…do they sleep a lot, or is it just the family my daughter is staying with on her French exchange?

I seem to be getting a lot of texts to say the family have gone to sleep! They seemed to sleep most of Sunday, and have a kip every evening so far.

The French are civilised, unlike the English and Germans. So yes, they take life a little slower. 🙂

Chapeau.

At the beginning of the 19th century, France was four-fifths rural. Almost a third of these lived in hamlets of fewer than 35 people. Without an industrial revolution to transform its roads, railways and canals, travelling in ‘la France profonde’ was as exotic as a trip to the lands of Tartary. In the years after the revolution of 1789, reports came back of almost unimaginably primitive lifestyles.

The peasant’s year was divided into two seasons: five months of labour, where 99% of the work was done and seven months of winter. As money was practically unknown in rural France until the late 19th century, there was little motivation to do anything other than conserve energy. It seems in many places, whole families just took to their beds, snug under their hayloft, with a supply of dried and preserved food and their animals in the next room to keep them warm. If anyone died, the corpse was stored on the roof and buried when the weather got warmer.

Is that a history lesson written by Monty Python? 😆

The French families I’ve known all have normal sleep like British, sounds like she’s stuck with a load of dullards, not sure what the answer is though, sorry. Get in touch with any other parents to see if this is a pattern or can one of the other kids there stage a breakout?

maybe they have a faulty boiler?

Do you have an address for where she’s staying?

xxxx Rue d’Avantage perhaps?

I’d ask the neighbours, but unfortunately they’re all asleep. 😉

Training for this starts early. Junior had a bed in infants school for an after-lunch snooze. Training your kids to take a nap means adults get time for a sieste crapuleuse.

Young teenagers are generally left to rot on Sunday morning, no point waking the enemy. Older teenagers get left in bed with their petit(e) ami(e).

Tonight is fête de la musique which we would still be fêting but junior has his maths Bac in the morning so we came home early. If your daughter didn’t get taken to see some bands you have reasoable cause for complaint.

Normally people eat dinner whilst watching the news on TF1 (centre droite) or France 2 (centre gauche), wash up during the ads then start to watch something but feel dozy and muttering something about kids finishing homework and cleaning teeth get to bed.

Bonne nuit, dormez bien et faites de beaux rèves.

the-muffin-man – Member
…do they sleep a lot, or is it just the family my daughter is staying with on her French exchange?

I seem to be getting a lot of texts to say the family have gone to sleep! They seemed to sleep most of Sunday, and have a kip every evening so far.

Could be nothing to do with being French, know a few folk like that just not active type folks.

It’s true that France made the break into modernity quite late. Even when I lived there in the mid 80s companies like Colgate and Unilever were publishing shameful statistics on toothbrush ownership and soap usage. Less than 1 in 3 people owned a brush and soap was used at less than half the rate of the Germans. We used to have a communal toothbrush that was kept in the office drawer and used by anybody who was going to see the dentist. When I went to see a dentist he did his bit then said: “And now…. the hygienist….” and showed me next door where a woman was waiting. I thought I didn’t remember asking to see a hygienist but anyway…. she looked in my mouth, hummed a bit, prodded a bit and sounding disappointed, told me everything was fine.

How things change, eh? Have you asked any forriners what they think of Brits’ hygiene standards?

For the OP: “boulot, metro, dodo” is the relevant concept 🙂

last night was fête de la musique down south too. Was a late one

Metro-boulot-dodo is for Paris which doesn’t live at the same rhythm as the rest of the country. I live in the sleepy south west.

As we’re teasing about national habits I’ll quote a Spanish friend whom I asked why he’d quit a good job in London and returned to Spain. “I wanted to find a wife and all the British women had square arses, apart from one fitness fanatic who was ten years older than me and impossible”.

Yes totally normal when you dont have upper class slave drivers dictating your work sleep pattern its the same with the Chinese and OMG the Argentinians they sleep about 4 hours after lunch.

My abiding memory of my French exchange trip was getting up the first morning and seeing an advert for a bra on the telly. Fronted – as it were – by a young lady who wasn’t wearing one. Or much else. Made an impression on my 14 year self.

Plus I helped deliver a calf. And cleaned out the shed after tbe local butcher came and butchered one of the cows on an old workbench 😯

…and you try telling the young kids of today that.

I rhought it was boulot, metro, cinq a sept, dodo?

Cinq a sept being semi legit couple of hours with girlfriend before going home to the wife…….)

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFMkx97wjkU[/video]

Well my daughter arrived back home in the middle of the night, and from the brief conversation we had before she went to bed it seems she really drew the short straw on this trip.

All the other exchange kids did loads of stuff at the weekend and in the evenings, but the whole household she was in was a bit dysfunctional – no father, and the mother was barely there and when she was, she was asleep, dirty house and many things not working (like a bathroom light!). So my daughter and her host child were left to get on with it.

Our school organiser has said they will contact the French school as soon as they can and make sure this family won’t be able to do an exchange trip again.

The organised bits arranged by the school she really enjoyed, but the ‘home’ part has been a big disappointment. Just feel sorry for her.

It’s certainly been an experience for her, and a bonus being she’d made some new friends from her own school.

Well that’s a bit shit. If it’s a single parent family hosting where the parent has to work their arse off to keep food on the table it’s understandable why she sleeps. I also get that she may sign up so her kid can go abroad too but surely the schools can accommodate this sort of thing better than they did.

Its a cultural exchange not an all expenses paid trip to euro Disney take from it some important life lessons like how lucky you are,and sounds like the French mum is a bloody hero.

I’ve organised a few exchange trips between French and German schools. It’s a delicate issue, you know someone is going to get a short straw but at the same time you don’t want to/can’t/won’t exclude a kid from an exchange just because the parents are poor, divorced or the family is a bit odd. There would have to be concerns for the safety of the guest to exclude a family.

Congratulations to your daughter for getting through it without ending up with a teacher in a hotel. She’ll have learned a lot more about life than if all had gone smoothly. If it’s a proper exchange and the French girl visits please do your best for her, they’ll both learn something from that too.

On one occasion I got a call from the police in Stuttgart who were holding four of the kids I’d taken. I turned up to find the four up against a wall and two mini buses of German police around them. There followed a long debate about whether the roll-ups were joints and what they were going to do with the kids with me reminding them from time that if they were wrong about the contents of the roll-ups (they only had the nub ends where any self-respecting dope head won’t waste any dope) and we missed the last train out of Stuttgart things it wouldn’t look good. They threatened to dope test but I pointed out that wouldn’t prove they’d consumed in Germany. In the end the head cop complimented me on being a typical teacher with as much sarcasm as he could muster and sent us off to run for the last train. Edit: and I thanked the cop with no sarcasm at all for not having done the kids for smoking, because simply smoking in public is illegal for under 18s.

If it’s a proper exchange and the French girl visits please do your best for her, they’ll both learn something from that too.

^^ This. Very much so.

I always thought the French were more night Owls, maybe it’s different for families with kids.

I stayed with a family in Barvaria once, it wasn’t exchange I was 30, long story – anyway they were all early to bed and early to rise types – everyone in bed by 10pm and up at 06:30 which suits me perfectly. The whole village was the same way.

The French know how to cook compared to ze Inglish iz all I can say.

Lots of their chefs work in country pubs and their dishes/menus served instead peas and potatoes…

Can’t beat Italian food though.

@Edukator – Yep it’s a proper exchange, we hosted back in October. And hopefully we did a decent job. She probably went home complaining she didn’t get much sleep though!

@wicki – we didn’t expect Eurodisney, lavish trips out and 5* treatment, we did kind of expect the host to be a host though.

We knew she wasn’t quite right from the texts she was sending, but we took the opinion that there was bugger-all we could do and she’d have to get on with it so didn’t pander to much. And the first she said to the teachers was on the ferry on the way home as she likes the girl she was staying with and didn’t want to create any trouble.

I hope they keep in touch, my sister still visits her pen pal and one of Madame’s colleagues has been married to hers for about thirty years.

My UK exchange family w terrible.
Food was horrendous, never sa the dad, and once back in from daily activities we had to stay in our room or go out.
On the plus side the local girls were quite keen on snogging as many of us as they could.
I promised never to set foot in England again. Broken that promise 7 years later and have been here ever since. And married to an english girl.

Mrs Mugsy, from the UNESCO city of Lyon,…got to visit…..Boston, Lincs.
She still to this day talks about the lack of a shower and carpet in the joint WC and bathroom.

The French know how to cook compared to ze Inglish iz all I can say.

nice try…! after 7 days in France outside Paris I am usually looking for anyone NOT french who can cook something interesting… and as for food for my Partner, who is a veggie… don’t even go there… and indeed perhaps she shouldn’t.

Its a cultural exchange not an all expenses paid trip to euro Disney take from it some important life lessons like how lucky you are,and sounds like the French mum is a bloody hero.

This. Well done to the OP for scuppering a French mum’s attempt to give her daughter a bit of cultural enrichment.

What are you on about DrJ – we didn’t scupper anything.

We kept at arms length and pretty much left our daughter to it. My posts on here, or any concerns were never passed on to her.

Oh yes, I forgot the return leg of my trip.

In exchange for topless TV ads and the whole James Herriot in French experience, my penpal (while having a crafty fag out the bedroom window one evening) got to see the neighbour behind naked in her kitchen, and got the bollocking of his life from my mum for running up and down the escalators the wrong direction in Queensgate shopping centre.

My German exchange visit involved getting my O level results the same day as the village beer festival 8) and meeting my penfriends grandfather who explained that the last Englishman he had met had shot his right hand off which was why he had a proper pirate style hook!

My German exchange visit involved getting my O level results the same day as the village beer festival

‘ey up…