If there is one thing the French are good at....

Other than making cheese, making wine, and making love (though this last one I cannot personally attest to), it is looking sexy on a bike. Yes indeed, any two-whelled vehicle, motorized or not, will do. Heels required.

I've seen the sexy 2 piece suits (bottom half a skirt, of course), wish distressed hair and fuck me boots on a vespa. I have seen the flirty, frilly skirt with a satiny v-neck top, strappy heels and a bike. I have seen the boring 40 year old office worker in a suit bought at McFrumpy's, with heeled pumps, riding a bike with a grandmother basket in front, looking totally ravishing, simply becaue she is pumping her way up a steep hill.

But seriously, heels and a bicycle makes you about a thousand times more attractive, especially if you manage to ride without looking a fool. And double extra bonus points if there is any kind of skirt involved.

****

So back to those wheely backpacks. Remember when they were popular because kids were doing too much homework and had these billion ton backpacks that were giving them scoliosis? Apparently they are big here.

I was in town one evening getting some food items at a grocery store, when I noticed a lot of people walking around with these rolly suitcases. I was kind of surprised, but I figured it was the end of the day, maybe all these important people had just come off the train from Paris (or some other important town where important things get done). Until I started seeing full grown adults, at all hours of the day wheeling around these suitcases. Then one day, I saw a colleague at work wheeling one out the door with them on the way home.

Then it dawned on me: not wheely suitcases, but wheely briefcases.

Wheely briefcases = definitely not sexy.

Negative quintuple attractive points for sporting one of those, even if you do ride a bike with high heels.

Somethings never change

Dear all,

I feel it my duty to post something since I have not at all participated in the web-bashed haberdasher since its inception this summer, this largely being due to my absence from the United States and/or extreme laziness.

That said, I now bring you greetings from France, where they don’t know what a QWERTY keyboard is they think that a nozzle attached to a long hose coming out of the wall qualifies as a shower.

I hope not to bore you or overwhelm you. So quick update: am living in Nantes, France with a colleague who is actually my boss but insists he is just a colleague, where I am regularly berated for using the polite vous rather than the personal tu. I am struggling (read: failing) to find an apartment for myself before I run out of my boss/colleague’s goodwill and before classes start on the 18th.

So this week was la rentrée, when everyone comes back to work after their long summer holiday and all the kids go back to school. I accompanied my boss/colleague’s wife to pick up her kids from school. Once back home, I was relieved to find that the French school system has not in any way changed since 1965. All good French schoolchildren still carry the same requisite notebooks, binders, notebook covers, and loose leaf paper with them every day. Even their backpacks have remained essentially immutable other than the addition of rolly wheels, an innovation which, you will recall, swept the world in about 1999.

Children, are in fact, as I once was, still not allowed to use white out to correct their work, but must use an effaceur which essentially erases fountain pen ink. I was so struck by the similarity in childhood office products since my days in a French school that I was motionless with fear as one of the girls produced a black notebook. Our black notebooks were always reserved for Dictées, a way for the French educational system to cultivate secretarial skills in all of its citizens: dictated tests. On that one point, France at least has evolved, black notebooks are now used for other subjects.

My knitting continues to be a source of entertainment and the butt of all jokes, as it was in Chile, where my host family doubted I would ever finish. Now my “host family”(read: boss and his wife) joke that I am like Penelope and will be knitting for all time, waiting for a husband to appear.

It is good that some things never change. It would be a lot better if the space bar on my computer worked...