French Culture Shock || Expat In France

Tutorial Transcript

Salut Youtube! I'm back again for another video in my culture shock series because I love doing them, you seem to like them and I really love talking about what life is actually like for a New Zealander living in France these kinds of things are just the little things that make you want to say hey have you noticed that or is it just me? So if you love talking about cultural differences between people like I do stick around we're about to get into it Okay so the first topic I want to talk about is gonna be a little bit sensitive I know for French people because French people love their comic books but I noticed something a little bit interesting about the comic books and I just feel like I need to get off my chest. For me comic books are something from childhood we had Asterix and Tintin and Batman of course the us kind of Avengers style comic books and stuff but it was something aimed at maybe you know kids too young teenagers and here is definitely you know accepted as an adult to absolutely love comic books and to collect comic books and because there's a wide range of adult comic books and of course you can get really dirty adult comic books like adult adult comic books but then you've just got your standard adult comic book where there's lots of stories of adventure real life and the you know you get into characters you know just like you would with a novel or a film and just like in novels and films you know a part of life is that characters have sex and I just can't get my head around that when I see it as part of a standard storyline in a normal adult comic book we're just in the store and then suddenly this character that I'm really getting into like a strong lead female character she'll be having sex with her lover and I see this little cartoon character enjoying it and having a good time I can't compute I'm kind of like I bug I'm like but because there's the the childhood association of cartoons and comic books for me and then this and it makes me feel like really prudish because I feel like oh that's naughty to see that like no is anyone gonna see me looking at this thing I'm so perverted but it's just so normal it's just just like as part of novels and in most films it's just a story get over it like this is just such a standard thing and so yeah I just want to talk about that that's kind of funny maybe a culture shock that you may experience living in France. The next thing I want to cover is an object that I didn't realize existed can anyone tell me what the hell is this? I encountered this for the first time in my boyfriend's father's home in Avignon in the South of France and I saw it in his bathroom and I was like what is that device this device apparently is called a bidet and it's there to squirt water into your parts. Um why do you need that? I've never felt the need to apply pressured water to that area you know showers baths they often suffice. My auntie actually made a joke that is you know based on the French cliche that French men all have mistresses and they go and visit their mistresses during the long lunch break that it's to freshen up after such an encounter midday I don't think that that's true, I don't know. French people, help me understand in the comment section please. The next point I want to touch on is the insane amount of yogurt that you will eat in this country I think because in France you like a lot of countries you have a breakfast lunch and dinner but what's kind of surprising about the lunch is that it's just as big if not bigger than the dinner and almost an obligatory part of that is a dessert you eat that at lunchtime which I never used to do before and I do now and I have to admit it's a real pleasure. But you know so that you're not eating creme brulee or mousse au chocolat you know every single day at lunch and dinner this kind of thing they often just like to seal off the meal with something sweet and often that's a yogurt or some fruit but it's really like tripled my consumption of yogurt because I don't often you know used to eat yogurt breakfast time but now I eat a yogurt to end lunch and dinner like you have a yogurt often after dinner here as well so you may be eating I don't know like let's say an average of two yogurts per day seven days a week 14 yogurts per week! And the way they eat the yogurt is pretty strange as well they take plain yogurt natural yogurt and then they manually add like white sugar to it so they'll pour the sugar into the yogurt and mix it up and then eat it and I don't really get it because we have sweetened yogurt already pre sweetened and it's nice and smooth whereas when you like mix and sugar into a yogurt it becomes like textured and kind of grainy and yeah that's just the way they like to eat their yogurt and they eat a lot of it. Another point that I wanted to kind of touch on is that in the workplace you kind of sometimes have to court people to do their jobs you have to almost convince them that you're a likeable person that you get on well that there's a kind of relationship there in order for them to do sometimes their job for you. A concrete example is in one of my companies here I had an HR who just would never email me back I would email her I have questions and she would never ever get back to me and then I bumped into her at a kind of workplace event and we got chatting and we decided to take a lunch together and we had a lunch together and it went really well and since then I have never ever had a problem with her, she emails me back in like 15 minutes. For us you know if you receive an email well you've got to reply to their email that's that's part of your work contract like you've got to do a job that's part of doing your job is replying to your emails whereas here it's like I don't know this person. It can also help to put a more senior person in copy of the emails if you need a reply from someone but you haven't had the chance to meet them in person yet that's another hack for getting people to reply to you. Another thing that you'd notice if you move to France is that it's okay to say that you're not okay or something's not okay so if someone asks you like how are you it's okay to be like yeah not great pretty tired you know and speaking of tired people talk about how tired they are a lot here I've never heard this phrase so often like it's je suis fatigué - it's really like people talk about how tired they are a lot I think when you're learning French for the first time you should learn like Bonjour merci au revoir Bonne journée, je suis fatigué because honestly you use it a lot but anyway my point is is it is okay to say that you're not okay you know where I'm from you're like how are you yeah good good and that's, full-stop, that's how far it goes whereas here you can be like you can complain you know you can you can let it out a little bit you can let off the steam you can be like oh I had a terrible morning with the kids or whatever it may be and it's it's a release it's a form of release and I mean it's okay to not be okay and that's yeah more human we're not okay the time and that's okay we can talk about that here in France. Something I've noticed in France as well as just there's something weird around table placement normally like for me when you go out with a bunch of friends I mean and there's 12 of you arriving I mean you just take the seat and you sit down and that's fine nothing you know nothing matters like if you'll be in front of someone maybe you don't know them so well but that's fine you'll chat and you'll get to know each other here I've noticed when you're in a group sitting and you're going for a sit-down meal there's a thing where you do almost like this dance of like okay so this person will sit here and that person will sit here and you take the time to like think about it and talk about who's gonna sit where and why and like "oh they'll get on better" and they'll do this and it's like can't everyone just get on equally? I mean we can mix it up like it doesn't always have to be the best friends sitting together and the boyfriend sitting together or like whatever it is. We just sit wherever we sit like we don't take the time really to like think about it whereas here there's a moment of like okay what's gonna work the best with the best dynamic and kind of like overthink the table seating thing I think you know just the other day I had a kind of business meeting with people that we didn't know them we were a team in kind of a staff restaurant with them and the most senior person was yet to arrive and we had this moment like oh wish if she searched she should she be at the head of the table if she sits there she'll be opposite this person and that and I'm like honestly. Okay the last thing I want to talk about is kind of very specific to my field of work and it's because as part of my job I run trainings but I also noticed this when I was a student as well that when French people are are in classroom kind of sittings whether that's in school or in trainings there's a lot of this chat-chat down the back of the room or yeah like whispering or just not really being there and I noticed because I mean we run international trainings so we have people coming from all around the world to the same training and it's always the French participants chatting between themselves, it's always them and I don't know it's like maybe you guys aren't disciplined about it at school or it's your way of kind of like rebelling from a very strict rule based structure such as school or a training environment I don't know what it is but I have noticed that. Cool guys so that's another video done and dusted unfortunately I wish I could keep chatting about these things for ages I love talking about cultural differences this is the reason I started my youtube channel but until the next Video Wednesday because yes I release videos every single Wednesday for those of you who aren't subscribed yet please subscribe if you want to see those come out but I'll see you guys next Wednesday A bientôt!