One of my students asked me a few weeks ago what I missed about the UK. At the time, everything was still new and exciting so, aside from my partner, family, friends etc, I couldn't really say that I missed anything.
Having had time to settle in now, I'm starting to miss little things about my homeland. At the moment, what stands out most is the lack of multiculturalism here. Oh, certainly, there are plenty of Arabs and Africans but all immigrants here appear to undergo an obligatory gallification process and they end up as clones of the indigenous people, only with darker skin. There is nowhere near the amount of real diversity, the diversity that comes from being assimilated into a new culture while still retaining important aspects of the old one, that is rightfully celebrated in Britain.
This difference only really occurred to me yesterday, when I was forced to trudge a couple of kilometres in the pouring rain to find the sole boulangérie in town that was open on a Sunday. I quietly cursed this ridiculous remnant of an apparantly catholic country which prevented the large number of muslims, jews, agnostics, atheists and other infidels from being able to nip to the shop for a pint of milk on a day which they consider to be no more important than any other.
When I finally got there, the selection of goods available only emphasised the problem. Row upon row of French baguettes of different lengths, patterns and thicknesses (which are all basically the same) - but I really fancied a bagel. If anyone knows of a place you can buy a bagel in the whole of l'Hexagone, then please tell me, do. Their complete non-existence here is just absurd: bagels are, quite simply, the best thing since sliced bread. Except, oh wait, no, they don't have that here either, and that tells you just about everything you need to know about a country. No, in even the biggest supermarkets here, you will never find a bagel, nor a naan bread, nor pitta bread, and it really is a great loss for this country.
Sometimes, the French-is-best attitude can have its advantages, of course. The burgers in McDonalds here are all made of 100% beef, by which I mean actual meat from named parts of the cow and not the ground-up hooves, lips and sphinctre gristle that we've come to expect in the UK. And I recently ate a kebab while sober for the first time*,thoroughly enjoyed it, and wasn't even ill the next day.
Yet I still feel that Britain's multiculturalism trumps France's nationalism. I have never been more proud of my country than when I watched a group of my fellow Brits unleash a flow of scorn and disgust upon Nick Griffin before handing his rather lardy arse to him on a plate on Question Time. How ironic that it was the homogenous French who came up with the phrase vive la différence.
* Not counting a holiday in Istanbul, of course. Kebabs in Turkey are delicious and totally different to the ones you get served in greasy fast-food places at 3am on a Friday night in the UK.
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