It’s one of the difficult realizations of adult life, that the good comes mixed in with the bad, the bad with a facet of good (No hay villano perfecto).

You learn it quickly as an expat. Living “abroad” is a life situation that enhances pleasure and displeasure, the way that heat intensifies smells. These heightened sensations come in the complete color wheel of feelings. It is possible to feel deep aggravation and helplessness and inspiration and excitement in one foreign breath.

This smorgasbord of emotions was a salient feature of my time in Paris.

Each morning filled my cup. The act of waking up in Paris was life-affirming. There was the smell of freshly baked baguette in the silent early hours of the day. There was the Trocadero before the sun and tourists emerged. And then, anything could happen. There could be delight in a fluid French-language exchange, or in an invitation to an authentic Parisian soiree. Interspersed in this delight was the flip side of thrill, I suppose moments of what people refer to as culture shock. At unpredictable intervals, varying degrees of bewilderment and distress, and occasionally, offense, brought on by the seemingly innocuous – shopping for groceries, commuting home, making a bank transfer. My time overseas has redefined love/hate relationships, and I cannot write of these and my Parisian life without telling you about B Café.

There is a ground-level bistro in a subdued west Paris neighborhood. It occupies the corner of a Haussmannian building that looks onto a pedestrian street. The walk to the bistro from my third-floor flat took me past an independent cinema specializing in black and white re-runs of the French New Wave, then across an upscale food market featuring sea urchins and oysters served alongside champagne and that day’s captured fish, and finally, past a bite-sized stone church that I will always remember for an Easter Sunday mass (attended out of solidarity) featuring a sermon, as severe as it was explicit, on the mortal sin of premarital sex.

The restaurant had a proper French name, but we liked it best as B Café, a moniker that fit in nicely with the place’s informality, by French standards anyway.

Our first dinner at B Café featured a serious spat with a headstrong Franco-Russian waiter. Pete had ordered a plain burger, no mayo, well-done, and frites. The burger emerged from the kitchen a bloody thing, slathered in sauce that Pete scraped off discretely with a knife.

“Monsieur, est-ce qu’on peut avoir un peu de ketchup, s’il vous plait?” Pete asked for his favorite condiment in his nicest French.

“Pas du tout necessaire,” said the waiter, which translates loosely to “You unsophisticated American slob.”

“But do you have any ketchup in the restaurant?” I pressed, in Pete’s defense.

Indeed, B Café had a stash.

“Could we please have some?” I asked. “For the frites,” I explained, because I felt this would somehow put us on firmer footing.

The waiter, eventually bored of us, breathed through pursed lips in a Pff that was all disdain. He returned to our table with exactly one tablespoon of ketchup, then went outside to smoke by the church.

Surely this was a personal attack. At least it felt like one – it’s a sensation that recurs on foreign land. But by the time Pete and I had gotten through our carafe of house red, the offense became the type of great fun that can happen when abroad and slightly under the influence, and well, it was great fun because we were together in Paris.

We made it a point to return to B Café often, each time with a request for ketchup. The place became what, to the English, is deemed one’s “local” (noun): an easy place under ten minutes away, by foot, featuring reasonably priced drink and food (often in this order) to one’s liking, where there is a crucial and almost instant element of emotional attachment.

The other day I thought about our first dinner at B Café. It was the perfect lemonade-making session out of cultural lemons, and I needed to replicate it.

We were at a Sunday lunch commitment that was not optional, as can sometimes happen in Portugal, with Sunday lunch being as certain as death and American taxes. The lunch included people we didn’t really know. We congregated around a large circular table, the kind that’s used at weddings and conferences. Pete and I were the first out of the buffet line and sat. I was on his right. One by one the empty chairs at the table were filled. The seating arrangement unfolded in something reminiscent of my days as the friendless new girl in school circa 1998, with the table populating to Pete’s left, leaving the four available spaces to my right empty.

I was the only woman at the table. Could this be the reason for seat selection as far as physically possible from me? I wondered. Or, maybe they just don’t like the look of me. Maybe I smell bad.

I don’t know. The rules are difficult to understand.

I introduced myself, and the table nodded in silence and went on to talking tennis. Tennis happens to be my subject of choice, as far as sports are involved, and this, I was certain, could salvage the lunch. I spoke in foreign but entirely comprehensible Portuguese about the upcoming French Open, and eyes went to the table cloth. And then there was silence, broken by Pete, reliable ally.

There were no niceties of the variety that I’m accustomed to: I was not addressed, nor asked what I did, where I was from, or even whether I had kids (the most common question I get asked by strangers).

I sat back and listened as the conversation went into a black hole of babble, with a heated discussion of soccer season, concern over Cristiano Ronaldo’s tax woes, and then finally a deep dive into tax evasion schemes. There were many small beers.

Surely, this was personal.

 

Of course I know better. Of course this was not personal. (Neither was it representative of most Portuguese people I engage with, although I do note that women in this country have been equal by law to men since 1976 only, and this does have its societal repercussions).

Over dinner with friends (one English, one American), a few months ago, I asked what they missed the most about “home,” and the three of us agreed that Amazon Prime topped the list.

It occurred to me that the things we most miss about our home countries provide the biggest space for personal growth, or at least questioning. There could be value, say, to not having the option of online shopping with overnight delivery. There could be humility in learning a different way of doing or being. Maybe our way isn’t the way.

And yet, the Sunday lunch was different. There was no humility in this different way of doing. There was just, for me, humiliation. The culture difference was more insidious than the lack of Prime shipping. It was personal in a way that the ketchup-hoarding restaurant experience was not. Personal perhaps not against me, but personal as far as my gender is concerned, and entirely at odds with my values.

This has left me with a challenging question. How to embrace life in a foreign culture with tendencies that can be so value-assaulting? How to be a feminist in a Traditional Country? How to embrace only parts of the culture? How to respectfully reject others?

During the Sunday lunch in question, Pete slipped me a text message underneath the white table cloth:

THIS IS HORRIBLE.
SO BAD.
SO SORRY.
PLEASE WRITE A BLOG POST ABOUT THIS.

Here begins a new series.