How we feel about our adopted country

This post is the fruit of discussions in the Americans in France group on Facebook and lunch with Victoria. Victoria has an excellent blog, The Franco-American Flophouse. We met and became good friends about 5 years ago. She's shuttling back and forth between France and Japan and has gone back to university for a degree in international migration. It's a subject we always talked about from the first time we met.
Now, back to that Facebook group. It's made up of mostly Americans, as its name indicates. It seems to me that most of the participants are fairly recent arrivals. The questions are about obtaining and renewing visas, getting student status, finding some kind of work. There is also a core of very long-term residents who are always answering questions. I'm one of those.
Discussions often turn to food and other comfort items one misses from home or where to find this or that. The other day, I put up the link to the Costco website because the first store in France is due to open in June. It was just information. It turned out to be a can of worms. Most people seemed to like that I posted it, but among the ones who chose to comment, there was a lot of negativity. They see the arrival of Costco as importation of the worst of American consumerism, American products and so on. We have to be French, buy French, shop in an idealized, French movie set.
I don't want to discuss Costco, other than to say I'm fine with seeing it arrive in France. What bothered me in the comments was the attitude of some of my fellow immigrants. They were taking such a superior stance. More French than the French. Got to save French from rampant, evil Americanism. My examples relate to Americans, but you see the same thing among the British, and quite frankly, among other immigrant groups.
This is what Victoria and I spoke about over lunch. She thinks it might be a class thing and she can explain it better. There are the wealthier expats, who are abroad on a company contract and who will return home. In many cases, the trailing spouse can't get a work visa and seeks the company of fellow trailing spouses. Their children get to go to the expensive international schools. Then, there are those who came on their own, married a local, and need to integrate into the local culture. They don't have the money to live the movie-depicted elegant life of an expat. They even consider the term expat derogatory. Yet, if they come from an OECD country, they might not want to call themselves immigrants, either. That's a whole other discussion.
My question is "What's with the attitude?"
I first came to France 47 years ago. I've lived here, permanently, since January 1972. I'm French. I feel perfectly well integrated until someone points out that I still have a pretty little accent. France has changed dramatically since I arrived. More women work. Little shops -- the butcher, the charcutier-traiteur, the cheese shop, the fish monger -- have disappeared. There is still the market, with those stalls, but fewer stalls. I like to knit and sew, but fabric stores have all but disappeared and so have notions. Yes, I get nostalgic for the time I could walk into Nogent and find whatever I was looking for, and now I might have to schlep into Paris or troll the Internet. I take these changes as societal changes that would have happened anyway. Look at the changes in society from 1900 to 1947, the same time period -- or any other 47 year span. Another friend who writes about us with great humor is Harriet Welty Rochefort.
The fact that there are so many "hypermarkets" in France is a purely French phenomenon, not imported from anywhere else, and they have drained the life out of many town centers. Costco will not change that; it's happened, already. In fact, it's the hypermarkets that fought to prevent Costco from entering the French market, not the smaller shops. The fact that hypermarkets usually form a ring around the towns is based on the laws that were passed to protect the town centers from the big stores. Instead, they've killed the towns. They didn't need the influence of Walmart for size or for discount stores. The result is, in my opinion, a disaster for many cities and towns all over France. In France, the discount store phenomenon comes from Germany. The same thing has happened in England. There's no turning back the clock, though. Feeling sorry that the Singer store is gone is not going to prevent me from going to Lidl to pick up the sewing machine on special sale. The fact that we have a grocery store on the corner that sells almost everything we want doesn't stop us from going to Auchan to stock up. This is something that the French do. It's something people do. We go for less expensive options.
Now, what about the attitude of turning up your nose when people mention their cravings for things from "home"? Or for the familiarity of a brand or the name of a store? I like to think of these cravings as the impetus for diversity, from all sectors. We go to the 13th arrondissement in Paris to buy Oriental specialties because of the influence of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Chinese population, there. There are supermarkets dedicated to those products. Anyone complaining about the imperialism? We can even find small bottles of soy sauce locally! Yes, we can now find Oreo cookies (made in Spain) in France, now. But in the US, Americans now have Lu! Is it because of the cravings of the Americans in France that McDonald's is so successful? I don't think so. If the French didn't want to go to McDonald's, they'd shut down. (I'm not a fan of McDo, so if they counted on some sort of American faithfulness to anything sounding American, they'd shut down.) When newcomers arrive, they might love what they find, here, and still miss things from home. As time goes on, either they find substitutes, discover that whatever they were craving is now available, here. As we get older, our tastes change, too, so we just don't crave for what we did when we were twenty. I no longer have a list of things to bring back from the US.
I hate getting the question on whether I cook American or French food. I cook food. I do not make a point by not making a good hamburger if in the mood. I do not go out of my way to make boeuf bourguignon, either. I welcome the newcomers with their questions and concerns. I'm friends with the long-term immigrants.

A big family weekend

May is the month of long weekends.  May 1st was on a Monday and that coincided with the May Bank Holiday in the UK, so Claire organized a family get together. It was supposed to be a big family birthday celebration since it's so hard to come together on birthdays. So why not designate a date that we could all agree upon? She queried us all about our availability for the date. She set the place as Toulouse because it's not really all that hard for us to get there. The Parisians and Brits could fly in. Paul and I drove down because we expected to extend the weekend. Emma and Gabriel live only an hour and a half away, by car.
Add to that the difficulty of seeing the Lebelle cousins more than once in a while and never together, which led to extending the invitation (for a Sunday lunch) to Pierre and Gillette's family. They answered the call and we were really looking forward to having everyone, but a couple of weeks before the date, one of theirs had to drop out. He was returning to France from a business trip just the day before and had to leave on another the day after, so his family stayed home. And another of our nieces just finished her exams and stayed home. That meant a group of 21 instead of 26 for Sunday lunch. Not bad!

The participants and some extended family have received a link to the shared online photo album and since almost all the pictures are personal, of us, I'm not sharing them, here. However, here is a photo of the yard of the house we rented. We had a cat and three chickens.
It was a big old farm house with lots of rooms that had been transformed into small apartments big enough for each to have a separate bedroom, living room area, bath or shower, and kitchenette. Each family unit had its own apartment ("gite"). On the ground floor, there was a big kitchen and living room, so we didn't use the kitchenettes in our apartments. We arrived on Friday and, after a little rest, went to the airport for Anne, came home, had a spaghetti dinner before I returned to the airport to pick up the British contingent. Saturday morning, I returned to the airport for the Parisian group and those arriving from Tarn-et-Garonne arrived. Claire had a visit from one of her Toulouse friends and, after a pizza lunch (really good pizza, for once), we headed off on the tram to visit the Airbus site, where we had a visit to the A380 assembly hangar. It being the May 1st weekend (that's the sacred Labor Day, here), the line was closed down, but we could see just how enormous those planes are. It's a shame the guide we had was not more enthusiastic. She rattled off her numbers and was a bit impatient with kids who were trying to ask questions.
Sunday, we walked along the Garonne to the restaurant, where we met up with the others. I think we all had a good time: loads of varied conversation. The children all played well, together. V. is closer to adulthood and seemed pleased to discover her dad's cousins. We continued the visit back at the house until they had to leave. Monday, May 1st, everything was closed -- almost everything. There was no public transportation, no tram. Some took our car to go into Toulouse for a short visit, a walk around the city center. Others went into Toulouse in the afternoon, after the first family left to return to Paris, and took a boat ride on the river. We emptied the house and dropped the last ones, the British contingent, at the airport late in the afternoon and headed towards Najac.
Spring is so lovely. There is such variety in green. Everything seems to be green, except the colza, which is in full yellow bloom. This is the southwest and there is a water deficit. In summer, it'll be all dried up but for now, it's beautiful. Our home away from home is the Hotel Le Belle Rive, where we are really welcomed as old friends. We spent Tuesday with Emma and Gabriel, but because I had a sore throat and back ache, we decided not to prolong the stay and returned home on Wednesday.

We had an adventure! A tire blew out. A few years ago, this happened to me in England, the right front tire. Well, this time it was the left back tire. We were very lucky to find the emergency phone safety zone just a couple of hundred meters away. We called; a really short time after, the highway emergency van came by with a very friendly guy. Handshakes all around. He called the local garage to find out how long they would be, but almost as soon as he hung up, they were there. They installed the spare tire you are not supposed to drive much on in a very short time and we were also very lucky that the next exit was just a couple of km. away. This gave us the chance to drive slowly through the green countryside, again, where we saw lots of sheep (and lambs) and cows (and calves) and wheat fields, still green, and colza, all yellow. The idea was to find a tire shop somewhere on the way to Limoges, and we did. In fact, in the shopping zone just outside of Limoges and on the road we were on (no extra detours!) there were two shops opposite one another, Feu Vert and Norauto! Once the tires were mounted, we had a quick lunch and hit the A20. I think the entire tire incident cost us less time than the traffic jam around Paris, when we hit it before 5 pm. We didn't get home until well after 6.
The only thing I'm going to say about the election is that I'll vote early, tomorrow and I don't know if I'll volunteer to count the votes as I did two weeks ago.