Summer bliss

It’s that time of the year again, when those of us fortunate enough to live in France get to go on vacation. Now, depending on your definition of “vacation,” this may or may not be a good thing, for there are some who insist that vacation with children is no vacation at all. And for the record, those people are correct. That has never stopped us, though—nor did it this year when it came time to choose where to go. “Croatia!” we decided. “By car!” we decided. Who’s crazy enough to travel from France to Croatia (≈1,000 miles) by car? 

WE ARE.

YAY!

But first, we stopped in Italy—Padua, to be exact. Its Arena Chapel is home to some of Giotto’s most important frescoes, which I had been hankering to visit ever since my blithely innocent days as an art history undergrad back in whenever that was. In any case, the frescoes were awesome. The kids’ behavior, on the other hand, was grotesque. Do you think that stopped us? NOOOO. After over a decade of parenting, potential embarrassment is no longer a deterrent to engaging in full-blown public displays of dysfunction. Did I chase my son around a Renaissance-era marble fountain, threatening to grab the city map that he had turned into a giant paper airplane out of his hands and rip it into 1,000 shreds while fellow tourists looked on, silently thanking God that they had sent their children to stay with grandma and grandpa for the summer? Maybe.

Happy traveller.

Padua on the whole was cool. And by cool I mean hot (mid-90s). But no matter! I stuffed my backpack with water, sunglasses, sun hats, sunscreen, and a USB-rechargeable mini fan, and off we went. We stayed at a really cute boutique hotel, which I heartily recommend to anyone planning to visit Padua anytime soon. Their breakfast in a flowery outdoor courtyard was lovely, plus I have noticed on multiple occasions over the years that Italians are truly tolerant of child antics, which is a BIG BONUS in my book. Actually, can I just say how much I love Italy, full stop? I love it. I love its food (obviously—everyone loves its food). But that’s not all. I love its art and architecture. I love its aesthetics. I love its Aperol spritzes. I love its reasonable prices. I love its language, even if my Italian vocabulary is pretty much limited to menu items and, thanks to a few weeks of Duolingo, observations concerning people’s age groups and genders (as un-woke as such observations may be these days). I love its HISTORY, especially its Roman and early Christian history. That’s my intellectual sweet spot. Oh, and its vegetation. Olive trees, vineyards, umbrella pines! Is there anything better? No—no there is not. I even love that you get to eat cookies for breakfast in Italy. Cookies! For breakfast! France remains my true love, but Italy is a close second. Had I participated in SMU-in-Rome instead of SMU-in-Paris back in 1999, who knows what could have happened?

I mean come on.

After several days of taking photos of bricks, stones, and umbrella pines, we piled back into the car and drove many, many hours through the Fréjus tunnel (50 euros, folks) and on into Slovenia. Do many Americans go to Slovenia? No. Do many Americans know where Slovenia is? No. And I would count myself among them, so no offense. We stopped for lunch in Piran. It was really nice! It had a big beautiful church on a big beautiful hill. Did we march the kids up there? You bet we did.

You’ll thank me one day, kids.

Then, on to our first destination in Croatia—Rovinj. Gorgeous! We swam in the Adriatic; we visited more old churches; we climbed more stone stairs; we drank more spritzes; we continued to engage in the merciless cat-herding that is parenting while on vacation. I found a dress and belt ensemble that makes me look like I just stepped out of a Greek myth—THAT’S A WIN. Also, our digs were awesome. There was an amazing central garden space with turtles just wandering around amid the grass. Yes, turtles.

Gardens: the one thing we can all agree on.

After a week or so, off we went to our second destination in Croatia—Trogir. Again, gorgeous! Swimming in turquoise waters (what’s a sea urchin or two?); visiting ancient Roman cities; drinking more spritzes. Also, dragging our children multiple times out of this insane rubber duck store, which for some reason I cannot fathom is not a local quirk at all but a full-on CHAIN. A chain! Devoted to rubber ducks in costume! And people say we aren’t in the End Times (I’m pretty sure the Book of Revelation includes something about rubber ducks).

Just, why?

Our rental in Trogir was a little stone apartment tucked away amid ambling pathways, a pleasant 10-minute stroll from a pristine beach. Very cute. There was just one problem though…

I’d like to congratulate the local city planners for building an international airport three miles outside of town. I mean how hard did they think about this? Regular bombing runs notwithstanding, we had a wonderful stay. And an all-too-short week later, it was time to head home. Naively assuming we could simply drive back into Italy, we tried to do it in one shot. Little did we know that the rest of civilization had chosen that very same day to do that very same thing. Thus, what should have taken us 7 hours in fact took us 11, so by the time we reached our next stop—fair Verona—we were fried. And here I would like to add a slight caveat to my Italian ode above: roads. Roads in Italy need work. More specifically, they seem to have been designed for only the narrowest modes of transportation, e.g. horses. Thin horses. Why are there so many Vespas in Italy? This probably has something to do with it. Getting our car through a mini-tunnel and into its allotted parking space without sacrificing both side mirrors was not really a challenge we were thrilled to face upon pulling up to our rental at 10:00 p.m., but such is life. What’s a battle scar or two (or way more than two)?

Totally worth it.

As for the city of Verona, ahhhhh—positively enchanting. Italy in all its glory (and by that I mean ancient ruins, umbrella pines, and spritzes, in that order). Plus, after over two weeks on the road, our kids were finally starting to behave. Alas, it was soon time to leave. But nary you fret, Italy. 

Torneremo presto!

A Roman road! Even my feet are smiling.

Ah, les vacances

French people get way too much vacation.

You who are reading this, and who may not have taken more than 2.5 days of sick leave in the past 18 months, may think that I’m crazy to say such a thing, so perhaps I should be more specific:

French children get way too much vacation.

Why might I say that? Read on.

Just another World Heritage site (we’re over it, Mom, seriously). 

My parents had the dubious honor of flying out from California to visit us for a romp through southern France this summer, even though it was technically our turn to go to them. But seeing as how I’m still recovering from our Christmas trip, plus the fact that my brother is tying the knot in Florida this coming March, we figured this was a good compromise.

Where to begin? Let’s start with transportation:

First of all, there are six of us when my parents are here and our car only seats five. But my father-in-law has an old Peugeot equipped with a sixth seat and a rooftop storage unit, so hey.

Of course, that sixth seat feels a lot like the proverbial back of the bus, i.e. hot and bumpy with zero leg room, but WHO’S COMPLAINING?

Afoot and lighthearted we take to the open road.

I’ll tell you who: my kids. Both of them. Screaming. Wailing. Temper tantruming. Rolling on the ground. The only way to get either of them to accept sitting “in the trunk” was to offer them my portable fan and my Snapchat account.

Here is but a small taste of what that led to:

Thespian #1

Thespian #2

Group travel is an interesting sociological experiment, and ours is always a particularly dysfunctional unique brand of that. Take two American grandparents who are used to having calm and quiet, add two Franco-American children who are the exact opposite of calm and quiet, one Frenchman who feels neither heat nor cold nor pain nor fatigue, and myself, who wants nothing more than two months of absolute solitude in a mountain monastery, and cram them all into a 20-year-old car with sketchy air conditioning for a three-week, 1,000-mile trek through southwest France in 90° heat … and what do you get?

A lot of drinking (obviously).

Negotiating everyone’s various and often conflicting needs was interesting, between my dad’s swollen ankles and my husband’s view that any day registering under 20,000 steps is a day wasted; between my mom’s natural amiability and my natural irritability; and between my daughter’s aversion to car rides/heat/walking/eating/sleeping and my son’s equal aversion to all of those things, it’s a wonder that none of us throttled the others with our bare hands (the temptation was real). 

Look at the camera, folks.

But for all our differences, we managed to visit quite an astounding number of places, and to have rather a good time of it to boot. Sprawling cities and perched villages, medieval castles and neolithic caves, craggy mountains and lush valleys, meandering rivers and tranquil lakes, and “oh Mom, not another church.” You name it, we did it. My dad’s ankles survived, my husband’s inner athlete was appeased, and the kids will (maybe) thank us one day for offering them so much culture.

Is it September yet?

Not that smart

A lot has been said about the connected “smart” car. A LOT.

Oh, it sure sounds cool: your vehicle as an addition to your devices, an extension of your modern connected lifestyle. 

But then my husband’s job went and gave him a company car equipped with a bunch of connected technology. And let me just come out and say: we’ve all been duped. Cars don’t need to be giant versions of anybody’s smartphone. Why? I’ll tell you why.

Let’s start with music. Before all this connectivity madness, if you wanted to listen to the car radio, you pressed a button or turned a dial. If you wanted to listen to a CD, you simply slipped a disc into the dedicated slot.

But not in our new connected car, no sir. The whole central dashboard is just one big screen. No radio knobs. No CD slot. Only a lonely “home” button. Where do you put your CD? “NOWHERE” is the answer. You put it nowhere, because judging from our car, CD’s are clearly old-school and therefore obsolete.

Same thing goes for the radio. Where is the tuner? It’s hidden inside a menu inside another menu that you can only access by fiddling around with the big dashboard screen. Don’t like the volume level? More fiddling around in menus and submenus.

I’m a consumer. I don’t recall voicing any desire at all for my in-car listening experience to become so pointlessly complicated.

But let’s move on.

How about Bluetooth? Heretofore, I kind of liked Bluetooth; it let me listen to music from my Deezer account through our wireless home speaker, which was neat.

But in the car, I would call Bluetooth a liability at best and life-threatening at worst. Know what happens the instant we climb into ours? Bluetooth detects our phones, and starts automatically playing music from phantom playlists we didn’t even know we had. Simply trying to make the sound system stop doing that is enough to send one off the road and into a ravine. Who came up with this and where should I send my hate mail?

Another “perk” of Bluetooth: notifications. Good God, why why why? For instance, let’s take WhatsApp. WhatsApp bombards us with notifications, which, because of the connectedness of our car, all appear at the top of the dashboard screen accompanied by a notification sound. Now, it just so happens that the volume of this particular app’s notifications came pre-set on “ear-splitting,” meaning every notification blasted through the speakers as BEEEEP!!! thus causing my heart to systematically leap straight out of my chest. But for the life of me I could not find the car volume settings for WhatsApp, despite digging through every last menu and submenu in the whole damn system. I ultimately had to consult some online chat group to find the solution. Again, WHY?

The one place where Bluetooth could actually contribue something helpful in the car is hands-free phone calls. Someone calls you, and the call is sent straight to the sound system, thus liberating your hands for other tasks, namely messing with your GPS holding the steering wheel. Except that the “benefit” of Bluetooth calls is limited to folks who drive ALONE. In a car full of people, in which NO ONE wants to hear your private conversation, much less in surround sound, this feature is truly terrible. Also, what happens if one’s mistress calls while one’s wife is sitting right there in the passenger seat? I mean this is France. I bet that totally happens.

And while we’re on the topic of voice, let’s discuss Google Assistant. I have long learned to avoid using it with, say, our remote control; it clearly finds my American accent to be incomprehensible. But my husband, who is French, does not have much more luck with it than I do. Why? Because the technology is crap, that’s why. When he receives a text in the car, for example, Google Assistant offers to read it to him out loud. If he agrees, the assistant reads the messages INCLUDING THE PUNCTUATION AND THE EMOJIS. This leads to such utterly surreal results as, “Can you bring a bottle of wine to the party question mark smiley face confetti fireworks cake smiley face.” And when the “assistant” is done reading, it asks whether my husband wants to respond. Regardless of what he answers, the robotic voice pauses for a moment, then says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. Do you want to respond?” This can go on for several minutes, usually resulting in palpable irritation inside the car, without mentioning the increased likelihood of a potentially fatal accident outside the car. Thanks, Google.

So in conclusion, the term “smart” is highly relative when applied to the car. And as a recent visit to an automobile museum reminded me, people have been rolling along in perfect comfort for quite some time now, blissfully unaware of connected technology. I say it’s time to bring back the dumb cars.

The scarlet letter

For those of you who are wondering (all five of you), YES, over the summer I did indeed pass the super scary, totally intimidating, much-loathed practical portion of the French driving exam. In fact, I more than passed it: I got 31 points, which is like 107%. To be honest, I feel kind of silly now for making such a big deal out of it. I mean, I’ve been whining, complaining and generally freaking out over this thing for years now. YEARS! I’ve already written about it here, here and here, and I could easily write more. Way more.

Semi-obsessive tendencies? Absolutely. But that’s how I made it to France to begin with, so let’s keep things in perspective. In any case, according to Google Analytics, most of you reading this are not actually human, but are instead robots. Ukrainian ones especially. Therefore, if I go off on yet another driving-in-France tangent, will you care? Probably not. You’ll keep circling back and screwing with my stats regardless, so I may as well tangent away!

All right, so I have my permit. Actually, I have a piece of paper that is standing in for my permit until the real thing comes in the mail—in something like four months. The Man had better be hand-crafting that thing using some secret ancestral technique, because damn. And, réglementation oblige, I now have my very own, extremely visible “A” sticker (signifying apprenti) emblazoned on the back of our car. Now why go and stigmatize new drivers à la Hester Prynne? Because adultery in France may be no biggie, but learning to drive is serious business. Newbies have to sport the scarlet A for three years. Awesome.

At least it’s discreet.

So, equipped with the requisite paraphernalia, I am totally legit to take to the open road without anyone telling me to slow down/speed up/check my mirrors more often/sit farther back in my seat/quit driving like a Corsican granny. Only here’s the thing: my zany-but-loveable instructor may be gone, but the act of driving hasn’t become any less stressful. I thought it would instantly morph into a source of pleasure once I no longer had a sidekick commenting on my every move, but in reality solo driving is actually kind of a pain in the ass! No matter—I have been forcing myself to get out there and face the ugly traffic, negotiate the sickeningly narrow “2-way” roads, avoid the randomly parked cars, make sense of the surreal pavement markings and deal with the chronic tailgating (I have a big “A,” people! So would you please get off it?).

Here’s an amusing bit of French driving trivia: as opposed to the US, where license plates can be customized to form compelling personal statements such as TOPDAWG or LUV2SK8, France doesn’t allow any (intentional) funny business to creep into its vehicle registration. Cars are issued plates marked with a two letter-three number-two letter combination like this:

The attribution is automatic, so you have close to no say in what combination your car receives. You could end up with your own initials, or something cute like BB, or even a fun smiley like XD. But you could just as easily get stuck with something totally atrocious and thus become an object of highway ridicule. You see, as is the case with English, certain letters when pronounced in French sound a lot like whole words. Q is a perennial favorite, because it sounds just like cul, which is French for ass. See where I’m going with this?

Here are some classics, all of which I have seen while living here, alongside their US would-be equivalent (which may actually exist as well, but the DMV would have to be asleep at the wheel. Har har). Being awarded any of the following on one’s plates demands a seriously self-deprecating sense of humor or else it’s going to be a long ride, especially for the poor schmucks who find themselves stuck with two of them. Since most of this is bathroom humor, let’s begin with:

Letter combo	French signification	US equivalent
WC	toilettes
DQ	des culs
PQ	papier cul
KK	caca
QQ	cul cul
PT	péter

Yes it’s all completely sophomoric, but as car games go, one could do worse. Interestingly, France draws the line at certain potentially offensive combinations, such as SS (better late than never), meaning they cannot be issued. PD, on the other hand, which is a well-known derogatory term for homosexual, is definitely a possibility.

Here’s another tidbit: prior to 2009, the last two figures on French plates indicated the vehicle’s département. Paris is 75, for example, so cars registered in Paris had license plate numbers ending in 75. But this led to road rage being directed at specific départements: “Did you see that 62 cut me off? Typical...” Things tended to get particularly nasty between 75ers and 13ers, 13 being Marseille. Car vandalism, theft, even assault. When we bought our first car we actually had it labeled 92 instead of 75, just to be prudent (you can do that—69 is an especially popular choice).

Admit it: driving in France is a good topic.

Road rage II

As some of you may recall, I swore up and down that I would avoid getting behind the wheel in France, both for my safety as well as everyone else’s. But that was before I had a baby, who is growing at lightning speed and will be in driving school himself before I know it, which would be super embarrassing. Actually, the truth is that he goes to day care twice a week now, and the place is almost 20 minutes away by foot. This isn’t a problem when the sun is out; it’s a lovely walk, and hey—I’m sporty. But when the nice weather heads south and we’re stuck with the nasty, those 20 minutes feel a lot like 40 (you try pushing a stroller while holding an umbrella). So enough of that. Plus, we’re suburbanites now. I have clients to meet. Babykins has little friends to visit. The car was bound to become an issue sooner or later.

So I bit the proverbial bullet and signed up for driver’s ed—for the second time in my life. The first time, I was 15 years old and I think it cost my parents something like $300. This time, I’m much, much older and it cost—I kid you not—six times more (and my parents aren’t paying). I think this kind of blatant extortion heavy-handed pricing would spark a revolution in the US, but as I don’t live there anymore, and my Californian license is worth exactly rien to the French, my options were either to go (back) to driving school or find alternative means of mother-and-baby locomotion. There are a few, but they all seem inordinately cumbersome and/or life-threatening:

The bike: dangerous

The caboose: stupid-looking and dangerous

The rickshaw: unwieldy, stupid-looking, and dangerous

None of these being an acceptable alternative to the car (bonus: we already have one), I accepted the price tag, expensed it (obviously), and moved on to worrying about what I had just committed myself to. Because even after years of experiencing the French highway as a terrified passenger, it still strikes me as complex, overly aggressive and fraught with seemingly arbitrary, totally un-American rules like sidewalk parking and la priorité à droite. Perhaps worst of all (for me), automatic shift is as rare in France as it is ubiquitous in the US. But what do you do, go buy a fake permit online? Hey wait—

In France, as in the US, one can obtain a driver’s license (legally) only after passing a written test, followed by a practical test. But here, the written test is electronic. It’s based on a series of screen shots intended to simulate various situations one might encounter while driving, each accompanied by a multiple choice question. Preparation for the written test consists in taking practice test after practice test after practice test until one has pretty much memorized every possible question that could ever come up on the real test. For example:

How many points is this guy worth?

I can hardly wait for the practical part.

Let them drink milk

This weekend, G. and I ventured out of Paris to a place I had been meaning to visit for ages—the Château de Rambouillet. For all those of you who haven’t been, go. Go NOW. It’s fabulous and relatively easy to get to, even without a car (no I still haven’t gotten my license). It’s even on the route to Chartres! Que demande le peuple ?

In a nutshell, Rambouillet began life in the 14th century as a fortified manor, but quickly became a favorite royal hang-out thanks to its well-stocked forests and, later, its convenient proximity to Versailles. Louis XVI finally purchased the place in 1783 and enjoyed its charms until that messy incident in 1789. Rambouillet was later inhabited by Napoleon, then a series of French presidents, and today is open to the public—but remains ready to roll out the red carpet (literally) should the Prime Minister ever decide to host a pajama party.

Now, I’ve noticed over the past few years that there seems to be a disturbing trend developing among many of the châteaux near Paris: they have begun to serve the double purpose of historical site and modern art gallery. So you’ll be at a given château, visiting let’s say a 17th century ballroom, admiring the architecture and breathing in the ambiance, when suddenly you realize that there’s a 40-foot-wide red plastic cog suspended from the ceiling by human hair. Some people find the clash of ancient and modern to be stimulating; I find it to be one big, unwelcome non sequitur—plus it totally messes up the meditative state I happily slip into when contemplating art history. Thus, the presence of an oversized, dismembered, clay aardvark smack dab in the middle of Rambouillet’s otherwise superb Renaissance salle des marbres did not score any points with yours truly. As God is my witness, I do not GET postmodern art. Never have, never will. Back in my days as an art history major (and proud of it!), I coined the now-celebrated adage, If it sucks, it’s postmodern—which is as true now as it was then.

Definitely meets the criterion.

Much like the nearby Château de Versailles, Rambouillet offers outlying buildings well worth the detour. Among them is La Laiterie de la Reine (the Queen’s Dairy), commissioned by Louis XVI in order to placate Marie Antoinette, who purportedly found Rambouillet to be sub-par (“a gothic pile of sh**” I believe were her exact words). So he offered her a stately, neoclassical marble temple of sorts in which to ... drink milk. It seems the aristocracy of the period found great delight in communal dairy consumption and even developed an entire ritual around it, in this case involving Sèvres porcelain tasting bowls, intricately-sculpted Carrera marble friezes and an indoor waterfall. Classy, but odd. Odder still, the English garden surrounding La Laiterie features the remains of a man-made grotto, whose former purpose was none other than to provide a peaceful, pastoral setting in which to ... drink (more) milk. I gather the anti-dairy movement didn’t have many followers at the time.

All of this begs one question: what was the deal with Marie Antoinette’s farm fantasies? What would Freud say? The Château de Versailles had its own pseudo HAMLET for crying out loud. Apparently, she would escape from the pressures of court life by dressing up as a milk maid and hanging out in the hamlet, milking a cow that her servants had specifically prepared beforehand. That’s pretty normal behavior from a monarch, no? I can just imagine Michelle Obama, clad in a little jean-and-gingham ensemble, gamboling about on a toy farm out on the South Lawn....

The visit ended with the Chaumière aux Coquillages, a beautiful little “shell cottage” intricately adorned with frescoes and row upon shimmering row of inlaid seashells. Also, it has ox femurs projecting from the walls. Rather macabre, but intriguing. What, pray tell, are they doing there? More postmodernism perhaps? No—they’re keeping the place dry of course! Apparently, bone does a fantastic job of combating humidity. EUREKA! So really, all G. and I need to do to fix our bathroom ceiling is track down a few unused ox femurs. It may shock our future guests to find massive lengths of animal bone jutting out out of the ceiling when they go to use the facilities, but then again, I could always soothe their anxiety by proclaiming the whole thing to be cutting-edge installation art.

Road rage I

I haven’t driven a car in over a decade. In Paris, you really don’t need one. The public transportation system, while far from perfect, is efficient enough to allow the city’s inhabitants to get around with relative ease. If you ask me, owning a car here is more a liability than a necessity; the streets are overcrowded, the parking cher et rare, and the security highly dubious (unless your car is made of some kind of un-keyable, un-bashable, un-burnable space material). So why bother?

Well, because cars are quite handy when one wants to travel beyond the city without having to rely on the train. And they’re good for professional purposes. And for those with young children, public transportation is not so convenient. I’m well aware of all these things. Truth be told, I’d have obtained a French driver’s license years ago if I could have. But alas, one of the (many) things that no one tells you when you move to France is that you have exactly one year from the issuing of your first residence permit in which to freely exchange your foreign driver's license for a French one. After that, it’s all over; you have to go through French driving school, complete with coursework, road lessons and a final driving test that is notoriously difficult to pass or even schedule, all for the peccadillo of €1,300 or so.

But that’s not all. You have to learn standard shift. In France, automatics are considered wimpy cars created for wimpy people who don’t know how to handle the road (Americans, in other words). Granted, plenty of my countrymen (my parents included) thumb their noses at such vicious stereotypes and embrace the stick shift. Not me. All through high school I happily zipped about in my late grandfather’s 2-door hatchback, an automatic that really hadn’t been conceived for the twisting, narrow roads of my native mountain town and thus struggled quite a bit with the steeper inclines. That didn’t matter; I was—and remain—incapable of maneuvering a stick shift. My dad courageously tried to teach me once.... I’ll leave it at that. Three pedals, three mirrors and five gears are just too many things to deal with simultaneously, even for a multi-tasker such as myself. In all honesty, I do tend to go through life with my head in the clouds—ask my 10th grade driver’s ed teacher—and one simply cannot have one’s head in the clouds while trying to drive stick. That’s why God invented the automatic.

But again, the French don’t do automatics (taxi drivers notwithstanding), or at least they’ll never admit to it. And so, if I ever intend on once more embracing the freedom of the open road, leaning into the wind at the helm of my mighty steed ... er ... whatever, then I am just going to have to grin and bear the humiliation of French driving school. Sigh. I hate being made fun of, and I will DEFINITELY be made fun of when I show up to class, a 30-something American amidst a bunch of snickering French teenagers, and proceed to demonstrate precisely how clueless I am when faced with a stick shift. “Ha ha! The old lady with the funny accent stalled the car again! Ha ha!”

But let’s just entertain the impossible for a moment and imagine that I somehow master the stick. I’d still have to face the sadistic free for all that is French motor law. Coming to a dead stop in the middle of an intersection if there’s a series of dashes running through it, for example. And whatever sick fool dreamt up the whole priorité à droite thing should be given the same sentence as Edmond Dantès. But my least favorite of all is probably the roundabout. I began calling them “death circles” the minute I arrived here and have remained true to my prejudice ever since. Those things were not meant to be negotiated by people like me.

Place de l'Etoile: where mediocre drivers go to die.

Incidentally, I’ve lived outside the Motherland long enough to no longer detain a valid US license, either. That’s right; I lack what is essentially the ID card of the average American citizen, a fact that never fails to get me into trouble when I’m home for a visit. Whether it’s writing a check (contrary to popular belief, one’s passport is not a universally accepted form of ID) or trying to buy booze, having an expired driver’s license is just a recipe for disappointment, extreme irritation and uncontrolled outbursts of anti-American sentiment quite ill befitting my generally easy-going (American) nature. I should really look into renewal one of these days, but with all the administrative hoop-jumping I already have to do as a French resident, I simply cannot accept the notion of also having to stand in line at the DMV. I’ve paid at the proverbial office, non? They should just SEND me a new one as a token of goodwill between fellow Americans. But in the meantime, I cannot legally get behind the wheel of a car in America or France, or for that matter any country requiring a (valid) driver’s license.

Which brings me to my next point. I discovered a few years back that having a French permit is not necessarily the sine qua non of legal vehicular operation in France. As early as the 1970s, European lawmakers went and approved the circulation of 2-person, permit-free cars. That’s right, cars that any idiot can cruise around in without ever having set foot in driver’s ed. Bizarrely, none of my French friends finds this blatantly criminal at all. “But the cars can only go 45 kilometers per hour!” they laugh. Right. Quick math quiz: A permit-free car traveling at 45 km per hour is heading south on la rue du Piéton mort. At the same time, another permit-free car moving at the same speed is heading north on the same road. A few seconds before the moment when the two cars meet, a small child goes running into the street between them, chasing after his ballon rouge.... What are the chances that anybody will walk away unharmed? I say, people without permits should limit their driving pleasure to Disneyland's Autopia and not go careening about on real roads, risking multiple lives behind the wheel of permit-free cars. I mean, just look at these things:

Just this side of a rickshaw.

I seem to recall having seen a similar contraption in a long-ago episode of Family Matters. And while at the time it appeared perfectly appropriate for the iconic nerd Steven Urkel to be driving one, today plenty of perfectly normal French men and women zip about in them without a second thought. On the other hand, in a country that fully embraces the Smart car as a credible—nay, even somewhat fashionable!—form of transportation, I suppose the permit-free car’s relative popularity should come as a shock to no one.

Thus, it appears that the only remaining option to my driving conundrum is to win the lottery and hire a personal chauffeur. I rather like this approach, which would offer the additional benefit of freeing me forever from early morning/late night dependence on Parisian taxis, whose dubious reputation is worthy of an entirely separate blog entry. A chauffeur it is, then. I shall leave driving school to the peons.