Salut everyone I am officially back so I took a little bit of time off this
year for some personal reasons I will not bore you with but I'm back and I'm
super excited to be creating content again for you on YouTube and on my pot
so I'm starting off my hiatus dedicated to the 5 things I learned in France well
I wasn't youtubing as you guys know my channels called unintentionally
Frenchified I have officially lived in France for nine years
mm-hmm I celebrated my 9 year anniversary in October and I often feel
like a veteran like I've lived in France for so long that nothing surprises me I
do lots of French things and I just feel like a very Frenchified version of
myself but and every once in a while something happens and I'm shocked that I
had no idea that that's how things were done and friends when I first moved to
France I lived in this little town called Poitier that's in the southwest
side of France and I was working in this town called Liu dong which is a really
tiny town by Poitier and I had to take the bus between and so I talked about
the bus stop all the time I'm going to the bus stop and the bus stop and French
is called la Rey do Bruce and I was pronouncing it at that time Laurette do
boost and Lirette is actually the word for fishbone so I was actually telling
people that I was going to the fishbone I'm going to the fishbone and everyone
knew I meant that I was going to the bus nobody cracked at me and for literally
years instead of saying bus stop I said fishbone and so there are these moments
where when someone corrects you finally and you're like what or someone tells
you something and you're like wait what I've been you know thinking or speaking
or for the last 5 years that it was a certain way and it's actually not at all
and so I figured today I would dedicate some of the five things I've learned in
this last year and my 9 year anniversary these things that I was like wait really
so are you ready because Lera Debus was not the first one number one a number
two are kind of similar we have had a really big year of strikes and pro
in France and I think I've got as many crazy strike stories as you've got crazy
boss stories you can't live in France without just really being used to
strikes and protests and I always knew that protesting and France illegal and I
always appreciated the fact that in France if you are unhappy about
something you are more than welcome to display your unhappiness while marching
throughout the streets with other people who believe in your cause what I didn't
know is that you actually had to inform the government before you protest I have
this impression that it was spontaneous that it was you wrote on Facebook that
you were upset and then you went in protests but actually it's really
organized so for example if I wanted to protest about something that I believed
in I don't know arise in pits and taxes and upset me and I had 300 friends who
believed in it too we couldn't just go out tomorrow and March we'd actually
have to let the government know ahead of time and what made me kind of think that
that was funny was that for example if I wanted to protest against the government
or against the police officers they would still need to help me define a
route within France and so if it was in Paris like the streets that I wanted to
walk down they would have to be there to block off the traffic to make sure that
I was safe that the other protesters are safe and that we were protesting in
optimal conditions and I didn't know that at all so that was the first thing
that I learned this year the second thing that I learned was more related to
strikes I have lots of fun strike stories I specifically remember a time I
was taking a flight from Po a town in the southwest of France
all the way up to Paris and we get to the airport and Air France is having a
strike and they say but lucky you the flights still gonna leave just delayed
so we take the flight quick 15 minutes it sees those tiny like puddle jumper
with one seat here and one seat here and we land and we need someone to push the
stairs up to the the plane and we get an announcement on the loudspeaker and the
people who are actually pushing the stairs have also gone on strike so we
sat in the flight for another two hours until someone would actually come
that stairs that open up so we could disembark and then by the time that we
get off the plane the people that are supposed to take our luggage have been
on strike as well so I literally spent like 12 hours an entire day going from
Paris to Po because of a strike so you can't ignore the strikes in Paris
they're everywhere but what I've never experienced before
and didn't know is that when you're really unhappy with something like the
SNCF which is the company that runs all of the trains in Paris this year they're
really upset with some changes and laws that were linked to their retirement and
they decided that they wanted to strike and they decided that they wanted to
strike for a long time this wasn't going to be a one-day or a two-day or
three-day this is going to be months on end and so they put out a strike
calendar and this calendar told you when they weren't going to be working so you
knew when to like get reimbursed for your train tickets when you needed to
change travel plans and literally for I don't know remember exactly how long but
let's say two months there was code strikes going on every other day so that
had never happened too far I didn't know that you could be so organized as well
in strikes and apparently you can so the third one I'm actually not that
surprised about I'm not surprised that they do it and I'm not surprised that I
wasn't aware because I am NOT a television girl or radio I've never
owned a car and friend I don't go to the movies that often
I am a Netflix Spotify podcast kind of girl and so I never really noticed that
there is this cultural exception they talked about in France further media all
related to cultural things and the idea behind it is that we don't want to lose
the French culture and obviously living in Europe France is surrounded by lots
of other different countries with their own culture and their own language and
you've got you know things coming in from the US and things coming in from
India and trends from Asia and what they want to do is just make sure that they
preserve the French culture so if I own a radio station for example 30% of what
I was putting out there during the day would need to be French and maybe French
songs and a French history and French culture and that goes all the way up to
80% during the night and I'm not surprised and no as I said because I
don't listen to to the radio but I went to get back last
year and I learned all about the history of French Canada and the lengths they
went to to preserve their culture and at the end of the day they are from France
and so maybe it's not so surprising that the French are really focused on and
it's important for them to make sure that they don't get overrun by all of
the different cultures are surrounded with and all of the different
cross-cultural and globalization that's happening today the fourth one has to do
with food one of my favorite topics I always think of France as the land of
cheese I think we all do if you've ever been to France it's really hard to miss
the staples a French diet we've got wine we've got bad get you know we've got
coffee we've got cheese but sometimes there are other things that are less
obvious that we don't think of and in France what I never really thought of
was yogurt so in the US where I grew up at least yogurt was something you would
have a breakfast when I moved to France I noticed that yogurt was something you
could have a breakfast it was something you could have at lunch at dinner it was
a dessert I feel like yogurt is a snack yogurt is pretty much a staple that you
can have at any time of the day well when I made this comment to a colleague
of mine at work because of course when you go to the canteen at our office you
have three different types of fromage blanc which is like a yogurt and then
you've got seven different flavors of yogurt with different companies
different brands and so I made a comment and so my colleagues said well actually
it's kind of funny but we produce more yogurt than we do cheese not by a lot
and because we export cheese and Friends is known for cheese we always consider
France to be the land of cheese but it also should be considered the land of
yogurt so I did a little bit of research France actually produces 2.4 million
tonnes of yogurt each year and they also do 9 million tons of cheese so I'm not
trying to say that France is not the land of cheese but it could also be the
land of yogurt and I'm wondering and this new nickname
might start trending hey I am a huge huge believer in celebrating every
opportunity whether it's Christmas holiday where two billion
people are celebrating it or whether we're celebrating the hundredth day of
school with 30 kindergarteners for the first time I love celebrating any
occasion so I'm really surprised that I didn't know about name days name days
are dates within the year that are attributed to different Saints and if
you are named after a saint then you also get to celebrate the name day of
your saint so my name is Kate but imagine that my parents had named me
Catherine that would mean that not only would I celebrate my birthday on March
9th but I would also get to celebrate Saints Day on November 25th as I said my
name is Kate and there's not a saint Kate oh I'm will be celebrating a name
day but I think this is the perfect opportunity to celebrate other people
around you that you love that are named after saints so that's a wrap on the
five things that I learned this year that I was surprised about or shocked if
you've got anything that you want to share that you learned that surprised
you don't hesitate to put it in the comments below I am creating new content
on my blog as well every Monday you can find the link below to I'll be putting
out videos once a month definitely hope to talk to you guys again soon ciao
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