Lasso Online asked editor Stephen Twentyman to share his observations about his recent visit to Toulouse, France, during the annual student exchange between George Mason and its sister school Lycee Ozenne in Toulouse.

By Stephen Twentyman (April 23, 2004)

I left for France on the afternoon of Saturday, the 27^th of March. The flight was a typical international flight in that it was very long and rather boring, and, it being over the course of an afternoon, Eastern time, I didn’t sleep a wink and was therefore terribly jet-lagged by the time we got to Paris, as day was breaking on the 28^th.

I am happy to say that Charles de Gaulle Airport is nowhere near as horrific as many travellers claim it to be. There were cigarette butts all over the place, but I didn’t see any incidents of public urination and, to my delight, it wasn’t the dimly-lit labyrinth that I had expected. I couldn’t mentally function very well at all at this point, and so just followed everybody else to the next terminal, but all-in-all, I’d say that Dulles is a far more obnoxious airport.
 

I picked up a few newspapers, but it was impossible to keep focused; for the next few hours. I mostly just amused myself by trying to stay awake and watching the camouflaged (I can’t say their disguise worked very well, though) security guards point their rifles at each others’ heads and laugh about it. I didn’t get searched at all in my way to France (although I did find an ominous note from the Department of Homeland Security notifying me that some goon had rifled through my luggage, and sorry if they broke any locks, but they couldn’t be held responsible); the way back was a little less fortunate. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it on some level; being delayed 10 minutes while a guard makes you empty your pockets and take off your shoes and jacket while searching every nook and cranny of your carry-on does rouse a bit of righteous anger, and we all like to be a bit ticked off in the name of personal freedom every now and again. These searches were conducted at random, which makes one wonder how effective it is if it’s entirely possible for every passenger carrying a weapon to be skipped over in favor of innocent tourists.

Members of the Class of 2004 pose in front of the  ruins of an ancient building.

I slept the whole flight to Toulouse and, after a brief interval, slept all afternoon at my host family’s house before sleeping all night and waking up in the morning bright and fresh and ready to go. Toulouse is a really nice place. If Paris is the New York of France, Toulouse is its Ottawa: smaller, sleepier, and less eventful, but very friendly and clean and easy. It’s a laid-back place, which made the trip to Paris that much more unpleasant. The Lycée Ozenne (our host school; lycée roughly corresponds to our high school) was in a bit of a run-down part of town, but it was hardly a rough part of town; there was much graffiti, many poor immigrants, and a certain amount of trash and cigarette butts on the ill-kept sidewalks. In spite of this, the area felt very safe and even friendly. There were no pickpockets and nearly everybody was quite friendly and courteous. A tourist is a bit of a novelty in the city, and I was generally treated very well and with an amount of interest. The French (or the Toulousains, rather) were not hostile, and if they hated America, they sure kept quiet about it. Nobody was in love with the U.S., either; most disagreed quite fiercely with our government but realized that many in our country do, as well. Being quiet, polite, and speaking passable French also helped. Just as we imagine a typical Frenchman to be a wiry snooty hothead with a striped shirt, beret, and Gauloise in mouth, the French imagine an American to be a boorish cowboy who barks orders in English between mouthfuls of chaw and McDonald’s.
Going over there, I expected the war to be a much bigger deal than it turned out to be. While I never got in any sort of serious political argument (I had a 20-minute conversation once while waiting for a bus, but that was it. It’s easier than one would think; many times, you can just say a Latin-derived word with a French accent and it’ll be reasonably close), I read the papers daily. General consensus is that the war is a catastrophe, but that’s about it. Americans feel much more strongly about the matter, both for and against. It does make sense: after all, it is our war. News from Iraq got press, of course, and Le Monde ran a few editorials during the worst of it (the days following Fallujah when all hell broke loose) criticizing the coalition’s ineptitude; however, there was never any sort of "we told you so" or taunting. I similarly (as I said above) didn’t get any sort of lip for my country of origin (although I heard that a few other group members did). The polls are known in France, as well, and an American is just as likely to oppose the war as support it. In addition, we had made something of a political statement simply by showing up in the country and taking an interest in the language and culture. The jingoistic types who hate the French would have simply stayed home; an American traveller in France is therefore more likely to at least be open-minded about the situation. I’d imagine that it would be quite different in Spain or Poland, however.
	Juniors Sarah Stanley, Stephanie Peters, Helen-Rose Patterson, Caroline Leamon, and Senior Erin Bugg  admiring the beauty of the ruins of an ancient castle.
The newspapers had their own thing to cover. The day before we came, France held regional elections (I don’t fully understand it, but it’s a bit like state delegate elections here) in which Jacques Chirac’s government took a pounding. As in most parliamentary democracies, there are many, many political parties. The first round of elections pares this mass of parties into a group of the most popular ones; they then band together into coalitions to run for office. In this particular election, there were three: the left, the right (Chirac’s supporters), and the far right (essentially Fascists). In 21 of France’s 22 regions, the left won. This is an almost unimaginable landslide in America; it can really be compared only to the 1972 or 1984 presidential elections (only for a lesser office, of course). The lone holdout was Alsace, prompting a week-long series of political cartoons in Le Monde depicting Chirac in German peasant dress. Although it was for a relatively minor office, it was a clear vote of no confidence by the people, and so Chirac and PM Jean-Pierre Raffarin spent the bulk of our trip re-arranging the cabinet and policies in a panicky attempt at damage control. The election was the major news story, overshadowing Iraq on many days (at least until Moqtada al-Sadr’s rise to power). Strangely enough, there was little more than a peep about it at home. I can certainly understand, but still found it surprising that a news event which was so enormous in one country can be almost completely ignored in another. During the second week, France and the U.K. had a grand old time celebrating the centennial of the Entente Cordiale, an Anglo-French alliance that would develop into the Triple Entente (of World War I fame). More importantly, the alliance established a friendly Anglo-French rapport after centuries of hating each others’ guts; they decided that Germany was a greater threat than each other and so set the stage for Western Europe as we know it. On a related note, the Queen took a lengthy royal tour of the country that included a stop in Toulouse, where she was received in the very same room of the Capitole (a fantastic 18th-century palace that houses the Toulousain city hall) as we were a week earlier by the mayor. To be honest, even though he/she spoke to us and greeted us, I had no idea who the mayor was. There were about five important-looking people who offered a few words to the group. Any one of them could have been the mayor. The Capitole is about four blocks from the Lycée Ozenne. French school is very interesting, quite different from ours, and not entirely very good. The students are very defensive of their school system and love it. Personally, I felt that the six classes I attended were quite enough for a lifetime. Class runs from 8:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M., Monday through Friday (either they had the Saturday off or the Lycée Ozenne doesn’t do the half-day-on-Saturday thing). That’s a terribly long time to spend at school, and the classes really don’t make up for it.  Outside of class, the school is easily better than George Mason. Instead of a single building, it consists of several surrounding an enclosed courtyard. It is very much like one of those enclosed bourgeois town houses, if you know what I’m talking about, right down to the gate that students pass through to get into the courtyard. A student must go to many school buildings in the course of a day, so the courtyard takes the place of our hallways in that it is a meeting place and a between-class hang-out. It’s cobblestoned and landscaped in the middle, with plenty of trees and plants to make the passage prettier. The excited French students smile happily at the  camera at a paper making factory. The courtyard is in stark contrast to the school buildings, which are much more austere and utilitarian. The halls, intended for a continuous flow of movement (at least there aren’t any hall-blockers) are very narrow and dimly-lit. The walls are completely blank; the hall’s only purpose is to be a passage between a classroom and the outside. The classrooms are slightly more cheery, but are nowhere near the plainest room at George Mason. There are no posters on the walls of the small and cramped rooms; upon entry, the 35 or so students take their seats. Students do not have individual desks as they do here; at the very least, there are two chairs to a table (as in elementary school).

When the bell sounds, the teacher walks in; the next hour is spent in uninterrupted lecture. All of the classes that I attended followed this same format: the teacher speaks, and the students rush to scribble down everything he says. The only interaction that takes place is if a student needs clarification or in response to an assigned exercise. After an hour of note-taking, the bell rings again, and the 35 students shuffle out to the courtyard for a five-minute break. The student does not have an individual schedule; the same group of 35 stays together as it goes from class to class. On the bright side, the French have more open periods than we, and their lunch is supposedly first-rate. I never got to eat it. According to those with enough patience to wait 40 minutes in line, it was quite good. I waited about 20 minutes before deciding it just wasn’t worth it and that the line was moving about an inch a minute. I nipped out to a café instead for a quick bite.

That was a beauty of the French education system; just about everybody has open campus, and there is more to do in the immediate area than there is in a mile of George Mason. Big supermarkets are unknown over there. It amazed me to see how much that affected everyday life; there are many people who routinely blast big supermarket chains, claming that it forces mom ‘n’ pop stores out of business, but it’s surprising that they rarely touch on the point that having a bunch of small stores fills space in a city and provides things to do and places to go. Instead of a Giant or Safeway, the French city has shops in every conceivable field of expertise. There are so-called supermarchés, but these are hardly the same thing as our concept. They sell produce and dry goods and are therefore no bigger than any other shop. A boulangerie (baker’s shop) and patisserie (pastry shop) sell just that; they’re often in the same store. Thankfully, the obnoxious low-carb craze hasn’t hit France, and likely never will; they value their croissants and beignets too much, as they should. There are two places to buy meat: a boucherie (butcher’s shop) is where one buys raw cuts, and a charcuterie sells grilled goods (often kebabs, owing to the large number of Middle Eastern and North African immigrants). Tobacconists also sell film and postcards, newsstands sell newspapers and sometimes books, and a papiterie (stationer’s shop) sells paper and writing implements. In America, most of these shops are condensed into a supermarket or office supply store. While it may seem somewhat of a hassle, I prefer these small shops; quaintness and novelty are obvious aspects, but there are other reasons. Bread and pastries are legitimately better when the shop focuses exclusively on them and nothing else, and the staff are generally more knowledgeable, as opposed to the jack-of-all-trades who work at large supermarkets. Also, as I noted above, having more shops livens up a city block. Instead of an endless line of laundromats, convenience stores, pawn shops, and liquor stores, the French city fills its places with a lively variety. The city enjoys better health as a result; people are more likely to walk about when there is something to walk to.

Unfortunately, we eventually left Toulouse for a three-day stay in Paris before heading back home. Paris is everything Toulouse is not: it’s crowded, impersonal, rude, dangerous-feeling, smelly, and full of tourists, Parisians who hate tourists, and Parisians who love tourists’ wallets. We travelled as a large group around the city, which led to our being sometimes embarrassingly loud (in English, no less). There were plenty of exasperated looks from the locals, but when we broke into smaller groups, it was much more manageable. Conversations took the typical Parisian form (i.e., I would ask a question in broken French, get an answer in perfect English, and I would reply again in French), but I like to think that they were just trying to be helpful by putting it in our tongue. If they were truly trying to act superior, they would likely just give a "Zut alors! Je comprends pas" and walk off with a huff. The Parisians weren’t quite as rude as their reputation, but we did get plenty of dirty looks in the larger group. Then again, how would you respond to a group of 20 foreigners blocking the way, some of whom are talking very loudly in another language?

The biggest problem in Paris was that it’s apparently some sort of grave humiliation to pick up after one’s dog. Main boulevards are generally clean, but smaller side streets are littered with unsightly piles that far too often get themselves stuck in the grooves of your shoe. It is not an exaggeration to say that on an average block of a Parisian back street, one must dodge four of them. It’s hard to see the scenery when your eyes are glued on the pavement directly in front of you.

After three days of the usual sight-seeing in Paris, we spent a sleepless night in which the concierge, fed up with some of our group’s noise, came up to scream at us to shut up and go to bed. Several hours later, at 6 A.M., we rose, went back to Charles de Gaulle, and passed an uneventful flight back to Dulles. It was a very good trip all-in-all; the Parisian leg was a bit of a downer, but it was probably a good thing that it was stuck at the very end and that we were a bit thankful to be getting home. I can’t imagine how it would have been if we had flown home directly from Toulouse, that great city in the South of France.