At risk of offending everyone, which I generally do anyway despite the risk and without really trying, it has become increasingly apparent that I am most decidedly not French. The Body, ensconced in her Raphaelite palace in Florence is driving a pin into her fluffy headed M voodoo doll, but it has to be said, I do not follow ze rules.
In the same way that the French do not eat salty food for breakfast (sacré bleu!), do not follow even the most basic of traffic regulations (honk honk!) and do not wake up before 8am on weekdays (what does it mean moh-ning?), there is a very Gallic, very strict code of conduct that applies to the practice of sport or fat-burning exercise in a gym. Part of the charm of living in France is the idiosyncrasies that apply to even the most boring and mundane of life’s tasks.
For example French people get dressed up in their Sunday best, with their tiny French children cocooned head to toe in micro-couture in order to run simple errands like go and buy bread. French people drink a syrupy extract of the coffee bean that they call coffee that we would call two cubes of sugar dissolved in a thimble of water that has a dash of coffee in it. French people do not talk about politics in the workplace. That is unless of course they want a day off work in the springtime and so they call a strike in order to allow for the talking of politics…outside the workplace…while not working…and still being paid.
The strict social and moral codes of the French apply to all activities, at all times (even during the occupation when even the resistance fighters were coiffed and wore skirts) including the one time when it is humanly impossible to look good, exercising.
As mentioned previously on these pages, I wake up at 6.30am and take two metros to get to the gym when it opens. Slap me silly and call me Aunt Martha but it seems ridiculous to me that I should wake up, get dressed in my day clothes…only to take them off when I get to the gym and put on the gym clothes…only to then get changed again and redress in the day clothes. Even though I lay claim to two different nationalities, one of them is not French. I don’t care that I wear no make up and a hot pink lycra headband to stay the mane that stands on end in all directions in protest at being removed from the pillow so darn early. I hope you’ve recovered from the shock; I travel to the gym…on public transport… in my gym gear.
When I exercise, I wear shoes, socks, running pants, an oversized t-shirt (one of a collection that are regularly given to me by my employer) a head band and a purpose built harness that holds my abundant mid-section in place to prevent either of the girls from swinging free and giving me a black eye#. I wear all of this, but nay, I do not wear make up.
Again, antipodean creature of logic that I am, when I finish exercising, I have a shower and then apply the layers of greasepaint that enable me to face the world as the Grecian Goddess that I paint myself to be. Allow me a minute to also point out that when I exercise, I sweat and my face becomes increasingly red. The idea of adding even more colours streaming in slicks down my face like teeming rain streaking the windows of my flat would serve only to render me a vision of Picasso cubism; one eye where it should be and the other somewhere below my left nostril… and all before 9am.
Finally, and most uncomfortably of the Gallic gal’s sporty habits is the après gym ritual of la douche or the shower. I was first exposed to this when a young lass of only 16 innocent years attending high school in France. This will shock the Europeans but in Australia, a country with an average annual temperature of well over 25 degrees, we do not shower at school. We play sport, we run jump, tackle and shoot, we no doubt sweat buckets and stink like builder’s bum-cracks afterwards, but we don’t have showers. Certainly a hangover of our Anglo Puritanism, we don’t get our gear off in front of each other and get naked at school. So I managed to wag an entire year of P.E. in my French high school all to maintain my maidenly virtue (*cough*).
As an internationally savvy adult, I am a little cannier and have now perfected the art of dressing, undressing, applying body-lotion and getting all Grecian Goddess-y…all while wrapped in a white towel. But not those crazy French girls!
Old, young, pert, saggy, fit, fat, brown, white, Brazilian, bushy or metro-ticket…they let it all hang out. Every single square centimetre of her naked self is exposed for your viewing pleasure while Mademoiselle, or Madame, raises her knees to apply moisturiser to her legs, lifts her arms to apply deodorant to the thatch underneath or bends over completely in half to dry in between her toes.
Adding insult to unbearable injury…
Not content with leaving me well alone inside the hermitty-crab-shell enclosure of my fluffy white towel, Mme La Sportive, while naked and spectacular and Amazonian, must also engage me in mundane conversation. Bonjour! Au Revoir! And what do you think of this weather, will it rain? Quite frankly Madame, I have no opinion about anything at all until you remove your right breast from the immediate vicinity of my left eyeball and while you are at it, how about you put your vagina away and is it really necessary to stand in front of the mirror and apply your make up while completely stark f**king naked..I mean where are you applying it? And the sight of your breasts reflected ad infinitum between the mirrors that seem to be every-bloody-where is a little retina splitting for my sleepy eyes…and all before 9am.
For the gentlemen readers, I am certain that you are getting all hot and bothered thinking about this… imagining what Sapphic pleasures we indulge in every morning while enclosed in a steamy National Lampoon-esque vision of female on female sexuality.
So tell me what is it like on your side of the showers?
#I am exceptionally proud of my womanly Edwardian bust; I just wish I could press a button and retract them when I need to move quickly and repetitively on the spot.
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