Goodbye to summer. Well, it didn’t take long for autumn to settle in around here. There have been entire days without sunshine lately and I’m still waiting to see if it will come out at all today. I’m just glad we were able to take advantage of a few days of nice weather when we got here. Apparently, those will be few and far in between from here on out. I suppose we can use this as further motivation to get on with our Iberian aspirations.

The good weather did last long enough for us to benefit from the Acroches Coeurs our first weekend here. This is an arts festival consisting of street performances and exhibitions as well as other special events throughout the city. As it turns out, the arts are big in Angers, a fact that is no doubt aided by the presence of Universities and their accompanying student populations in this town of 120,000. After that weekend, the weather started to turn pretty lousy. But if the atmospheric conditions around here limit the potential for outdoor activities, there is fortunately no shortage of indoor – and more interestingly: nocturnal – activities to delve into (more on nocturnal life later).

The weekend following the Acroches Coeurs, was designated as the “Days of Patrimony”. During this Saturday and Sunday, all the museums, galleries, monuments, and countless other attractions throughout the republic are open to the public free of charge or at a reduced rate. The aim is to expose folks to the local, regional, and/or national treasures they may otherwise not have access to. Not bad. We took advantage to visit some small out of the way exhibitions in a small town called Bouchmaine. The name literally translates to “mouth of Main” as the town is situated where the Maine River joins the Loire in its final push to the Atlantic. It was a gray day with a slight drizzle later on in the afternoon, but we were able to wander along the small village down-river before the rain came. It always amazes me how the countryside here is dotted with these small villages of several hundred people that have neither shrunk nor expanded very much over the centuries.

As for nocturnal activity, you may recall that I mentioned something about a student population. As it would anywhere else in the world, here this translates to a large variety of bars, pubs, restaurants, cafes, and oh yeah, nightclubs. We just discovered a particular jewel in the form of a good size live music venue in the tradition of HOB or the Varsity. There are several shows coming up that we’re eying including (if we’re still here at the beginning of November) Steel Pulse! This Saturday they’re having their big 10th anniversary celebration with an array of acts throughout the long evening that starts at 6pm and ends around 4am. We’ll be hosting our first dinner party that night so we’ll probably not make it until later on. It’s a hard life and I know it, but a comprehensive survey of urban nocturnal activities demands a certain degree of rigor and discipline. I’ll be reporting on our findings soon thereafter.

One other thing I wanted to mention is that yesterday was “no car day”. This is meant to encourage people to sample alternative means of transportation as a way to introduce them to other modes available that they might make regular use of in the future. While many cities make special provisions to enhance public transportation for the occasion, there are a handful that have permanently made public transportation free of charge to the public. Again, not bad.

As for the status of our transition and job search, there are a few things worth noting. First, it would seem that while the process for acquiring a work permit is a fairly simple and straightforward one, the same cannot be said about validating my degree and license in Spain or signing up for social security coverage while in France. The latter has exposed a labyrinth of red tape befitting the country that invented the word bureaucracy. If you haven’t seen “L’Auberge Espagnole”, check it out I highly recommend it. In it there’s a scene where the main character is doing his paperwork at the university to go on a year’s exchange in Spain. After given the runaround a couple of times, the screen quickly fills up with all the forms, slips, applications, etc. that he has to get signed, stamped, and/or otherwise approved. You get the picture. As for validation of degrees, this involves getting official notarized copies of transcripts and diploma as well as official notarized translations and I’m sure other cute little surprises I can’t yet imagine. Unfortunately, under the existing model of a “global economy” the free movement of labor does not seem to be as high a priority as the movement of goods and capital. But that’s a different discussion.

So anyway, we were commenting the other day on the remarkable similarity the bureaucratic process here shares with doing paperwork in Honduras. It’s nice to have little reminders of home, but clearly some more than others. So if I may digress, I should like to spend some time here writing about the concept of customer service in Honduras and its inextricable link to El Muchacho. “The young man”, as this translates, is a character known throughout Honduras to be ubiquitous by way of his perpetual absence. Whenever there’s a breakdown in service of any kind, you can count on being told something like, “the young man who takes care of that isn’t here right now” or “that’s not my department, but the young man should be back later” or “you should come back when you young man in charge of that is here”. You quickly get a sense of how the functionality of an entire society, not to mention the economy, rests on the shoulders of this fictitious “someone else”. It would be too much to ask for someone to take initiative in solving a customer’s/client’s problem. No, the appropriate response is to pass the responsibility on to someone else. If El Muchacho did not exist, he would have to be invented.

In France, this takes a different twist. While there is regular use of “le monsieur” here, it is more common to be reminded of the limitations of our reality by the expression “c’est pas possible”. Functionaries and employees of all types, when asked to do something that deviates in the slightest from their job description or the standard operating procedure, will quickly smirk and tell you: “I’m sorry, that’s simply not possible”.

And that’s one of the contradictions I was referring to in the previous post. Folks in general seem to be very accommodating in modifying their private lives for a perceived greater good (e.g. using mass transit, recycling, etc.). However, this flexibility is often – albeit not always – absent in the provisions of goods and services (especially in government administrations) and represents a real limiting factor to the dynamism of economic activity. I think a lot of this is because work (and here I have to admit to agree somewhat) is often seen as a necessary evil, not as a calling, a mission, and certainly not a labor of love. The result is that it can often be frustrating to get simple stuff done (like getting a DSL connection in under two weeks!!!), but it does have its positive trade-offs. Sure, the store you need to go to may be closed at lunchtime or on the weekend, but that means that chances are YOU won’t have to work through lunch or on weekends either. I think the trick to avoid the frustration is to just accept that the reality is what it is through the exercise of tolerance. C’est la vie; this is the nature of culture shock. And before embarking on a mission of social change, it may be worthwhile to examine whether or not the alternative is indeed an improvement.