my blog just turned to french...

i mean, the instructions...

the academic year here is wrapping up, and I'm thinking of writing a several part reflection on this year.

I spent last weekend in France with the family of a friend of mine here and her boyfriend. They are both french, so as foreigners in Switzerland they of course have there own reactions. I was surprised, when I asked one friend about how he liked living in Switzerland, to hear that he preferred living in Switzerland to living in France. (a lot of french that I ask will say that they feel like the swiss are a bit uptight, or that they are made to feel like a foreigner here) He said there is a certain violence in French culture, and when I asked him to explain he gave me two examples. France is a socialist leaning democracy, but unemployment is a large problem and government services are often underfunded and overtaxed. What this means practically is that if you live in France, every time you go run errands at the bank, the post office, etc the employees are in a bad mood because the offices are understaffed (the same thing as in big cities in the US).

Another example he gave was the lack of integration of immigrants from former colonies. France has post-colonial guilt, thus this issue is a bit taboo, but nevertheless it is a huge societal problem that has existed for a long time. He said that in building housing projects in the suburbs for immigrants, the french government created the problem of segregation. I understood and wondered how similar the situation with la banlieue in france is to inner city violence and poverty in the US.

As we were sitting outside sunday afternoon eating barbecued lamb, the question came up, "What do you think of Obama?" Like, wow, we have a couple of real Americans here, now we can get the insider view or something. It was fascinating to talk about politics with my friend's parents, both teachers in French schools. Like most french I've met, they despise Sarkozy. But the extent to which they feel he is wrong is impressive: at one point her mother said "We had an enormous revolution two hundred years ago to change things and now it is as if it didn't happen." Apparently his administration is pretty slick about how they manipulate their power; redistricting to gain an advantage in elections, basically being corrupt. I sensed overwhelmingly their anger and outrage at the president and the state of french politics.

I'll continue with some reflections about music soon...

In two weeks I'm going to be back in the US and am looking forward to seeing many of you soon!