A French Laundromat
Mark K October 24th, 2007
I’m standing in a Laundromat in Limoux, France with my notebook resting on top of a washing machine. There’s a perfect little niche for me to stand in, and the washer-top is just the right height.
It took me awhile to figure out how to use the French washing machines, but there was a very nice English woman (there are quite a few English people who own homes in this part of Southern France) who explained how to do it. You put your coins in a machine on the wall that looks more like a change machine in an American laundromat. Then you push a button corresponding to the machine where you have loaded your clothes and the washing cycle begins. Put in more coins and select the soap, and the soap dumps into a plastic cup at the bottom of a nearby soap dispenser.
One of the few times that I ever saw a French person become unpleasant was when a French couple entered the laundromat and the husband forgot to return the plastic cup to its home in the soap dispenser before the wife purchased 40-cents worth of soap. What followed, while the soap dumped into a messy pile at the bottom of the machine, was some finger-pointing and blame-assigning using French phrases that aren’t in my limited vocabulary.
After spending a week in France, we still haven’t encountered the notorious French bad attitude or anti-American beliefs.
Peter Mayle, in his book French Lessons – Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew, retells a legend about how God created France. It seems that France’s European neighbors were jealous that France had so many outstanding qualities: The Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, mountains and fertile valleys, southern sunshine and romantic northern winters, an incredible cuisine as well as the finest wines in the world. The neighbors decided to go to God to complain. After presenting their case, God thought it over and had to agree that he had perhaps been a bit overgenerous with the part of the Earth occupied by France. And so to make up for the inequalities, God created the French. The other Europeans went home happy, feeling that justice had been served.
We had been told that when you try to speak French and do so poorly, the French will scoff and either correct you and rattle off something in incomprehensible French or shame your efforts by responding in English. I found this not to be the case at all. Although the first French words out of my mouth were usually, “Parlez-vous Francais?â€, I found that the natives were polite and receptive even when I ventured to say something more ambitious.
I have two theories about why people were so polite. The first is that people tend to mirror the attitude that you bring to the interchange. Treat people decently, try to fit in with their culture, show respect and curiosity, and you will be shown respect in return.
My second theory is that people treat me differently than when I traveled through France in the 1970’s because I can now afford to stay in respectable hotels, eat at fine restaurants, and take taxi cabs, rather than lugging a backpack and spending the night in a youth hostel or even worse – sleeping on a bench in a train station waiting for the morning train. Many of the people who are so nice to me today are charging quite a few Euros for their services, which may put them in a more receptive mood.
I don’t really believe this, though. We had plenty of encounters with people in a variety of situations and they were almost always either friendly, or at the very least, civil. Like the legend of the creation of French, stereotypes about the “difficult French†make for good stories, but have very little to do with reality.
