15. l’automne

I never considered that the blogs would be read by the locals, which was foolish in hindsight.
For the first several weeks of my job, after introducing myself, I was greeted with a slightly over-familiar look and ‘ah, yes - I’ve read your blog’. Each time, I slightly cringed at the thought of the rash cultural generalizations I’d made and muttered something apologetic.

But, at the risk of offending more French people, perhaps enough time has passed to justify another entry...

I sit on the sofa, for the first time in several months, with a cat. Obtaining said cats involved vast sums of money, kindness from friends in Boulder and bureaucracy. The final collection of the cats was a 2 1/2 hour tour de force of office apathy, with enough characters to make a functional sit-com (the mis-placed hiphop backing dancer at the main desk, the aggressive middle manager who was typing something very important and would talk to you in a minute, the guy who went out for a cigarette every 5 minutes, the impatient fork-lift truck driver constantly blowing his horn and the seventies throwback gel guy who gave everyone hi-fives whenever he walked into the room). 

We eventually, after some time, managed to establish that the cats were, in fact, in France and not some other random European country, cigarette guy made a joke about them missing some limbs - and they were ultimately delivered to us in an in-tact, but understandably pissed off state.
Our French is at an awkward stage - enough to participate in a conversation or meeting without switching to English necessarily, but not good enough to guarantee that you haven't completely missed the point. 

We have used this as an excuse to buy a TV. I haven't owned a TV since 2007, but we decided given our stumbling language progress that it might be useful to watch some trashy TV in French and feel slightly less dirty than one otherwise might.

Trashy TV late at night, however, is hard to find. The most common format seems to be debate programs, where a group of highly opinionated people sit around a table and have an argument, indefinitely. Last night, there was also a full length opera and a program about the pitfalls of nuclear power. The tone is lowered by British imports like 'le meilleur pâtissier' and 'danse avec les stars', which we have obviously watched enthusiastically (along with the endlessly entertaining ‘Mont Blanc Live’ which seems to show 24 coverage of people climbing mountains and grimacing a lot).
In the meantime, we have found ourselves endlessly speculating on the ideal living situation - living an awkward distance from the mountains where it’s too far to commute everyday, but too near to sensibly get a cabin (the latter being the general French solution to the problem).
We have, nevertheless, spent a lot of time looking at French property. The first thing you notice is that none of the adverts tell you where the houses are. In the city, they at least tell you the neighborhood, but in the mountains the houses are described in incredibly vague terms (“seulement 15km d'Ax les Thermes!”). 

This is apparently a strategy by French estate agents to protect their offerings - but it lends itself to a slightly addictive detective game of working out where houses might be based on rock formations, pylons and the position of the sun in the photos. I’ve lost more hours than I care to admit playing this game, each time triumphantly informing Rosie I’ve worked it out (usually to be told that she doesn’t like the house anyway).

There is an inertia to life here: attempts to live outside the norms, or to streamline inefficiencies are met with resistance which eventually just forces you to comply with the system. This can be also be illustrated through coffee at lunch.

In America, and specifically at NCAR, mediocre coffee was constantly available in industrial quantities. The system would not regulate your consumption, and you could obtain a small bucket of weak coffee whenever you deemed fit.

At MeteoFrance, one collects one’s lunch, queues for 5-10 minutes, pays for lunch and coffee, sits down with lunch in dining area 1, puts lunch away, moves to dining area 2, queues for another 5-10 minutes, obtains small cup of strong coffee, sits down in dining area 2, drinks coffee, eats 1 (just 1) piece of chocolate, goes back to work.

Any variation on this protocol - pleasant as it is - is met with force. There is a coffee machine and sandwiches in dining area 2, but the same (very hard-working) lady who serves the coffee for the queue is also responsible for dispensing the jetons for the coffee machine and the sandwiches - effectively negating any time-saving which those things might have provided (jetons, incidentally, are an establishment-specific currency, seemingly used to mitigate against the singularity by ensuring that every dispensing machine must be accompanied by a cashier who exchanges human money for robot money).

Il faut profiter de votre déjeuner (and resistance is futile)...