Nous Sommes Tous Americains: France Times

While in Germany and the Czech Republic, I met only one other American: a college student who told me he'd once gone swimming with Michael Phelps. It seemed that the rest of America had stayed home, or at the very least, were avoiding the shadowy bars and clubs where I'd been spending all my time.

As soon as I started making my way towards France, however, I began encountering Americans. I think most of them had been hired by Al-Qaeda to damage America's reputation abroad.

At the airport in Prague, I sat next to two young American businessmen. They wore identical black suits and were talking loudly about Nintendo Wii, which quickly turned into an equally loud conversation about a sexual parlor game involving a group of men and a baked good. Before I boarded my flight to Paris, the last words I heard were, "Sure, I'd play. But eat that cookie? No way, bro. No way."

A few days later, while visiting the Musee d'Orsay, I was joined in a gallery by an American family. I was looking at paintings and statues and nodding meaningfully; they were involved in a lengthy discussion about the merits of the "he who smelt it, dealt it" theory of flatulence.

That evening, I found some Europeans. First, I had a forty-dollar drink at the Hotel Plaza Athenee; then, I went to a club where young Parisians were dancing to Kanye West. One Frenchman was standing on a banquette, waving a bottle of champagne, and rapping poorly; his shirt was almost completely unbuttoned and even though I couldn't smell him, I knew in my heart he was wearing a lot of cologne.

But soon enough I was back among my countrymen. On the train from Paris to Marseille, I saw a American woman point to her group of rowdy friends and say to an elderly Frenchwoman, "Uh...we...va...etre...annoying? So I think you might want to move." I looked at her friends. They were all in their forties.

Between Marseille and Nice, this same woman described the Cote d'Azur with a common barnyard epithet and the observation that "San Diego is nicer." Then she and her friends began shouting out euphemisms for male genitalia. They seemed particularly fond of the term "skin flute." They finally got off the train at Cannes, or as they called it, "cans."

As soon as they were gone, there was a burst of applause. Children celebrated; couples kissed; someone pulled out a trumpet and played "La Marseillaise."

Later on, in Antibes, on the French Riviera, I met an American woman who introduced herself as a political exile. She told me she'd thought about moving to France after George Bush was reelected but didn't pull the trigger until Barack Obama became President.

My summer of European adventures finally drew to a close with Negronis on the terrace of the Hotel Cap in Cap d'Antibes. As I gazed out on the Mediterranean, I imagined my own expatriate fantasy: become an outlandishly famous writer, marry a flighty woman prone to intense psychiatric episodes, and then move to France and befriend Ernest Hemingway, who would write about me in A Moveable Feast. When you have four gin-based cocktails before noon, anything seems possible.

Comments

[zanzig]

Sadly I think you might be right about the American Abroad. It's many years (20 to be exact) since I wandered around Europe but as I was on my own for a large part of the time, I decided to join a short coach tour through Spain and Portugal. My fellow passengers seemed to be comprise 80% geriatric American + 1 21 year old on her honeymoon without her new spouse, and 3 extremely uptight Brits, and another Australian girl and me. They were a nice bunch but I still shudder at the absolute ignorance of those Americans; they knew NOTHING about the places we were passing through or stopping in, and worse, had made no attempt whatsoever to inform themselves of the barest facts about culture, currency, customs, language... ANYTHING. At every stop they ran from the coach to search for a Burger King (this is before the ubiquitousness of McDonalds); they spoke loudly and long. The other Australian girl and I (in our late 20's at the time) decided to strike out on our own and we had the best time. We occasionally took the poor 21 year old with us, but lord I still remember what Puritans the rest of them were.