Summer, and life slows down

I’m enjoying my morning coffee and croissant, contemplating one of the great mysteries of life in France. How does one eat a croissant without getting flakes of pastry all over one’s keyboard? You can try to catch the crumbs in the bag it comes in, but the flaking is so much that you virtually have to eat it out of the bag, and inevitably end up with a mouthful of brown paper to go with your croissant. My mother always told me to make sure I close my lips before I bite, but a fresh pain chocolat starts to disintegrate on touch, long before it reaches your mouth.
I appreciate that the croissant and its puff pastry cousins have been with us much longer than the idea of eating breakfast with a macbook on your lap, but my point stands – it is impossible to eat breakfast in France without blanketing yourself and a perimeter around you with buttery flakes. The true mystery is not so much how to eat a croissant in style, which I have long since concluded is actually impossible, but why the French, a people who put such emphasis on style, persist with such a hard to eat bake good as their only real breakfast food.

The fact that I have time over breakfast to contemplate such inane matters might give you a clue to the new nature of life in Fonty. There are 5 periods in the year here, and each has its own flavour. We are now in P5, which is marked by a distinct divergence between two groups of people. Classes have slowed down to a crawl, and for those students who took the simple route and went into consulting, or have otherwise secured their next job, the recruiting season is over too. Life is good – the long French days are spent soaking up the sun in the INSEAD ‘Biergarten’ (a gift of the German Alumni association, but nothing more than a few chairs and tables outside), making an occasional foray to the gym and debating the appropriate time to switch from coffee to beer.
If, on the other hand, you are taking the hard road, declining the consultant bandwagon to look for your dream job in industry, start ups, venture capital or other glamour areas, or even start your own business, P5 is a time of increasingly intense job hunting, and not a little stress. Where the future consultants are deciding between Heineken and Leffe, petite ou grande, the job seekers are deciding between Eurostar and Air France, fly-in fly-out or stay overnight, as they travel everywhere from London and Paris to Africa and Sao Paulo for endless meetings with recruiters, headhunters, potential investors and anyone else who might be able to put their talents to good use.

There is a little mutual envy between the groups. Life is sweet for us future consultants, but it’s hard to escape from the fact that we’ve taken a safe job and stable income in exchange for a few more years at least firmly in the rat race. The job seekers look stressed now, but the pay-offs, in the form of job satisfaction and long-term happiness, or even total independence for the entrepreneurs, might be so much higher. On the other hand, in their more pessimistic moments, the job seekers must look over at the sign-on bonuses and guaranteed post summer start dates of the consultants and wonder if it’s all worth it.

Job seeking aside, summer has hit France, and Fontainebleau has come alive. In winter, one could walk down Rue Montebello, the small pedestrian strip of restaurants that Fonty students all know and love, and see only a few hardy souls huddled inside. Today, even on a Monday, the restaurants are not only full inside, but have taken over the pavement, doubling their capacity and letting diners enjoy the endless dusk of a place where the sun does not truly set until 10.30. To pass Bistro Neuf and Cote Sud (two favourite INSEAD hangouts) in summer feels like walking down our very own miniature quartier latin, with the added bonus that instead of tourists, the tables are packed with your close friends.

We’ve been exceedingly lucky, in that France is, apparently, in drought. I don’t think this is drought in the Australian style; the Seine looks to be flowing pretty healthily, from what I can see. But, until the current rain set in about three days ago, it had been warm and sunny for about eight weeks in Fonty, and in Paris. This is a hardship for the garden staff of the chateau’s, but a boon for just about everyone else.

A European drought does seem like a rare event, so I’ve been trying to make the best of it by seeing some more of Paris and other parts of France. I was fortunate enough to be invited to a friends place in Provence, in the small town of Fayence, for a few days. If you’ve ever been faced with a grimy, crowded part of Paris and a seemingly obnoxious waiter / shop assistant / person on the street, and wondered where all the romantic images of France come from, I strongly suggest a trip to Provence, in the South. The coastal places, like Cannes and Nice, are well known, but it’s a little inland that the magic happens. Fayence, like the surrounding villages, is built into a hillside, so each beautiful brown brick house gazes over a valley and onto the next rolling hillside town, again of all stone houses and terracotta roofs, and which turns positively orange in the glow of a sunset. In May, when we were there, the lavender is in full bloom, adding a bright streak of purple to every scenic view. The houses and villages are joined together by impossibly steep and narrow alleys, which, while they take cars, are generally used by ambling locals indulging the French passion for walking slowly (which is much less annoying here than in Gare de Lyon). The alleys take cars too, but you can hardly call them roads. It sounds clichéd, but it could easily be taken straight from a movie. Take the setting and the beautiful house, and add good company, copious amounts of Provence’s signature Rosé and multiple games of petanque, and you have a memorable trip. My thanks to Come, my French friend, for hosting us.

Since then Parisian outings have been on the cards. I couldn’t pass up a chance to visit Roland Garros during the French open, and I finally managed to tick Versailles off the list. The French open was great, and another beautiful French day in the sun. Versailles – well, its impressive, but really just a scaled up version of every other Chateau in France, or Schloss in Germany for that matter. I realise Versailles is the original that all the others are based on, but I saw the others first. All I really wanted to know was where they signed the treaty, but that was not on the audio guide. Still, it was another day with good company – Sandy, a friend from Australia who has moved to France, and is French, kindly agreed to be my tour guide.

Well, the gentle rhythm of INSEAD in P5 is calling me to the restaurant. It’s lunchtime here... (yes, it took me from breakfast to lunch to write this - but breakfast is pretty late these days)