Reality Talk Blog

Language A or Language B

Posted on 15. Sep, 2009 by Devo in As Good as it Gets

We’re now in Chamonix France after spending a couple of days in Paris and then in Beaune. 99% of this trip has been the usual fantastic time I have in France, but there is one little thing that just gets under my skin a little. When we go to a restaurant, cafe, or bar, sometimes we meet up with a waiter or waitress who has this chip on his/her shoulder about us English speakers and they make it quite obvious by making your stay a little less than the rest of the customers.

For example today we went to a new place for lunch and were seated by a guy who spoke French of course and my wife who is bilingual English/French with French her first language acknowledged him in French that we would. He immediately seated us at a table yet to be cleaned (tray of plates and glasses, paper place mats, crumbs etc.), but when he heard me speak in English, he left us at this dirty table and as other people left he would immediately clean and reset those tables all the while ignoring us. After about 10 minutes of watching what what was going on, I got his attention and asked if it would be possible to have our table cleared of the previous customers’ dishes. He nodded and then forcefully grabbed the tray and then roughly crumpled the paper place mats up dumping all the crumbs on the table before leaving. I was getting a bit ‘ticked off’ and we talked about this a*& a bit and then after another 5 or 10 minutes and no new place setting or order taken we got up and left.

Strangely enough, there is the other side as we found out by talking to the desk clerk at a small hotel we stayed at in Beaune. One afternoon we stopped in at a cafe for lunch and were greeted nicely until my wife addressed them in French. From then on our treatment went down hill with angry looks, slow and rough service and inappropriate language to my wife and as you can guess, we left. As I mentioned earlier, we had a chat with the desk clerk at our hotel later at the bar and the answer to this strange treatment came up in conversation purely by accident. He was talking to us about the cross section of tourists that come through and at one point said that most locals don’t like it when their own people come to stay. He said they are usually rude to the cafe staff, hotel staff and shop staff and the town’s people would rather not have them. Now we concluded that back at that cafe, they may have taken us as French and given us the cold shoulder.

Please don’t get the wrong picture by this story, I love France and have visited many many places and regions in this wonderful country. After this trip ends, I hope to be able to come back soon and see even more. I would however would like to just say to the very small percentage of the population who has language issues ‘grow up’.

On that note, I have taken quite a few photos this past week and now I’ve put a few of them up for your enjoyment. Just click on any image to get a larger size. Unfortunately I have had to watermark the larger sized images because in the past years I have seen some of my photos appearing on other blogs. Sure, it’s a compliment, but no, they’re mine.

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Tags: chamonix, france, french, paris