Ethnography: Cultural Autobiography

 I grew up in & around Birmingham, England*, not the one in Alabama, nor the crater on the moon, although growing up, it sometimes seemed like either would have had more culture!  Birmingham seriously reinvented itself when I was in my teens and that changed a lot then.

As a child, with Birmingham being the second largest city in the UK, and being very multicultural, I was exposed to a lot of different cuisines, the most prevalent being Indian food.  My mother still tells people about taking me to eat at an Indian restaurant for the first time when I was three, and the waitstaff lining up along the wall and exchanging bets about whether I would eat the food.  Apparently, I had been eating Indian food at home since about the time that I was weaned, so my mother would have liked to get in on that betting pool!

I had several friends at school from quite an early age who were from different cultures, including one when I was about eight, whose family had moved to the UK to avoid the reunification of Hong Kong with China.  That was when I learned that you could rent a country like a house, and that according to her, everyone in Hong Kong had an English first name and a Chinese first name, and depending on where you were, you just swapped the order around - so I knew her as "Anna Woodyan Liu" but in Hong Kong or China, she would have been "Woodyan Anna Liu".  I had also learned years earlier from a children's tv program how to which someone happy new year in Chinese (although not which language it was or that there were multiple Chinese languages).  From her, I learned that there was a proper response to that phrase too. 

I started to learn French when I was 8 or 9 too, at that same school. This was really good timing, as when I started guides, it was in a neighbouring village, which had a twin town in France, and I got to go on a trip to France on my own at age 11 - I had my birthday that week while I was away, and they found out because my exchange friend, Sandrine, asked to see my passport, I think to see the awful picture, and saw the date.  First time away from home, apart from staying at my nan's, and my birthday away too.  They made me a pineapple cake as a surprise for my birthday, which was really nice of them, except I didn't like pineapple when I was that age!  

I had a whole week in France during our autumn half term holiday, and they were in school that week, so one day, I got to experience what French school was like, and read their English textbook and see how English was taught, which was an interesting reversal.  They had an imaginary example family called "Brown", I think.  We had the imaginary French family "Bertillon".  We also went on a scavenger hunt one day in the nearby town, and I had somehow acquired two other girls who were younger than I was by a year or two, and spoke even less French...  The coach dropped us off at one place on one side of the town, and we were given a map, and the first clue.  We were also told that if we couldn't find the clues, the coach would be at place x at a certain time, and just to head there...  

Needless to say, after not very much time, we were hopelessly lost, and couldn't find any further clues, nor could we have retraced our footsteps.  Couldn't even use the map, because we had no clue where we were - unlike the US, there wasn't a grid system there or in the UK, and street signs were a lot less plentiful than they were at home in the UK.  After we decided to give up, as the oldest and with the most French, I had to find someone to ask the way from (& having recently learned terms like "a droit', "a gauche" & "au boud de la rue", I felt really confident asking directions...) And so I approached an old French woman for directions and asked her where our destination was, and showed her the map.  Apart from having to ask her to "parlez plus lentement, s'il vous plait" (a useful phrase to learn in any language, and 先生 has already taught us that in Japanese, I was doing really well, until we had more direction instructions than I could remember...  It must have been fairly obvious from my face when I ran out of memory and was sure that we would never get there, and she stopped in her list of turns, and looked at me, and the two smaller kids behind me, and made a "follow me" gesture and set off with us trailing behind her like lost chicks...and guided us all the way across town to the car park where the coach was waiting, and barely waited for us to say "merci" before heading off to continue her day that our plight had dragged her away from.  I doubt we were the only ones to have got lost, as they never did an activity like that in any of the following years... it could have ended really badly!

My mother that first trip had told me how jealous she was of all the nice wine that I would get to drink - growing up in the UK, we had learned that French families allowed their children to drink wine at the table, although usually watered down - and I had agreed.  About the first thing she asked me when I got off the coach when I came home wasn't if they had nearly lost me and other children (& I still don't think I have ever told her that story ;) :D - good job she isn't online and what see this, or I would probably hear the screech all the way from England!), but if I had had a lot to drink.  I growled in frustration that I hadn't had a drop, but that they had sent me back with some for her as a gift.  

My mother had been making wine since I was about six when someone gave her a winemaking kit as a gift, so I had grown up allowed to have a little wine with meals, and that is legal in the UK, even out at restaurants once the children are about ten, and with the parents' permission.  My mother thought that the French family probably assumed that , being English, I wasn't allowed to drink till I was eighteen, because the culture and attitudes to alcohol were different on the continent...

So when Sandrine came to stay the first time, my mother made sure that there was wine with every meal (or at least it felt like it, I suspect that she may have skipped it for breakfast though...) , and made a point of offering some to Sandrine and pouring some for me.  That definitely did the trick, as on the next trip, I was introduced to her grandfather who also homemade wine and offered to try his home made wine... However, I was introduced to him as "Fiona, la jeune alcoholique"... :o You know, this may explain something that happened on the wedding trip**. 

These trips continued all the time that I was in secondary school, with us going there spring or autumn, and them coming to visit us, spring or autumn.  Always one trip each direction, each year, two weeks of exposure to each other's culture each year - and staying in a French home, instead of a hotel, and learning that her father loved watching Benny Hill, which the UK had grown out of, thankfully, by then... It was odd seeing that dubbed into French! :D 

One trip, they had several family members over for Sunday lunch, and it was a special meal, and they sat me at the foot of the table, as the guest, although with Sandrine on one side of me, and her older sister, Valerie, on the other. So it was the kid's end of the table, but also the seat of honour for a guest.  And they were having whole lobsters for the first course... I had eaten lobster before, but I had never had to do the dismantling, and the whole family was sitting there waiting for me to start first, because I was the guest.  Luckily, it was fairly obvious what to do with the individual nutcracker-like tools by every place, and once I had made one crack in the big claw, everyone else was free to start eating, and I could slow down enough to copy them for how to actually get the meat out of the shell... It is really nice bring treated as the guest of honour, but it comes with unexpected pitfalls too!

Also notable that meal was the fact that Valerie didn't have much of a sense of humour, but partway through the meal, when Sandrine cracked part of her lobster, it squirted bright orange lobster juice all over her and me (& I was wearing a mohair sweater that had been knitted for me by my grandmother, that was in multiple shades of grey that faded into each other, so not only did it really stand out, but it was going to be a pig to get out). Valerie absolutely roared.  It was obviously the funniest thing since her father discovered Benny Hill...  For some strange reason, she didn't find it anywhere near as funny when the same thing happened to me a few minutes later, but it squirted juice all over her instead! :D

She came across on the next visit to us with Sandrine, and also didn't find it funny when my mother dropped the bottle of wine when she was pouring for people.  She didn't just drop it - it spun round when it hit the table, like a lawn hose, spraying wine over everyone, but mostly over Valerie... :D I don't think that's why she never came back again, but it probably didn't help.

One time, my mother even went with me to France, and that was odd, the change in the relationship there, going from having been the guest, to now being the second ranked guest, and very visibly the child, even though I was probably about 17 by now, and also having to do all the translating for my mother, as she didn't speak a lick of French, and she was wanting to have in depth conversations with the adults... which would have been more worth it if we could have gotten Mme Savre's recipe for her soup out of her.  My mom would have traded her homemade tomato soup recipe for it...  Madam Savre was a wonderful cook, and her regular everyday soups were wonderful.  She also made amazing scallops (and I later learned, when I tasted it in something that I cooked myself, that the main herb in that was tarragon.  I still don't think my mother has ever used tarragon).

It was even interesting just having different meals - croissant and hot chocolate for breakfast, and the hot chocolate was in mugs that were as wide and deep as a bowl, and Sandrine would put butter on the croissant and then put it into the hot chocolate, and the butter would melt and stream across the wonderful chocolate...  That wasn't something I liked, although I did like the hot chocolate bowl mugs - especially as it turned out that milk tasted different in France than in England.  They used UHT milk rather than pasteurised (which seems odd as pasteurisation was invented by Louis Pasteur who was French - but he invented it to stop wine going off, not milk, so perhaps that is why).  UHT milk tastes different because the heat affects the flavour of the milk, and that affected the taste of the tea... even before having to heat the water to boiling in a saucepan on the stove, rather than having a kettle that you just flipped a switch on.  That shouldn't have changed the flavour but seemed to, so hot chocolate was the big win.

Because we stayed in touch even after I went away to college and could not go on the trips (college terms in the UK don't have half term holidays, like the US has Spring Breaks, they run straight through), when she got married, I was invited to the wedding.  I flew to Paris, and then took the Paris Metro to the Gard du Nord, and then the train to Auxerre, where Sandrine was living.  When I was queuing up at the metro station to buy my ticket, I rehearsed what to say in my head, as I was a bit rusty, and the ticket agent instantly replied in English rather than French, which was depressing, but probably a lot faster.

When I arrived in Auxerre, I stayed at Sandrine's apartment, and I helped them get ready for the wedding.  The day before the wedding, both families were decorating the village hall that they were going to have the reception in, and partway through the afternoon, the young males of the families, decided to take a stroll up the street to the local liquor store and came back with a couple of crates of beer bottles, which they thought would help make the task easier.

There was just one technical hitch - they were not screw top bottles, and not a single one of them had a bottle opener on them, nor had thought to buy one.  I, of course, had one on my penknife***, and was very popular and did a brisk trade in opening beers for people...

I was fascinated by all the French wedding customs that I got to see and from the inside - they got married in church, then the whole wedding party walked to the mayor, who then did a civil marriage for them.  At the reception, there was a "hemline auction" - the bride was stood on a chair in the middle of the room, and then bidding commenced.  Anytime a male gave money, the hemline of her dress was raised.  Anytime a female gave money, the hem was lowered again.  The whole bidding process was conducted with much good natured yelling and cheers & probably gets a lot more wedding gift money out of relatives than if they just included it in a card with a note, the way it is done in England (if you're not getting something from the wedding gift registry for the couple).

The final odd custom was that the whole wedding party walked them back to their new home, and then stood round and presented them with a chamber pot - into which a lump of chocolate that looked a bit like a Mars Bar was put, and then a bottle of champagne was poured in on top.  You can imagine what the resultant admixture looked like... and then the happy couple was supposed to eat and drink the whole thing up together... I have no idea what the purpose of that tradition was!

I think it was this trip that I realised how much variation in accent there was in France even in as short a distance as the hundred miles or so South of Paris that we were - learning French in school, you are supposed to learn the Paris accent, just like people learning British English as supposed to learn Received Pronunciation (Queen's English****) rather than any other accent.  I had recently read "A year in Provence" & learned that the south of the country actually pronounces the end of words, but while I was there on this trip, Sandrine said something about going for "lavian", which sounded like l'avion to me (airplane), & it wasn't the right day (earlier, she had been insisting that they would drive me to the airport, instead of having to catch the train back to Paris), but after much back and forth, it turned out that she had been talking about going out for viandes - food/provisions, and hadn't pronounced the d even though there was an e after it...

* Although, my mother points out that when I was born there, it was "the Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield" and not part of Birmingham at all - they redrew the lines after I was born, just like they changed the money from pounds, shillings, and pence, to a decimal currency, with 100 pennies in a pound, instead of 240. Even the culture I grew up in was changing all the time.

** footnote just to keep track... spoilers, sweetie!

*** I did say that the alcohol stories above might explain something that happened at the wedding - that's me having a penknife that has a bottle opener on it.  I don't think I've been without a bottle opener since then - even when security stopped allowing penknives, I already had a keyring that was a flat bottle opener, a souvenir from a brewery tour.

**** yes, isn't she?