Newsflash: No one was waiting for you to get here

This weekend, a hundred people emailed me about an American woman who took against French celery, plus a recipe for cheese baked in a pumpkin.

All that terrible French produce, in the halles at Nimes. Chez Sylvie - Image from Les Halles de Nîmes Officiel

This weekend, dozens of people sent me links to this piece from CNN website about the Californian couple who moved to Nîmes and were so horrified at the terrible state of French celery, they’re going back home to America. I haven’t been so surprised by an opinion since Lisa on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City said she didn’t like the food in Italy because it was too fresh.

Joanna McIsaac-Kierklo was very upset about the produce in French supermarkets. “You pick up a piece of celery and it falls over. It’s so limp. So old and so horrible. Who would eat this?” I don’t know who took the picture of dear Joanna in the produce aisle of a French supermarket, but they’re a sly goose. Joanna looks utterly delighted with herself, holding two glossy red peppers the size of rugby balls, and there, on the shelf just to the right of her shoulder, are heads of celery positively rigid with life.

Joanna says she and her husband Ed are struggling with making friends, are driven mad by French bureaucracy, that every day is a nightmare of “too much grief and no joy”. She says, “I honestly don’t think we could have put anymore effort to acclimatise to the French way of life,” and that before their trip she read everything she possibly could to prepare herself for life in France.

Joanna, in a French supermarket with all that troubling produce. Credit: Joanna McIsaac-Kierklo - from CNN.com

But did you Joanna, did you really? Because you said this part out loud. “I have been so busy packing, unpacking, assembling furniture etc. that I haven’t really found time to hunker down and start (learning French). It was always on my list but (I) just couldn’t find the time.”

Oh, honey.

She says she’s a “chatty box”, that she misses company, but perhaps if she’d spent less time with a cordless drill and more time on Duolingo, she might have fared better. I get it. It’s a lot more fun shopping for furnishings than cramming vocabulary, but there are no shortcuts.

After being frustrated with Nîmes, Joanna and Ed have now moved to Montpellier, but guess what? They speak French there too. The problems they had in Nimes, will replicate themselves in Montpellier because the problem isn’t about the place. Everywhere you go, you always take yourself with you. By the end of the piece, Joanna admits perhaps, in their 70s, they’re too old to take on this new adventure and perhaps they’ll go home, to their nice, rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco.

What perplexes me most about these two is that they’re not naïve travellers. They lived in London for a while and have visited many European cities. They even lived in Nîmes for two months at one point. Joanna seems to crave company and yet – despite all her apparent reading in preparation for the move, she appears to have skipped the most important part. Learn the language, learn the language, learn the language. She eschews the company of “ex-pats” – both Nîmes and Montpellier have sizeable anglophone communities – but seems astonished that she can’t integrate with her French neighbours. She says, “It’s a hard shell to break. They’re very private people. But they’re also principled and moral. They’re nice people. There’s nothing unkind about them. They’re just not extremely social.”

Oh Joanna, they weren’t just sitting around learning English waiting for you to get here.

She rails against French bureaucracy. I mean, fair enough but they were “bewildered by the rules and regulations when dealing with seemingly simple things like setting up a bank account”. These days, there are very few places in the world where it’s simple to set up a bank account, due to all the bad lads doing the money laundering and all that. And good luck to anyone negotiating the hell that are visas, Green Cards, banking, taxes and the healthcare system on trying to emigrate to the United States. I promise you Joanna, it’s not the work of an afternoon, to be fitted in between putting up shelves and shopping for salad.

I’m sorry to go on, Joanna, because I am sure you’re a nice person, just one with a terrible dose of Why Don’t They Do It Like We Do It? Even Guillaume, our wonderful pharmacist, has nothing that could help you with that. But I will go on a little longer, because this bit is personal. Joanna went in on French food.

“People go, ‘Oh my god, the French food is so fabulous. Yeah, if you want to eat brie, pâté, pastries and French bread all day long. But who eats like that?” Tourists, Joanna, often American tourists, those are the ones that live like they’re on a pâté drip, consume every four hours, brie as needed. I admit, when we moved here, I almost baguette’d and croissant’d myself to death. This is because I can’t abide waste and knowing a baguette goes stale in about the time it takes you to get it home (I’m sure this is why the French seldom have butter on their bread -  there’s just no time) meant that as an ethical obligation, I would eat the whole thing as quickly as possible. I’m all about the planet.

But now I don’t eat bread every day and I save croissants for a weekend treat. Like most of the people I know, I eat meat and fish, usually fairly simply prepared, fruit, vegetables (a green salad with every meal, as is the law). Of course I eat charcuterie and cheese, but not all the time, Joanna. Perhaps if you’d spent more time with French people, and less time at Ikea you’d know this.

I don’t mean to go too hard on Joanna and Ed. There are lots of Joanna and Eds about, people who see abroad as a pretty backdrop to a life exactly like the one they live at home, and when they come up against an entirely different culture in all its complex and sometimes baffling glory it’s challenging. No one was waiting for you to get here to start. But you need to jump in where they are, not hope that everyone will fall into step with you.

Roasted pumpkin with Saint-Marcellin cheese and walnuts

You want a pumpkin or squash that’s not too large – the cavity should just hold the cheese so it can melt into a delicious pool. I use potimarron, but you could use butternut or any other suitably compact squash. Also, I used walnuts as that’s what I have, but it’s very good with hazelnuts too.

I give the recipe for two people here, as I’m making this for our Sunday night dinner at home, but it’s very easy to make for more – double, triple, quadruple the quantities as you like. I either serve it just on its own, or with a very simple salad of pear slices dressed with a little olive or walnut oil, a splash of wine or cider vinegar and some flaky salt. Make sure you also serve it with some slices of baguette to dip into the cheese. I know you won’t let me down.

Serves 2