Well, that’s annoying.

When I moved to Sweden for university, and later to England for work, I received virtually identical talks about the four stages of culture shock. There’s the honeymoon phase when everything is all wine and baguettes, then ‘frustration’, where you get annoyed because things aren’t what you’re used to or how you expect them to be. In stage 3, you adapt to the way things work in the foreign country and adjust your behaviour accordingly, and finally you reach the acceptance stage, also known as “it is what it is”. (Fun fact: marriage works the same way.)

We’re only in France for a couple of months, but we’ve noticed a few things that create frustration for us and/or require us to adapt our behaviour.

Security. I don’t know if it’s a remnant of centuries of fortification or a desire to sunbathe privately in the nude, but many homes here are hidden behind locked metal gates (kept closed and locked at all times), and concrete walls or high fences, behind which is often a dog. Just as we’re about to say, “hello cute little doggie”, the bark alarm goes off and it races towards us, hurling itself against the fence in froth-mouthed fury. Sometimes the dogs are loose and will chase us as we cycle past, even grabbing the back wheel of Ray’s bike in one case. Coming from a neighbourhood in Canada where front yards are wide open (making it easy to chat with people), dogs are generally friendly, and doors are still sometimes left unlocked, it’s a strange feeling to walk around these tiny country villages that feel deserted and a little unwelcoming (not the people, as we haven’t met them, just the atmosphere that the security measures create). We even saw high concrete walls on one house that completely blocked a beautiful view of the Pyrenees. Such a shame.

Opening hours. I mentioned this in a previous post, but it’s become a bit of a running joke between Ray and I due to the frequency with which it occurs. It took Ray three cycles into town before the post office was open for him to buy a stamp. Sometimes places have been closed for public holidays (three of them in May), sometimes for ‘exceptional circumstances’ (this occurs too often for the circumstances to be truly exceptional), sometimes due to a ‘social movement’ (protest by public servants), and sometimes for no discernible reason (just closed when the sign says it should be open). We’ve learned to temper our expectations.

Tea time. Along the same lines, we’ve found it difficult to find a place to have tea and a pastry in smaller towns where the only option seems to be the Tabacs, small dark places where you can buy cigarettes, coffee and alcoholic drinks. They’re generally full of older men, smoking and drinking an espresso or something stronger. I haven’t bothered to ask if they serve tea. We save our coffee/tea breaks for the larger touristy towns where tea houses are more plentiful.

It’s also taken some getting used to that, even at cafés, you don’t pay when you order. You order at the counter, sit down and have your coffee and then go back in and pay when you’ve finished. When we were at an outdoor market a couple of weeks ago, we ordered crepes from a food stand and had to wait about half an hour as there was a back-up of orders. They were eventually delivered to our table, we ate them, and we left. Around 2 am I woke up with a start and realized we hadn’t paid. Now whenever we finish our tea and coffee, I say, ‘shall we go in and pay or do we want to make a run for it again?’

Lunch time.  The other day we tried to find somewhere for a light lunch. We weren’t particularly hungry (because of our earlier fika stop), but knew we had to eat before the restaurants stopped serving lunch. We found a place that had garbure on the menu, a traditional local soup we’d been wanting to try, but once we were seated, the waiter said we could only order the fixed menu, which included an appetizer, main, dessert, coffee and wine. This is fairly typical in most restaurants we’ve seen. Fortunately, when we got up to leave, the waiter suddenly decided that if we just wanted soup, we could just have soup.

Those minor frustrations don’t mean the honeymoon’s over. There’s still plenty of wine and baguettes going on. In fact, speaking of wine, we had a tour of La Cave de Gan-Jurançon, a winery founded in 1949 that produces five million bottles per year. The tour guide spoke english, but her accent was so strong that we didn’t catch a lot of what she was saying. We smiled and nodded as she explained the process behind the fermentation tanks and the semi-underground ageing cellar, and when she asked if we wanted to taste some wine, we smiled more broadly and nodded more vigorously. Jurançon is most known for its sweet white wine, but we bought the dry white and rosé.

The winery is just south of Pau, the largest city in this area, and formerly the capital of Béarn. The city overlooks the Pyrénées, has plenty of history (Henry IV was born here), and frequently hosts stages of the Tour de France.

Other places we’ve visited lately include Salies-de-Béarn, known for its naturally-occurring saline water and thermal spa. The legend is that a wild boar being hunted took refuge in a muddy swamp and his body was later discovered covered in salt crystals. This is how the salt water was discovered and the town was born.

We also visited Oloron-Sainte-Marie, a pretty town with lovely views of the mountains, but the main attraction for me was the Lindt chocolate outlet. We stopped in for a hot chocolate and to stock up on chocolate. A great deal of self control was required.