Three years ago my family and I moved to France 🇫🇷. We left the United States 🇺🇸after living there for more than 16 years. Today, I am no expert in France or the United States, but I am a bit of an expert on their differences. While both France and the US are both prominent parts of the western world, they do not share the same culture. France has to a large extent avoided American influence, making it quite unique in western Europe. Some of these differences involve informal institutions: cultural norms & attitudes towards life and work. The United States, for instance, is a culture of scale and volume. Despite a vast territory, it carries a uniformity that is hard to deny, from the ubiquitous presence of red Solo cups, to the oversized obsession with giant wedding cakes. America is about making it big: becoming rich, growing famous. France is quite different. It is a culture of quality and differentiation. Take French cuisine as an example. Unlike other world cuisines, which are characterized by dishes (e.g., Italian pizza or Spanish paella), the French restaurant experience is one where chefs are always adding their own twist. Almost any dish can be served in a French restaurant because what makes it French is the attention to detail in the preparation. French restaurants also tend to focus on few dishes, and I am not talking about Michelin star restaurants, but regular lunch places that serve a fixed menu at noon. Many of them are great, and provide a very contrasting experience to that of the American dinner. No 20-page plasticized menu with 100s of options (none prepared very well), but a few carefully crafted dishes each day. It is not about more, bigger, or faster, but about fewer, different, and better. No architectural scale sponge-filled wedding cakes, but delicious and beautifully crafted petite gâteaus that satisfy you with taste, not size. My experience in France has of course, also been unique. France may not look very big on the map, but it is a country with important regional differences. In my case I live in Toulouse, a city in the southwest, in between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and once the capital of the Visigoth kingdom. Its' downtown is a wonder of urban planning, with medieval streets and gorgeous public spaces that are usually filled with life. And in some ways, Toulouse is still the capital of its own little world, being more than a 4-hour drive from other large cities (Barcelona, Bilbao, or Marseille) and as far from Paris as you can get, it is large and far enough from other big urban centers to be its own thing. Free from tourists and souvenir shops, it is an oasis, despite having immense architectural beauty and a one million people population. But there are other ways in which France has been kind to us. Our story in Toulouse started in October of 2020, amid the pandemic, and the first gift we got was for my daughter to start attending school in person right away. In the United States, she was scheduled to complete all of first grade in Zoom. In Toulouse, she never had to be a remote elementary school student. Once the pandemic subdued, we begun to explore Toulouse’s surroundings, discovering quickly that we were not going to run out of weekend trips anytime soon. Google places like Cordes-sur-ciel, Albi, Mirapoux, Lectoure, Auch, Rocamadour, Sarlat, Fortress de Penne, and St Antonin-du-Noble-Val just to get an idea of the dozens of medieval villages that are a short drive away. That’s not counting Carcassonne which is too touristic to be relaxing :o). You can literally throw a dart on a map and find an amazing place to visit in a landscape that has remained virtually untouched for 800 years, since the Albigensian crusade. Of course, like in all places, not everything works perfectly in France. But that’s something that I do not need to share here nor today. Overall, these three years have been an amazing and an interesting adventure, in a particular part of the world that I think it is as good as it gets.
@cesifoti How much of a challenge hassle the language been? Are you all fluent French speakers?
@cesifoti Hello C.H., my wife and I also moved to Toulouse from the States. We moved back in 2019. It's a wonderful city - and the contrasts between France and the States are substantial. How's your French coming along?
@cesifoti Pay a visit to Puycelsi if you haven't already, also the nearby forest of Grésigne is a nice quite place to go for a hike.
@cesifoti Reminds me of when I first moved to the US and a classmate informed me he found a "great" sandwich place near campus. "Great" for him was large portions for a good price and I was hoping he found a place with very tasty sandwiches 😅
@cesifoti If you go past Carcassonne, I highly recommend spending some time in the beautiful Corbières — similar landscapes to Provence but with not nearly as many tourists