21 and 29 for the non-Americans asks! (hi Sam <3)
hi rynna<33
21. if you could send two things from your country into space, what would they be?
a baguette, obviously -- cannot escape that one! --, and uhhhh ...watercress ? it's a local specialty from where i live (in france, this plant is mainly cultivated in my home department and the neighboring one)
29. does your region/city have a beef with another place in your country?
i don't know if it quite counts as 'beef', but inhabitants of the 'grande couronne' departments of paris' region often tend to be seen as parisians and teased for it by french people from other regions... while parisians don't see us as parisians at all, and more like 'country/provincial people'... but none of these two stereotypes are completely true, imo
i mean... on one hand, because paris is the economic center of both the region and the country, we are inevitably intertwined with it : three of our departments, including my beloved essonne, were created in the 1960s by the loi n° 64-707 du 10 juillet 1964 portant réorganisation de la région parisienne (law no. 64-707 of july 10, 1964 relating to the reorganization of the paris region) in order to respond to a demographic boom due to rural exodus of people from other regions + immigrants, all searching for jobs in the capital or its close suburbs but unable to afford housing there (i'm kind of simplifying, but you get the gist of it!). we share a public transit network and the same transport card (the pass navigo), a common slang/accent, cultural references, etc... but, on the other hand, i would still argue we are different, and ultimately don't face the same problems nor are the same kind of territory, socially and economically.
i could use many examples, but the topic i know best is the way we are connected to the rest of the region : we are even further from paris than people living in the close suburbs, and that means can get really isolated when there are renovation works on the rer/transilien (which. happens often. like really.). it's a whole issue, how we genuinely cannot get to paris or the suburbs (because the network is so paris-centred -- it's star-shaped --, most of the time, when you want to go from a suburb to another, you have to take a connection in paris) when the lines are closed in the evenings (and by that i mean the evenings on weekdays, sometimes starting from 8:30pm) and weekends, the infrastructure on many lines (c and d especially) is old, and unlike with the subway, you don't get a train every five minutes (it's a train all 30 minutes or every hour, and that's when they're not cancelling them lmao) :'D and as someone who lives in a more rural corner and has been going to uni, working, and seeing friends in paris... i have been experiencing it daily. people commute for hours every day to get to work because they don't have the choice... and the regional council (presided by valérie pécresse </3), which is in charge of the public transport, doesn't do anything to improve the situation...in fact, the quality of our public transport has been degrading since her coalition won the regional elections back in 2015 and has been reelected since because there is a very low turnout so. yeah. (also tbh whilst we have an extra struggle due to distances in the 'grande couronne', this obviously applies to the closer suburbs as well, especially the poorer ones like seine-saint-denis.)
honestly, while not ignoring the fact that this city also has inequalities within it, just living in paris itself is a privilege that most ordinary parisians (not just the upper-class ones!) don't realise. it immediately gives you a wider array of opportunities and access to a lot more services and institutions! like, a parliamentary investigation has once showed that even the least reputed schools in paris' working-class districts receive more funds than the best-ranked schools in the neighboring department of seine-saint-denis, which is one of france's poorest departments ; there are almost no food or medical deserts (even though the public hospitals there are also being fucked over by the government's policies like in the rest of the country, ofc), and wherever you are in the capital, you will have a subway/bus/tram, and a plan b if your line is closed, etc. anyway yeah tl;dr: there is no universal experience of living in the paris region, especially if you live in a poorer department with shitty infrastructure and public services that are even more underfunded by the state / in a rural area, but we are still linked to paris whether we want it or not. schrödinger's parisians or something, idk👍(also, i'd say the shared trait in the whole paris region is that people are rude. our fellow countrymen from other regions are right about that one.)
“hi, I’m not from the US” ask set
