France II EXCERPT
Why do I keep coming back to France? Is it for the cheese, the relaxed lunches, or is it just because one’s weight always sounds so much more tolerable in kilos? It must be admitted that I love being abroad; even with progressive globalization, one can still find warning stickers on electronics that begin Uwanga! and Pozor!
France has so many eccentricities. Like coming up out of a parking garage directly into the faces of blasé diners in the geographical center of a plein air café.
The sugared violets are a regional specialty and you buy a twelve-dollar chocolate bar with these little gems embedded, feverishly unwrap it just outside the shop, break off a generous piece for yourself and for your partner, and shove it into your mouths. The hopeful expression on your faces turns immediately to disgust. You can’t quite put your finger on the flavor, but your partner nails it: “It’s like eating soap,” he reports with a grimace. It’s reminiscent of dinner at the Indian restaurant the other night in Toulouse, where at the end of the meal, instead of the pastel candy-coated aniseseeds one finds in U.S. Indian restaurants (those things in little dishes that look like mutant cupcake sprinkles), you’re expected to consume a bit of potpourri, the dried-wedding-bouquet-taste of which will linger on your tastebuds nauseatingly and ineradicably.
Due to the rudeness of those at the next table lighting up their cigarettes, you tell the waiter that you must relocate from your outdoor table to one inside, sorry for the bother but cigarette smoke gives you a headache. The waiter looks at the offending fumeurs and rolls his eyes. Only belatedly will you realize he rolled them at you.
Of course, actually getting to Southwest France from my Colorado home requires the nine-hour joy of an airplane seatmate with extreme halitosis and an Eastern European accent who has apparently memorized the Courteous Phrases section of his English phrasebook. “Sank you, Zank you, Zhank you oh very much indeed!” he tells you enthusiastically every time you so much as gesture that he can have the cold prehistoric dinner roll from your plastic-wrapped meal. He will offer his verbal gratitude in equal measure to the flight attendant who gives him a glass of water. “The water, it is sooo nice!” he enthuses. This young man will continually massage his own right breast throughout the flight and will, with utter abandon and lack of self-consciousness, use the tongs-proffered Refreshing Warm Towelette on his pits.