaucrats and the act of signing contracts, by the way? They treat the whole experience with so much pomp and circumstance, I always feel drastically underdressed whenever I sign anything).

I discovered this, as it happens, when I tried to connect my livebox and found that its automatic diagnostic check kept stalling at the “check ADSL line” stage—no fool, I. Frustrated, I phoned the friendly woman at the Mobistore (“you can always phone me if you have any problems” she had cheerily informed me during The Signing of the Big Contract) and explained my issues before suggesting that perhaps the France Telecom guys had somehow not installed an ADSL line after all given my difficulties, requesting that perhaps she might phone them on my behalf to verify matters.

She breezily replied that she thought that highly unlikely, that the order was well and truly in her computer (?!), that the contract was, of course, signed (?!), and that in any event she certainly couldn’t phone France Telecom because they were a completely different organization. She coolly recommended that I phone the Orange service number (Orange, the service provider, is also, needless to say, a completely different organization) displayed prominently on my documents if I was having any difficulty in following the installation instructions.

Well. At this point, I began to appreciate that I was dealing with forces that were well and truly beyond my powers, and decided that, under the circumstances it might be best if I could find someone else to phone the aforementioned number on my behalf—partially because I hoped that some of the difficulty might be traced to my French, but also because it wasn’t clear that I had the necessary social skills to handle the looming conflict and I might just ruin any future chance for a phone line by having an excoriating exchange with these bozos—discretion being the better part of valour and all of that.

So I arranged for a French acquaintance of ours to do the dirty deed. Unfortunately, her level of technical expertise makes me look positively Edisonian by comparison (a difficult feat, I can assure you) and so I had to run through the entire (aborted) installation process several times in her presence before she felt she had the necessary knowledge to grapple with the service line (thereby soundly defeating the purpose of engaging a native speaker to begin with).

Eventually, not without some trepidation, she made the call and discovered that…yes indeed,...