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Brittany is the Wales of France.

Its inhabitants are a repressed minority speaking a Celtic language denoted most visibly by bilingual road signs. It is a popular tourist destination for French people. It often rains. Apart from the lack of sheep and glut of seafood, you would be forgiven for mistaking the beachy-at-the-edges, countrified-in-the-middle region for some kind of slightly-more-socialist Doppelganger of Cymru.

(Oh, I am enjoying my use of the lang attribute.)

I spent my time there visiting a friend from college, Ivo, who has a house in Saint-Quay-Portrieux, a small port-orientated fusion of two towns on the coast.

Our activities could be roughly split into three categories:

• Visiting stuff

  We visited a variety of bits and bobs in and around Saint-Quay, with a few trips to the nearby Plage Bonaparte (including one especially “merit”-worthy one I’ve already documented), the town and beaches of Trégastel with its crazy pink granite. We also explored Saint-Quay itself, and did a short walk along the coast from it to the Plage Moulin, which has nothing at all to do with either Nicole Kidman or windmills.

• Playing board games

  I’ve learnt to play Mahjong (a bit like gin rummy with small, ivory tiles), Risk (I’d never managed to actually play this on a board before) and a couple of sundry card games. We also played an ancient French version of Monopoly: Park End, or Avenue des Champs-Élysées cost some ₣35,000; 100 times more than the British £350, implying it was from the time before the Franc was multiplied by ten in value - an action taken by the French government to stop all the British tourists throwing ₣100 notes around and saying “Bloody Monopoly money!”

• Being confused by the food

  We made some food ourselves and ate out some nights. Seafood is a local speciality, with the fishing-boat rich port nearby, and indeed the moules were rather pleasant. The worst thing about the restaurants was their distribution of menus with English translations. In a pizza place on the final night, we all got handed menus entirely en Anglais which, frankly, is just plain insulting because Ivo, the only one who did any real speaking, did so in perfect French. What’s even worse is that their translations are often worse than we could have divined for ourselves with a little French knowledge. A different restaurant helpfully told us that a French peculiarity known as lardons (small bits of bacon) translated as lard cubes. Way to put the British tourists off the perfectly innocent pizza topping!

  Sadly, no opportunity to try escargots arose. However, I suspect even the clichéd snail-eating is not as odd as the deep-seated differences between French and English foods.

  The first thing, and a good thing too, is the French attitude to bread: in France, bread has a fixed price meaning that local bakers are not squeezed out by the hypermarchés (with such wonderful names as Hyper Champion! and Super-U), with the net result that my one culinary snobbishness was truly sated. I shall leave the diatribe on supermarket bread over here for another time.

  The oddest difference, though, is that the French do not understand cooking apples or cream. And when I say “do not understand”, I mean do not have a concept of any kind whatsoever about cooking apples or cream.

  Chloë and I, on our night to cook, decided to make a dish (which supposedly originates in Normandy) involving pork, cooking apples and cream. Pork was easy enough; neither of us knew any French words for cuts of meat, but we avoided the suspicious things which looked like trotters, and all was good. Then, we headed for the fruit and veg; no cooking apples. We asked the shop assistant: les pommes…pour la cuisine? He walked us over to the counter until, using broken French, we eventually got him to ask us so, you want to eat them hot? Oui, oui! we implored. So…err…what colour would you like?

  Truly defeated, we grabbed some Granny Smiths (that seems to be what they call them) and headed for the aisle with the milk. We found crème fraîche, milk, and nothing in between. We asked a woman at the checkout: La crème…double? Single? Comme lait? She just kept telling us that crème fraîche was lovely. It seems that the French miss out completely on an entire range of viscosity when it comes to dairy products, diving straight from milk to crème fraîche and soft cheese. A sad and bizarre thing for a nation so stereotypically culinary.

So, that was France. I learnt a few new French words, hurt my feet, tried some seafood and became disillusioned by the lack of kitchen staples and their grasp of English.

What disillusioned me even more, though, was my grasp of French. Some day soon I’ve got to stop blaming the British schooling system and learn a foreign language proper. Then I’d be able to make a purposely misleading menu for French tourists.

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005 21:54 | permalink | trackback