Two Weeks in America

The Readjustment

I know Carolyn wrote last week about reverse culture shock, but I have a few things to add about daily life in our two countries as I readjust to life in the US.

The morning after we arrived back in Austin, I was out walking Woody at 5:00am. It was dark and a screechy, lurching SUV drove past us at 30-35mph. The driver was well within the speed limit, but the velocity and mass of the vehicle caught me off guard; it literally made me gasp out loud! (Is GOL a thing?) have gotten used to living in a pedestrian area where the very few cars we see are smaller and much slower moving due to the pedestrians, cobblestones, narrow streets, and limited sight-lines in the old city.

Place Notre Dame, Montpellier. A lively evening, not a car in sight.

Talking to people is different. By that I mean, we don’t talk to each other here. Besides the customary bonjour one offers to nearly everybody on the street, I have several interactions every day when I run errands in Montpellier. I now look forward to seeing everyone. I talk to the guy at the meat stall, the vegetable lady, the cheese team, the family that owns the restaurant downstairs, the barrista at my local coffee shop. Maybe somebody stops to pet Woody and we have a quick exchange (to be fair, that often happens in the US as well). On my recent trips to Central Market (in Austin) for groceries I felt like something was missing - it was, I didn’t interact with a single person! Not in the parking lot, not in the aisles, not at the self-checkout line. On another trip to that same store, my only interactions were at the butcher counter, “Hey, good morning! One and a quarter pounds of sugar-free bacon, please”, and at the checkout lane, “Good morning, I’ll be paying with a card.” Aside from possibly saying excuse me as I squeezed past a other carts in the shopping aisles, that was it.

When we first got to France my American sensibilities found it annoying that people would invest a minute or two talking with the cashier every place they stopped to pay someone - at the lamp shop, at the grocer, at the barber. Didn’t they see I was in line behind them, didn’t they care that they were slowing me down and making everyone in line wait. No, they didn’t, and they’re better off for it. They talk, they are neighborly—it’s kind, it’s community-building. It is so different than here, where interactions with neighbors aren’t built in. Unfamiliarity breeds contemnpt and I can hear the impure thoughts of the person behind me in line when I take a second too long to find my bank card, or don’t clear my bagged groceries out of their way quickly enough.

Another example of this dearth of personal interactions shows up on the jogging trails. I run or bike several times a week in the morning and I try to give at least a friendly wave or say good-morning to each person I pass. It’s genuine friendliness and tribe-building (hi runner, I’m a runner too!) on my part but also a way of signaling “I’m not a threat/I’m an ally” to people who might find my presence intimidating—women running/walking alone, the elderly, etc. Mostly I get no response, not even a quick wave in return. Maybe those are defense mechanisms (I could see how it feels safer to not interact at all), maybe they have a podcast or music blasting in their ear buds and don’t hear me or see me. I’m not judging, but I find the French version preferable.

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Trash and recyling: again, I vastly prefer the French system! In Montpellier nobody owns outdoor trash cans. There are large plastic dumpsters on every block which are owned by the municipality. Everyone, households and businesses, shares the bins. Trash goes into the bins with the black lids and recycling into the bins with the yellow lids. (Unfortunately, there’s no centralized compost collection, but maybe that’s different in parts of France where people have yards.) Trucks come around several times a day to empty the bins. The worker gets out of the truck to push the bin into position and sweeps up any mess that spills onto the street. It struck me as funny, inefficient, and much less sanitary when I saw all the individual cans lined up on our block in Austin last Friday. As always, I had to look up our collection schedule to see which cans to put out, since recycling is only collected every two weeks. Instead of one bin, the workers have twenty on our small street alone, and so the process is automated. The truck’s mechanical arm gracelessly grabs the cans and flips them overhead, resembling a move that my college judo instructor called Ippon Seioe Nage. The driver rarely gets out of the driver’s seat and can’t see that things have spilled. After the collection, there’s always a few plastic bottles or clamshells blowing around in the street, probably destined for the creek that runs through our neighborhood, and ultimately the ocean.

I fear this piece reads like I’m developing a bias for France. I still love it here in the US, too. On the cobbled streets of Montpellier I have missed my jogging trails with their predictable, crunchy surfaces. And the Tex-Mex! I have missed spicy food and Tex-Mex…okay, mostly the corn chips and guacamole.

PS: Who’s been watching the Tour de France? I’m excited that stage 16 is passing right by Montpellier! I have been following the race on-line but haven’t yet tuned in.