In Aniane, as elsewhere in France, there is a problem with dog owners letting their dogs shit where they like — streets, sidewalks, alleys — and then just leaving said shit there for others to avoid or, if unlucky, drive over or step in.

There is a campaign here in Aniane, however, to change dog owner behaviour. From the look of the streets it is not a terrifically successful campaign, but perhaps we’ve caught it early.

School children are on the front lines of this campaign; here’s a random selection of their poster are against crottes:

Here’s a photo I took yesterday from a plateau overlooking Aniane. The tower to the left is the “Tour” in “rue de la Tour,” which is our street. Our house is roughly in the middle of the picture.

1. Bicycle tires in France have different valves, complex yet ingenious little things that screw out (to inflate) and back in (to seal). Perhaps this style is more widespread than I know, but this is my first encounter.
2. Car radios are smart. There’s a switch you can flip that will keep the same radio station (or network) tuned, even if you’re traveling a long distance and the actual frequency changes several times.
3. Escalators are on the other side. Which is to say the “up” is on the left, not the right as it is in Canada. And vice versa.
4. Milk for tea is served hot. And it also appears to be something of a novelty to order milk with tea at all, as when I order, as instructed by my phrase book, thé au lait I’m often greeted with a quizical (in French) “you mean you’d like some tea, with a little pitcher of milk on the side?”
5. Aluminum is still in vogue. I couldn’t figure out with the space-age light material that various spoons were made of until Catherine told me it was aluminum. There are also three standard spoon sizes, with an intermediate size betwen our “tea” and “table” spoons.
6. Credit cards have PIN numbers. Whenever we pay by credit card there is confusion because we don’t have a smart chip in our cards, and need to actually sign the slip rather than typing in a PIN number. I assume this means the French system is an amalgam of our “Interac” and credit card systems, but I’m not sure. Oddly, when paying road tolls on the autoroutes I’ve been able to just slide my card in the slot, and it comes back to me immediately and the gate opens with no “we’re checking to make sure you have enough money” wait. I wonder if they’ve just decided to eat any charges that might arise in return for smoother flowing traffic at the toll plazas.
7. Milk is sold in “last forever” sterilized packages. Try as we might we’ve not been able to find milk in the “fresh” form that we’re used to at home. Grocery stores have entire aisles where milk is sold in Tetrapak or similar containers, sterilized and sealed and with no need of refrigeration until opened.
8. Everyone says “bonjour.” Really. Well, perhaps not in the big cities, but here in Aniane everyone we meet, from child to adult, plasterer to businessperson, strange and familiar, says “bonjour” or “bon soir” to us (and to each other) on the street. It’s very endearing.
9. The country has an excellent tagline. In the annals of three-word phrases, you gotta say that Liberte Egalite Fraternite is a pretty good one. And it appears on every public building, school and piece of official documentation we’ve seen. Canada needs branding like this.

Here’s a work in progress, a photo-collage of all of the street signs in Aniane:

This Sunday was May Day here, the day the French simultaneously celebrate workers (like our Labour Day) and spring (like our Victoria Day).

We knew something was afoot when we picked up our baguette at on Sunday morning and the boulanger handed us a small bouquet of flowers and wished us “Happy First of May.”

The big May Day event here in Aniane was the Au Bonheur des Jardins, held on the edge of town in a large walled compound that looked like it had been a armory in an earlier life.

We figured, from the publicity, that the Au Bonheur des Jardins was a festival of flowers and plants. What couldn’t be effectively be communicated on the posters, however, was that it was a died in the wool “Birkenstocks and apple cider” hippie festival of flowers and plants.

Some things, it seems, transcend cultural divides, and “back to the landism” appears to be one of them, for we might just as well have been at any Canadian gathering of organic farmers, folk musicians and hackey sack devotees.

All the telltale signs were in place: the healthy brownies for sale that tasted like chocolate pressed wood pulp, the man selling energy detecting handcrafted wooden pendulums, tables covered with pamphlets selling the international solidarity movement, recycled stuffed toys in the children’s “fishing pond” game, the drummers drumming their handmade drums, and the shiatsu stand in the corner.

Of course, this being France, there were also mimes on stilts, handmade goat cheese, and flagons of wine available to go with the brownies.

Although I’ve flirted with the edges of hippie culture in Canada — when Catherine met me I had a full beard and hair down to my shoulders in a pony tail, after all — I was always a tourist, eating the carob burgers by day and running out to Mcdonalds by cover of night. In the end I found conforming to the rules of the Birkenstock crowd as confining as conforming to the rules of the suit and tie crowd, and went my own way.

But I found Au Bonheur des Jardins oddly alluring.

Somehow being amidst something so disturbingly familiar but in French (and thus completely without chance of recruitment) made for a very pleasant afternoon. I sat back and drank my mint tea (leaves left in, of course) and ate my brownie, and just watched it all unfold. I even screwed up my courage and bought some artisanal cheese (very good, from the Champagne region) and some handmade books (cookbooks about basil, eggs and olive oil).

Catherine, frighteningly at home in any situation, simply dove in. She and Oliver made handmade paper, fished for recycled stuffed toys, and watched the mimes up close. She bought some myrtle juice (we’re still not sure what a myrtle is) and some more cheese and some weird substance from which she can purportedly make tea.

Monday morning, life returned to normal.

On Tuesday night we got caught, again, in the “we’re going to have to eat at a cafeteria” bind.

We’d driven down to Perpignan for the day, attracted by the allure of the promised “somewhat France, somewhat Catalonia” colour of the city. Catherine spent the day wandering around by herself, visiting art galleries and going behind the scenes at a weavers coop. Oliver and I found a playground, visited the library, went shopping for shoes, took in all of the toy stories within the walls of the old city, had a fresh squeezed orange, kiwi, strawberry juice, and found a FNAC outlet with glass bridges that Oliver found very compelling.

At the end of the day, though, I had to find a quiet place to settle down for a conference call with the folks back home at Yankee. The truck was underground, with no mobile phone reception, so that was out. We considered going to dinner and having me just duck outside, but we were still to early to eat.

In the end we decided to head towards home, and find a place along the way to stop when 8:00 p.m. (aka 2:00 p.m. Eastern) arrived. As it turns out, this place happened to be the parking lot of a giant Carefour grocery store. And when the conference call was over, and I’d reunited with Catherine and Oliver (who’d been exploring the cheese, televisions and running shoes of the store), we realized that it was too late to head back into the city (too late for us and too late for the city). We had no choice but to dine at the cafeteria we had so accidentally parked immediately in front of.

We decided that I would take Oliver and sit while Catherine made her rounds and picked up her dinner, then we’d switch.

Catherine made a good go of navigating the system, which was a little different than what we’d experienced earlier in the week in that the meat course had to be ordered in advance and picked up elsewhere. She made the mistake, however, of picking up a small can of apple juice for Oliver from a special fridge devoted to the servicing of the menu pour enfants.

It turns out that this can of apple juice was “not sold separately” and by the time we knew what hit us (I was involved as a French-English go between by this point) we’d been forced to order the entire menu pour enfants, which consisted of a heaping portion of french fries, a piece of chicken that was large enough to be an entire small bird, a salad plate and dessert.

The problem was that Oliver, catatonic from a day in the Perpignan sunshine, wasn’t hungry at all. Not even the prospect of french fries with mayonnaise (usually a sure winner) could tempt him. He didn’t even want the apple juice.

So I polished off my “assiette des legumes” (I had learned from our earlier experience, and there were no squid parts on my plate) and Catherine finished off her boiled pork (Catherine hadn’t learned from our earlier experience). Catherine, feeling guilty, polished off Oliver’s salad. We smuggled the apple juice out to the truck. And Oliver’s menu got left on the plate.

Of course if my grandmother had been in attendance the entire meal would have gone into a napkin and into her purse, but modern day fears of botulism combined with the realization that Oliver would be even less likely to eat a giant cold piece of chicken later on prevented us from doing likewise.

Out on the highway, we found ourselves alone with the trucks heading up into France from Spain. With 130 km/h of highway largely to ourselves, we made short work of the journey home, and were in bed by 11:00 p.m.

We have vowed that, come hell or high water, there are no more cafeterias in our future.

We came here to Aniane at exactly the right time, just as winter was on its way out. Although the weather was certainly an improvement over Charlottetown’s “extended late winter,” the nights here were still cool, and the chill never really left the house during the day.

Over our three weeks spring has arrived in spades: the temperature has risen by 5 to 10 degrees, leaves on the trees and vines have sprouted, and everything and everyone seems to have an extra spring in the step.

We’ve been here long enough that the boulanger knows our daily order, the man at the épicerie knows Oliver likes Kinder Surprise Eggs, and the postmaster knows to prepare the international stamps for Oliver when he sees him coming with postcards in hand. Catherine got her hair cut and styled yesterday (entirely in French; a sheer force of will, a testament to her stubborn courage); the man who served her coffee at the salon was the same man we found, later in the day, behind the counter at the hardware store. (Her hair looks great, by the way).

I have begun to remember not to say bonjour after dark, learned that you buy artisanal chocolate by the plaquette and which is which in the fraise vs. framboises confusion. We’ve figured out which bac to put our compost, our recycling and our garbage in, and we know when it’s too windy to put our clothes out to dry. And that we need to move the car on Wednesday nights because Thursday is market day. I’ve even begun to form my own opinion about the oui vs. non on the EU constitution vote coming up later in the month (I’m leaning oui).

While I haven’t learned quite how the French television tuning system works (it seems to involve the letter “P” in a big way; I’m just not sure how), I have figured out that there is a movie on almost every channel every night at 8:55 p.m.

French and English have started to blur too. I’ll read part of a book, put it down, and then not remember which language it was in. I’ve slowly switched from the “simultaneous translation” method of living in French to the “taking French on its own terms” method.

Which is not to say that I’m any good at understanding, speaking, or reading French. I get the masculine and feminine mixed up. I express most everything using primitive building blocks (“do you have any things of chocolate that also have the name Oliver embossed on the top like these chocolates that are round that contain alcohol?”). But I’m not half as afraid as I was when we first arrived, and I’ve ceased to be too ashamed of my poor French (mostly) to venture forth into new territory (mostly).

Twenty-one days isn’t enough time to really understand anything about a place — we’ve been on Prince Edward Island for twelve years and we still don’t understand. Most of what I relate above is more about comfort and familiarity than about realizing French life, culture and history.

But I’ve a strong belief that culture is found not in the monuments and the museums but in the substance of everyday life: road signs, roof tiles, park benches, the little twist of the bag that keeps the croissants from falling out, saying bonjour to everyone you meet as you walk.

Living in the midst of what to us is a strange yet vaguely familiar land, and achieving some level of comfort and familiarity, has allowed us, if not to understand France, at least to realize that there is something here to be understood: that the wine and the land and the architecture and the parks and the croissant bag twist and the church and the war and the cheese and the strange opening hours are all part of a complex, interdependent system. This is not something unique to France, of course; it’s just that this system in this country has an integrity, a maturity, and tremendous sensual appeal that makes it an excellent selling tool for opening the mind to consider other.

If all Oliver remembers from the trip he took to France when he was four is a vague memory of that notion, then I think we will have done our job as parents well.