France v. England

August 10th, 2017

Before we arrived in France, I had a mental model in mind for acquiring all of the necessities for our apartment and daily lives: buy what was convenient and not too expensive at local shops and use amazon.fr otherwise. I may need to amend my model. Package delivery here is a challenge. The complete address we gave to FedEx to deliver a box of work papers to us was apparently not complete enough. We finally received it after a week and half by calling FedEx and changing the delivery address to work. We did manage to receive three boxes we shipped from home, but only because we happened to be home when they arrived and the housekeeper for the building happened to be in the courtyard and willing to open the gate and the door to our particular building. That being said, I have placed a number of Amazon orders that have arrived. It may be that the key is ordering things that arrive in boxes small enough to fit into our mailbox.

I’ve had an interesting time contrasting my year in Cambridge England (1987-88) with this year so far. One obvious difference is that I am thirty years older. I think those thirty years have made a marked difference in how I have approached moving to a new country. Also, I did not come to Paris alone, as I did to Cambridge thirty years ago. (Cambridge was, in fact, where Glenn and I met, and I made other dear friends during the year, but I didn’t know a soul there when I arrived.) Somehow, I thought that language would make a bigger difference, that the transition here would be so much more difficult because none of us is very good at French. Not so---let me illustrate. When I moved to Churchill College in England, I was told that “this is a college, not a hotel, so there are not phones in the students’ rooms.” With a little further digging, I found out that I could, in fact, get a private phone line, but the installation would cost 300 pounds and I would have to wait a minimum of three months before the installation would take place. And the monthly fees were also extraordinary. So I resigned myself to go without, scheduling a time when my parents would call and I would post myself by the common phone in the hallway to answer it. (I could not actually initiate it myself because there was no way to pay for the call.) The lack of phone led to some local inefficiencies as well. When I played squash for the college team, the method used to reschedule a match was that I would have to cycle the two miles to the college where my opponent lived, put a note in her pigeonhole with a list of acceptable times for rescheduling, and she would then have to cycle out to my college to leave a note settling on her preferred time. We always hoped the rescheduling could be achieved in one cycle, but sometimes two were necessary.

Here in France, we were able to walk into an Orange, pay 80 euros for a smartphone, sign a contract for 12 euros a month to get unlimited calls and texts and 2 gigs of data, and walk out in about 20 minutes with a working phone. Obviously much of this difference is attributable to technological progress, but I wonder how much is attributable to the differences between huge city and medium-sized town and the differences between French (relative) efficiency and British love of bureaucracy. Whatever difference knowing the language made was negligible. (Note that technological progress cannot tell the whole story. The backwards situation in the UK was at a time when every college dorm room in the US had a phone which worked immediately upon arrival.)

I also recall that I had flown to England without packing a toothbrush, for some reason. I landed at Heathrow on Saturday, made my way to Cambridge, and didn’t quite get my act together to go out to buy a toothbrush until the evening. All the stores were closed, of course, as they were the next day as well. My teeth went unbrushed until Monday morning. Despite August closings, I’m sure that one can now easily buy a toothbrush in Paris any day of the week, well into the evening.