France: the mood is rude

Ok, it’s official—France is the rudest country on the planet.  Seems that a company called Skyscanner.com, which claims to be Europe’s leading travel search site, surveyed its users seeking informed opinions (i.e., from people who have actually travelled to the countries they are disparaging) about how various nations treat foreign travellers. A whopping 1200 people responded from all over the world (although a preponderance of them were European) and to nobody’s surprise, 19% named France as the place most likely to insult or offend foreign visitors, with Russia following closely behind with 16.5% of the vote. With 33 countries named by the respondents, just three countries—France, Russia and the UK—managed to amass a full 46% of the total vote!

So, if France is the rudest country in the world, it must stand to reason, then, that the French are the rudest people in the world, right? Never having been to France and having met precious few French people in my life—although the one I knew best certainly would win no prizes for her courtesy towards others—I am not in a position to definitively declare the French a race of boors, but simple logic would lead you to the conclusion that, in order for France to be declared the rudest country in the world, it must be because its citizens are significantly lacking something in the courtesy department, hein?

So this got me to thinking…

When people want to give something a touch of elegance, when they want to evoke sophistication and grace and classiness, the go-to vibe is inevitably French. Whether deciding to call your coffee shop a bistro or sidewalk café, whether evoking illusions of Versailles or the Champs Élysées, whether channelling Coco Chanel or Christian Dior…if we want to bring to mind class, elegance, and style, we turn to the French.

We even do it with language. If we want to sound erudite and urbane, we toss in a vis à vis here and a faux pas or billet doux there, knowing the cognoscenti will recognize us as one of them, and everyone else will just pretend to know what we are talking about. Despite our recent falling out with the French, renaming their delightful fried potato fingers “Freedom Fries” in a petulant attempt to teach them a lesson about reciprocal support in times of trouble, we still look to the French for those things we subconsciously consider better than prosaic American sensibilities. If it’s French, it must be classy!

So how do we reconcile this sense of Frenchness being sophisticated and worldly with their apparently deserved reputation for being the rudest people in the world? French was once the language of diplomacy and international business, having been supplanted by English in recent years, and a mental image of couture-draped women dripping gems, French tripping lightly off their tongues, is what pops up when one thinks of embassy functions and soirées. Exceedingly polite diplomats and foreign functionaries concealing their deceitful intentions behind correct smiles and polite French phrases, rigidly correct, excruciatingly refined…this perception does not square with the exasperated “Merde!” muttered as another foreign tourist butchers a patriotic Frenchman’s mother tongue with his crude accent and ridiculous phrase book.

I suspect that France—and the French—are no more rude than anyone else, that the denizens of big cities like Paris fall prey to the stress of their environment like New Yorkers and Johannesburgers, and that in more laid back environments we might find gracious hospitality rather than rude rejection.

Then, again, maybe the French are just more willing to be honest than the rest of us, less politically correct, more true to themselves and their expectations of what it takes to make a satisfying life—which, in their culture, may not include being excessively patient with visitors who seem to think everybody in the world should speak English and drop what they are doing to serve the unintelligible stranger.

There is something inherently flawed in judging other cultures based on our own values. An American or Brit might find himself repulsed by the Japanese visitor’s loud slurping and lip smacking at dinner—while the Japanese host would find himself insulted at the carefully silent dining habits of their American or British guests. Perhaps what we non-French consider rude the French consider merely expedient. It is absurd, after all, to go to a foreign country and expect its denizens to ape your own sense of manners and courtesy. When in Rome, do as the Romans do—don’t expect the Romans to suddenly exhibit the manners and mores of your culture.

Maybe we should apply that to our judgments of the French as well, n’est pas?

The Great Baby Ban

Today I laid my hands on another person’s child…actually, I could have easily walked off with said child and, except for the fact that he and I were of widely divergent colour, nobody would have blinked…not even his so-inattentive parent that s/he didn’t object to my manhandling the child, probably because s/he never saw it happen.

There is a movement afoot these days to ban children from…or at least limit their access to…certain venues where, for the last couple of decades, they have been increasingly allowed to behave like uncivilized, unrestrained wild animals. This child today was a case in point: no more than six years old, he was hanging around the bottom of an up-escalator, playing with the device and blocking access for people who wished to use it. Shopper after shopper stepped around the child, gaining precarious access to the moving stairway while the boy obliviously continued to treat the device and its moving rails like his own exclusive amusement device.

I’m old. I’m cranky when it comes to the ill-mannered of any age. I also have a bad back which causes me balance issues. There was no way I was stepping onto that escalator without having unimpeded access to both the steps and the handrail the child was using for his personal playtoy. First I stopped in front of him and stared at him. Most young children, when glared at by an adult, particularly a grumpy-faced old woman, will have second thoughts about whatever it is they are doing. Not this kid. Obviously so poorly reared that he did not even recognize this common social cue, he looked at me and, with no change in his expression whatsoever, kept right on blocking access to the escalator, clinging to the moving guardrail with his hands until it transported his upper body upward a bit, then letting go, standing up straight, and then repeating the process.

I found myself wondering what kind of parent allows a child this small to 1) wander loose and unsupervised in a busy mall; 2) allow the child to play on something as potentially dangerous as an escalator (people have been caught and died on them!); 3) fail to teach a child about such things as blocking the access of others; 4) fail to teach a child the most basic of social cues; and 5) pay so little attention to their child in this busy environment that s/he could easily be stolen by an ill-meaning stranger. But wondering wasn’t getting me up the escalator, so I reached down and firmly grasped the child’s upper arm and removed him from in front of the escalator to give myself access…dragged might be a better term, since he was reluctant to remove himself from his command post.

My first surprise was that he did not scream bloody murder when I grabbed him. I fully expected an outraged parent or irate security guard to accost me and demand an explanation for me putting my hands on a child clearly not my own. The second surprise was that no parent arrived, indignant and ready to give me a faceful of invective for manhandling little Johnny. In fact, nothing happened at all, except that the child was temporarily moved, like a gate, to allow me and my husband access to the escalator and then he resumed his amusement, playing on the escalator and hindering the access of all those who came after me, not a parent in sight.

It is winter here and it is cold outside…very cold…cold enough that some of our outlying suburbs reported snow flurries in the last few days. The sky was a brilliant, crisp, cloudless blue…the kind of sky that truly frigid days are made of, with no cloud cover to keep even a modicum of heat trapped to the earth. And so instead of outdoor activities, everybody went shopping…the mall was crowded. And crowded malls can be noisy, a combination of the various shops broadcasting their music into the walkways, people talking to each other, the rattle and clatter of bags, high heels on the tiled floors and, of course, the inevitable screaming child having a meltdown while Mama continues to shop, Junior’s eardrum splitting wails conveniently shut out. The older I become, the less inclined I am to suffer these indignities silently. As I passed one toddler shrieking his displeasure from his stroller (pram) while his mother obliviously chatted with a friend, I said to my husband in a voice designed to carry to the oblivious mother “My, it sounds like somebody needs to go home and have a nap.” I have little hope that she heard me, though, because if she could tune out the hellacious racket her little darling was broadcasting, it is unlikely she was able to hear my none-too-subtle suggestion that she take her noisy brat out of the earshot of the rest of us.

Then there was the kid, barely two, I would guess, whose mother just abandoned him in the queue for the cashiers when it became her turn to pay. I don’t know…maybe today was the day for other people’s children to act as impediments to still other people’s progress. Anyway, the kid started snatching candies from the impulse-buy displays and, instead of putting them back, Mama instructed the cashier to ring them up, meanwhile leave her little man standing at the head of the queue, blocking the rest of us from getting to cashiers as they became available. Who, after all, wants to trip over a little toddler with her arms full of crockery or shoes or a stack of pre-season sale summer dresses? We gingerly skirted the child…whose mother’s back was to him the whole time, making him fair game for the kind of monsters who steal and abuse children…and while my husband paid for the purchases, I was treated to an example of what becomes of children whose parents teach them that they are the centre of the universe and respect is something other people are supposed to give them.

A short time earlier I had been in the shoe department of the store, trying on bedroom slippers as my 10-year-old Walmart specials have popped a big hole in the sole. I found a pair to try on but, with the back issue giving me balance problems, I opted to go to the other side of the department and sit down to try the slippers on rather than drop them on the floor and stick my foot into one to see how it fit. Now, mind you, this is not an elegant, up-scale department store…this is Ackerman’s, the housewares and clothing equivalent of Safeway…and the shoes and slippers hang on racks by little plastic hangers. The aisles between the rows of shoes are narrow, not wide enough for two super models to pass each other, not even if they sucked in their tummies.

The slippers fit and my husband, thoughtful man that he is (and aware that I have been trying to find replacements for the Walmart specials for several months) offered to buy two pair, an offer I readily accepted. Unfortunately, when we returned to the rack, we were greeted with an enormous bum…bigger than mine, even!...bent over and blocking access to the one display of slippers I needed. This woman was not trying on a pair of flats or sandals she could drop on the ground and just quickly stick a foot into to check for size, no…she was bent over assiduously buckling one of a gazillion buckles on a particularly hideous pair of “gladiator”-styled demi boots. I waited politely for her to finish.

When she removed the boot and began looking again at the rack, still blocking my access to the rack behind her, I said “Excuse me, can I get in here?” She ignored me! I tried again: “Excuse me…” She flicked her eyes in my direction so I know she wasn’t deaf…but she didn’t move an inch. So, I just stepped forward, bent down, and reached into the size section I wanted and retrieved a pair of slippers. Did my shoulder inadvertently graze some unnamed portion of her anatomy? Yes. Did I acknowledge or apologize? No. Did I ignore her just as diligently as she had ignored me? Yup—there was nothing else to do if I didn’t want to start a row over her rudeness, which would have been rude in and of itself.

But the story of this self-absorbed adult brat doesn’t end here. I walked away from the rude cow and went to the tills, was treated to the candy-pilfering toddler and eventually got to a till myself. As I was observing the toddler while my husband paid the cashier, who should wander up to the cashiers but Shoe Cow herself, with a plastic basket full of shoes and boots. I kid you not…one of those baskets, like you pick up at the supermarket when you don’t need a whole trolley, and it had no fewer than six…and it looked more like ten…pair of shoes and boots in it. And, true to her oblivious behaviour in the shoe department, when one of the cashiers called “next!” this rude, selfish, inconsiderate cow simply skipped the queue of half a dozen people patiently and politely waiting their turn and marched straight up to the open cashier, plunked down her basket and began rummaging around in her handbag for her wallet. The woman who was supposed to be next was half way to the till when Rude Cow stepped in front of her and put her basket down and if she even saw the woman, she did not acknowledge her any more than she acknowledged me in the shoe department.

This woman was a young adult, young enough to have been brought up after the concept of teaching your children manners and respect for the rights of others had begun to decline. Obviously she had learned her lessons well: spoiled and entitled, she could not courteously share space in the shoe department and neither could she take her turn in the queue like everyone else. What she wanted is what she got and to hell with the rest of us.

This is the attitude I see parents actually teaching their children today…screw everybody else. Don’t like the grades on your child’s report card? Blame the teacher for “giving” your kid a bad grade, don’t blame the kid for earning a poor mark. Don’t feel like taking the time or making the effort to teach your kid some manners? Make excuses for your kid’s behaviour (“kids will be kids”), inflict them on other people in places they shouldn’t be in the first place (like five star restaurants, evening screenings of movies, supermarkets at 10 pm), then blame others when they get testy about your brat stealing morsels off their plates, talking over the screen dialog, or screaming with fatigue when they should be home in bed. Do you know what kind of adults these kids become? Rude cows. Selfish, disrespectful, inconsiderate cows who have no sense of propriety, no sense of respect for others, no sense of anything outside their own immediate wants…and who raise brats and bullies just like themselves.

So it is no surprise that restaurants, movie theatres, even airlines are beginning to listen to grumpy old people like me…there are so many of us fed up with the world becoming dominated by obnoxious children!!...as we complain about unrestrained children allowed to run amok, turning what could be a pleasant excursion into an Excedrin moment. Kids will behave like kids, it’s true, but that has only become a problem since parents have stopped behaving like parents.

Neighours and Neighbourliness

Nothing ruins a beautiful home and tranquil neighbourhood like having rude, inconsiderate, selfish, unpleasant people sharing your property line.

I have these neighbours who have two teenaged sons, neither of whom, apparently, understand the purpose of the two metre tall masonry walls that have been erected on the property line. If I simply wanted to mark the dividing line between the properties, a couple of stakes and a line of string between them would suffice, but the huge hint provided by a 12 inch thick, 6 foot high brick wall seems to have escaped these boys.

They don’t understand gates, either. Tall, iron-banded wood gates with massive security padlocks on them are, to these lads, merely climbing apparatuses…and climb them they do. Evidently the advantages of entering their own property through their front door…or ringing my bell to politely ask access to the property (which I would grant if the request had some legitimacy, like retrieving a ball that had gone over the wall) escape them and scaling my walls, being more expedient that respecting my privacy and property rights, is their preference.

I remember having parties when I was younger…in fact, I have parties now. But, there is a considerable difference between my parties and the 60 hour marathons these boys throw every weekend, starting mid-afternoon each Friday. I do not exaggerate in this…I woke up the other morning at 3:45 am to use the loo and we had left the window open that night. Through the open window came the unmistakeable throb of what passes today for music, not as a muted background to what should have been the soothing nocturnal cricket symphony, but thumping sound so loud that I could have picked out the lyrics, had they been intelligible.

It doesn’t stop there… We had guests over for Christmas dinner and the guest list included two 10-year-olds. Our back garden is huge and we have several small dogs that love kids, so we opened the patio gates and let them all out to play. Within a short time, one of the kids came limping back, the bottom of his foot cut by a piece of brown glass…a broken beer bottle. The location of the broken glass and its proximity to a certain part of our garden wall left no doubt from whence it came, especially since Thandiswe regularly finds beer bottles and other vice-related debris in that particular part of the garden.

We’ve given up on talking to their mother, she of the Cape Coloured accent so broad that I literally cannot understand her. Hubby’s ear is more attuned, however, and her basic response to our complaints is that they are teenagers and she is incapable of controlling them. Well. D’UH…I never would have guessed! Besides, both times we made a complaint about her rude children being on our property, we suffered a robbery within 30 days. The first time I was sure it was a coincidence…now I am not so sure.

I, who enjoys temperate weather, find myself eagerly looking forward to the chill of winter and their pool becoming too cold to be attractive. In fact, if luck is with me, the winter months will bring new…indoor…amusements to these young delinquents and by summer next year, the pool will have had its newness wear off and they will find other entertainments to capture their attention…preferably in some other part of town.

Why am I surprised?

Written 25 August 2008

We’re travelling again. The Honda is still in the shop, but Bertha has recovered (and at about half of what we expected to pay) so she was our chariot to the airport early Friday afternoon.

Even though we don’t live in the US, we still have to deal with airport security. Just like in American airports, we have to queue up, put our hand luggage through an x-ray unit, and step through metal detectors before being allowed to enter a boarding lounge. And so it happened, a queue of impatient people gathering behind me wanting to get to their boarding gates, and I beeped going through the metal detector. The unsmiling guard directed me to “wait right here” until a female security agent could search me.

I retrieved my handbag from the x-ray machine and the guard scowled at me, so I returned to the spot he had designated for me to wait. A few seconds later a smiling black woman approached me and began to pat me down. And suddenly I was jostled…first lightly, then firmly…and then I was shoved most unceremoniously by a scrawny little hunched over man who was muttering something about me being in his way…as if I had chosen to park myself in his path…and as if he couldn’t see a large uniformed black woman running her hands all over my body. And it really wasn’t that I was in his way…I was exactly where I was supposed to be…he simply was unwilling to stay in his own line to the end of the x-ray conveyor and was trying to go around the people who were taking their turns. Unfortunately for him, the security agent has stationed my not inconsiderable bulk beside his queue for her search.

“That was really rude!” I said to the security agent, who appeared to be as surprised as I was, but the culprit ignored me. Like a twitching little weasel, he scurried over to the end of the x-ray machine and began collecting items, at one point reaching his arm across my husband’s body to retrieve something…Hubby was collecting our hand luggage, his pocket goods, and our laptop from the end of the x-ray machine while I was being patted down by security. Nothing that even vaguely resembled an apology came out of his pursed lips, either to me or Hubby.

The security lady finally decided it was probably the underwires in my bra and waved me onward. We headed down the concourse and found our boarding lounge, only to find Mr. Weasel already there. Being in our boarding lounge signified he was booked on our flight and, since we had at least half an hour until boarding, it was obvious that his ill-mannered rush at security was not motivated by an urgent need to make a departing plane, it was just self-centred boorishness. I found myself hoping the little weasel would try shoving his way past one of the bullishly built rugby fans that were on our flight to Durban as we queued up to board, but they called us to board by row numbers, so the gnomish Mr. Weasel was unfortunately able to board unmolested.

Three hours later, we were deplaning in Durban. Ordinarily, Hubby and I wait until the plane is nearly empty before we leave our seats and take down our carry on luggage, and this was no exception. As we were seated in the 24th of 29 rows, it wasn’t long before the traffic past our seat thinned to a trickle and I stepped up to take our bags from the overhead bin (I was in the aisle seat). I try to be as polite a person as I can, so I did not step into the aisle and block it, but unbeknownst to me, my handbag was protruding out into the aisle. Instead of calling it to my attention, a sturdily built blonde woman tried to shove past me, nearly knocking me over. In a struggle to keep my balance, I thrust myself back upright…causing my bag to protrude back out into the aisle…and she said, testily “I’m trying to get past!” Well, I’m sorry, but the plane isn’t going to take off again with you still on it and a simple “Excuse me, you are blocking the aisle with your handbag,” would have resulted in an immediately cleared aisle and an apology!

Ironically, ShoveyPushy Woman and I met again at the baggage carousel where my bags were among the first out and hers…well who knows when hers showed up? There was no need for her great hurry, no reason for her rude pushiness, other than an urgent desire to get out of the plane before some people in the aisles ahead of her.

The return was no better. My husband, an ordinarily laid-back sort of gent who is normally difficult to ruffle, actually left our seats to go stand near the boarding gate because of an uncommonly annoying boy. He looked to be about 12…certainly old enough to know how to behave in a public place…and he had a soccer ball in a plastic shopping bag. He wandered up and down in front of our row of seats, his parents completely oblivious, kicking that soccer ball through the bag. Since the bag was in his hand, the ball did not leave the vicinity, giving us some respite. No, the ball never moved more than a few inches, allowing him to kick it over and over and over again. Thwack thud thwack thud thwack thud…endlessly.

Hubby and I took up a position near the boarding gate and turned our backs on the annoyance. A few minutes later a black soccer ball rolled past, and a few minutes after that, I saw the ball impact the shoulder of a fellow passenger. Hubby moved us again while I kept a jaundiced eye on that ball. The boy was bouncing it off one of the support pillars of the building, completely ignored by his family: his parents were reading and his teenaged sister, badly bleached blonde and dressed in obscenely tight white capris, a pink and black designer top (at least it said Chanel on the front) and a white bra…the straps were tackily exposed by the racer-back design of her shirt…was busily picking the zits on her face.

Because the support pillars were cylindrical, the kid was unable to anticipate where the ball was going to rebound to and, as a result, the ball was akin to an unguided missile. As it sailed past us on one occasion I leaned to Hubby and said “If that ball hits either of us, it’s mine!” He nodded, obviously as weary of the kid’s antics as I was.

Durban is a hot and humid place and even though the boarding lounge was air conditioned, it was muggy and uncomfortable in there. Boarding was delayed by half an hour, so passengers were grumpy and restless, and when they began boarding the plane by seat number, people began to queue up in anticipation of their number being called. I kept looking out the window onto the tarmac (there are no jetways at Durban’s airport) trying to find the distinctive bright green paint job of a Kulula plane, but despite a steady stream of people walking out the boarding gate and out of sight to the right, I could not locate our aircraft. A wholly irrational frisson of fear trilled down my spine…or sort of a Twilight Zone moment…as I watched fellow passengers file confidently out the door into the unknown.

Our turn came and we made our way out the door and turned right. Somehow I had expected to see the distinguishing green of a Kulula plane out there, but nothing. “Where’s our plane?” I asked Hubby. He nodded towards a blue and white 737 to which the passengers from our lounge were streaming. “That must be it.”

It had nothing on it! Just white paint over dark blue. No insignia, no company name, nothing at all. To call it “nondescript” would be banal, but that is exactly what it was. There was no way to tell if it was a commercial plane, a privately-owned jet, or a government craft. That frisson of fear tickled my spine again, this time feeling not quite so irrational.

When we took our seats the first thing I noticed was how hot the plane was. I reached up to adjust the little air-blower thingie and encountered a solid clear plastic panel covering the reading lights and no air nozzles. A flight attendant was standing nearby and I asked her how to adjust the air…she reached up to the plastic panel, bumped her hand on it, did a double take, then said “I guess they don’t have them on this aircraft.” Very comforting thought…the flight attendant doesn’t know how our airplane works…

No air conditioning…29 rows of 6 passengers each…174 souls plus crew crammed into a narrow aluminium cigar sitting on the black tarmac of the Durban…hot, humid Durban…airport and the air conditioning doesn’t come on until the plane is underway. What genius thought that up? OK, granted the plane’s designers couldn’t know it would sit on the tarmac in sweltering conditions, but whatever made them think that 174 people of varying sizes, shapes and metabolisms would be comfortable at a single uniform temperature and only then after the plane was fully boarded and under way? Calling them unthinking morons would seem to be an understatement.

We were seated in aisle 12…an exit row. Why didn’t the check-in agent ask us if we would take exit row seats? OK, Hubby is a sturdy fellow who can easily lift the 45 lb (20kg) emergency door and the emergency rows do have more leg room, but at what cost? For one thing my handbag…with my money, ID, good jewellery, and diabetic emergency supplies for Hubby…was not allowed under the seat ahead of me like on normal rows. I don’t know about you, but I’m not comfortable with my handbag being stowed in a place easily accessed by a lot of strangers. Secondly, the seats in our row did not recline, which made for a very uncomfortable flight. And third, the plane was absolutely booked full, so we were stuck with these seats as there was no place to which to move us.

The plane was full of rugby fans who had flown to Durban for a game against Australia. South Africa lost, but it didn’t stop the guys from drinking and carousing as if we had won. SoccerBoy was someplace else on the plane, thankfully, but the rugby okes did their best to make up for his absence, the thrumming silence of the plane frequently broken by loud yips and yells. I tried to sleep but between the stiffly upright seat, the inability to regulate the temperature, the turbulence, and the sound effects from the rugby crowd, all I could do was doze. By the time we got to Cape Town I was exhausted, cranky, and had a stiff neck.

Bertha was waiting for us where we left her and sinking into her cushy leather seats was an unmitigated delight. The doggies were hysterical with joy at our return and it was with great relief I sank down into the comfort of my own bed. After a solid night’s sleep I was back to my own cheerful self, but now I find myself wondering…

Why do I continue to expect even the barest of courtesies from people I meet outside my house? Do I set myself up for disappointment by expecting people to wait their turn, politely ask me to step aside if I am blocking their progress, restrain their children from being public nuisances? Should I expect this kind of rudeness as a matter of course now? And if I do, won’t that turn me into a dour old cynic…someone I find miserable, pathetic and pitiable?

What has happened to the barest minimum of courtesy and politeness in public? And why, after all these years, do I continue to be surprised when confronted with the rude and uncivil?