The French Make Waves

Before we left France, Maxime waxed lyrical to friends about beaches and new world wineries, showing off a little.

'And the Australian barbecues are amazing!'  He'd exclaimed.

They are? I thought.

'Do you know, they have so many parks, and each park has free public barbecues. They are actually in working order and people clean them after they use them!'

'Never in France,' the friends said and all the French shook their heads glumly, thinking of blackened barbecues in concrete parks in Marseilles.

I'm pleased that Maxime's positive about the beaches (and those fabulous barbecues)  because on our first holiday to Australia he was a little less positive (actually bloody annoying, but I didn't say that because I'm a caring and supportive partner). We went to a couple of Mornington Peninsula ocean beaches, but at Point Leo beach, Maxime complained that the waves were too wavy. At Gunnamatta, the beach was too crowded. 

'I like to be alone on a beach,' Maxime said à la Greta Garbo.

'Yeah, and that happens so often in Europe,' I muttered darkly. (Then it rained a year’s worth of rain in the week we were in the Grampians and I never heard the end of it.) 

'The French don’t transplant well,' Mum pronounced, having read it somewhere. It quickly became her favourite phrase.

But these days, now that he knows how to dive beneath oncoming waves, if not quite how to catch them, Maxime's as happy as any Skip to plunge into the surf. Still, one of the Dads at our kids' swimming lessons told me recently that it's mostly foreigners who drown on Australian beaches. So I've been careful to tell Maxime about rips, just in case he ends up like Harold Holt and gets a swimming pool named after him. 

He borders on religious in his devotion to sunblock too. This is partly because when we first came to Australia, I'd been out of the country so long I'd lost some of my reflexes, like putting on sunblock and wearing something other than sandals when going for a bush walk. So after seeing how painfully red you can turn after even ten minutes in the midday sun (and after seeing me narrowly miss a black snake with my sandalled foot) Maxime chooses sensible footwear and smothers himself in so much sunblock that he looks like a ghost.

That other beach tradition, fish and chips (with optional sand), is taking a little longer to win its way into the Frog's heart. Although he's happy enough to eat the chips and pronounce judgement on their sogginess or crunchiness, the battered fish completely mystifies. The kids too. When they first encountered fish in batter, the girls started peeling it. They ate the fish, shunned the batter and wouldn't have a bar of the chips. Unfortunately now they've worked out what chips are. (That's right. They are vehicles for eating sauce). And try as he might, Maxime cannot persuade fish and chip shops to provide him with a scallop without whipping it in batter first. I'm personally a bit squeamish when it comes to rubbery creatures from the sea and find a little batter disguise helps enormously. But then I guess Maxime's been eating slimy rubbery things since childhood. Snails for instance. Maybe if they battered snails they'd catch on in Australia! Actually maybe not.