Just how funny is France during Spring Festival? Well not especially. Funny in the same way that hitting your funny bone is funny, or someone else�s pain is funny or discovering your date is a man funny. It�s the funny you feel when you say �I feel funny� after eating too much Brazilian BBQ on Jian She Liu Ma Lu and spending the next three days splayed on the bathroom floor.
Much like a Brazilian BBQ I bring this up in reference to my own funny experience of flitting, like the international man of mystery that I am, between Guangzhou and Paris.
There is a laugh-out-loud thrill of alarm that overcomes me when I arrive in France from China. Suddenly, all the things I thought were whacky about Guangzhou seem terrifyingly normal and the outside world has gone utterly bonkers in my absence.
Wide blue skies startle me. Empty spaces make me nervous. Nature is out to get me.
I can�t seem to handle the way people speak softly and whisper considerately into their Blackberrys and cell phones. Queuing in customs in an orderly and adult way surrounded by bleached-pink white people and understanding what they�re saying overloads my brain.
Suddenly, athletic people seem fat and overweight people are giants. At the same time, French women, beautiful as they are, seem not to have eaten a square meal since 1993. On the street, road rules are uncannily observed, ordinary people are fabulously rich and terrifying gangs of petulant roaming youths roam petulantly about the place in terrifying gangs.
Old people shun large intimidating groups and behave themselves, like there�s some kind of conspiracy. They amble discreetly and apologetically through brilliantly lit supermarkets and don�t seem to have any opinions that need sudden, violent sharing. Meanwhile, I barge past them and elbow my way through anything that looks like a queue.
The most beautiful seem the unhappiest. Beautiful magazine editors and gorgeous students scowl gloriously past me at the Musee D�Orsay, which is closed. They don�t giggle shyly when you say �Ni hao� or �Duo shao quian?�
Bread tastes disconcertingly like bread. Cheese tastes demonically like cheese and Foie Gras tastes distinctively like the liver of force fed baby geese. Disgustingly, none of my utensils are doused in tea.
English in not at all funny.
There are rules at the dinner table. Complex, daunting, important rules that seem to play a critical role in some terrifying social experiment somehow connected to my value as a person. Perplexingly, burping, spitting, farting, shouting, groping and chopsticks are out.
I can�t remember what to do with my toilet paper.
Like other malformed adults I giggle uncontrollably and hysterically through my two weeks of confusion just long enough to get used to it.
Then it�s back on the plane, a few hours sleep before I start collecting my luggage, make my calls and fight my way to the front exit�15 minutes before the plane lands in Baiyun.