286c Mother's Day; Sweet Home Croatia; An American Mother in Paris

The people of France really adore their children. Even in big city Paris, complete strangers will often provide helpful advice on how to be a good mother. That's what a pregnant American discovered when an elderly gentleman stopped her on the street. He took my hand in his and he told me he thought I looked beautiful, and then he thanked me for making a new French citizen. Hi, I'm Rick Steves. Today, it's a Mother's Day edition of Travel with Rick Steves. American Mary Barone tells us what it's like marrying into French culture and talks about the joys and challenges of raising a child in Paris. And another young American mother, Jennifer Wilson, joins us to share her family's adventure, moving everybody to a tiny rustic village in Croatia, where her ancestors came from. The neighbors had a cow on the first floor of their house, and the gathering space was sort of the cafe bar in the middle of town. That ends some special tributes to our mothers. It's just ahead on Travel with Rick Steves. The Family of the Deaf Years ago, Seattleite Mary Campbell married a Frenchman she met while working at Rick Steves, Europe. They're now raising a family in Paris. In just a bit, Mary lets us in on a few French expectations for being a young mother. And Jennifer Wilson tells us what happened when her family opted out of their busy American life in Des Moines and relocated to a small village that time forgot in the mountains of Croatia. By the way, we're proud to note that this week's Mother's Day edition of Travel with Rick Steves won the top Lowell Thomas Award for Audio from the Society of American Travel Writers, back when it first aired in 2013. I'd like to open by sharing a few thoughts about my own mother, June Steves. She had passed away just a few months earlier. My mom was my first travel partner ever. It was 1969, and I was a wide-eyed 14-year-old when she introduced me to Europe. As my dad was busy doing business with European piano builders, he imported pianos, my mother and I immersed ourselves in the wonders of Europe. On that first dip into Europe, we'd watch Dutch bicyclists gather at a stoplight on the way to the fields, wooden shoes filling their little handlebar baskets. Venturing into our first subway ride ever, we found our way to a stop called Trocadero, emerged, turned the corner, and set eyes for the first time on the jaw-dropping Eiffel Tower. Together, we puzzled at neoclassical buildings that looked both new and ancient. We collected souvenir pins to fill my Bavarian felt hat. When friends in Germany gave us a tin of white asparagus, we opened it and marveled together at what looked like a rare albino vegetable. And with Norwegian relatives, we traveled to the fjord where we found the actual house from where my mother's mother left for the Newland, in her case, Canada. On that first trip, I was attached to my mom. Literally, as back then, a mother and her child could share the same passport. And flying home from that first foreign adventure, I have a hunch my mom knew that she planted in me a seed, one that would sprout into a lifelong passion for travel. One of my favorite photos is of me and my mom with our host, Sinastria, in a dusty village on the border of communist Hungary. It was 1969. Mom had just introduced me to a man who claimed to have witnessed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, which kicked off World War I. Whether he actually saw it or not, the story had me wide-eyed. And when I look back on it, I think that may have been the pivotal moment in my life. It directed me toward my history degree and a passion for learning and teaching through thoughtful travel that has stayed with me to this day. June Steeves was born of Norwegian immigrants Harold and Erna Framerli on June 29, 1931, in Edmonton, Alberta. They eventually moved to Seattle, where mom fell in love with my dad, Dick Steeves. The romance produced three children, me and my two sisters, as well as six grandchildren and proved to be lifelong. Their relationship only seemed to be strengthened when several years ago mom developed Alzheimer's and dad never left her side. In my mom's family, being of good stock was the ultimate compliment. Her mom and her mom's mom always talked about it. It must be a Norwegian thing, good stock to survive a hard life. It was as if offspring were like plants that needed to survive a winter snow. Mom certainly was good stock. In fact, my fear was that her tough Norwegian body would long outlive her Alzheimer's brain. In that regard, her death was both timely and a blessing. A week after Christmas, I got a call that mom had been taken to the hospital. First diagnosis, pneumonia, but it was worse. A few minutes later, we learned she had had a heart attack and would eat a pacemaker. Half an hour after that, the doctor was on the phone, asking about mom's end-of-life wishes. Within the hour, I gathered with loved ones at mom's deathbed. Looking at her in that hospital bed, even with her pale face drained of life, I saw a noble woman of beauty and strength. I saw the power of maternal love. I saw and I will remember a strong, timeless woman of good stock, Viking stock. At 1.30 a.m. on December 29, 2011, I held my mom's hand and stroked her head as she peacefully took her last breath. Losing your mother takes you to places you've never been. There's a void. You see things differently. You realize how much emotion is inside you. You find there's a bucket of tears reserved, especially for mothers. Collecting my thoughts about mom's death, I find myself going ethnic, going primeval. Coming together as mom died, we cradled her. It was as if we created, with our family, loved ones and pastor, a Viking ship. In some torchlet burial ceremony a thousand years ago in Norway. At that dreaded but epic moment, I appreciated the cyclical nature of life. June Steves brought us in, and those she raised and loved saw her out. Offers his grasp of flowers, they land time is fleeting ever. Crosswordly makes more than. Up next, the story of a family that moved from middle America to the middle of a muddy village in Croatia. Tired of their at-race, Midwestern mom Jennifer Wilson decided to uproot her young family and seek out something simpler. So she moved her husband and two kids to the Croatian mountain village of her great grandparents to learn what they would have taught her about life. Jennifer makes sense of her family's adventures in her book called Running Away to Home. She joins us right now from the Iowa Public Radio studio in Des Moines to tell us what she and her family gained from living in Croatia and how it's changed them now that they're back in America. Jennifer, thanks for being with us. Thank you so much for having me. So you took your family from Iowa to Croatia. Set up the story here. When did this happen? Why did you do it? How long you stay? Well, it was in 2008 when the economy was sort of melting down here in America. We were really feeling a lot of restlessness at the time. So we sort of collectively decided as a family to take a big risk. We decided to get rid of all of our sort of consumerist lifestyle stuff and we took our young family back to the ancient Croatian mountain village of my ancestors and it was a pretty amazing ride. How long did you stay in Croatia on this trip? We were in the country itself for about seven months. The majority of that in Mirkapa, the village itself. Is your husband Croatian also? He's a Norwegian and Alsatian, but he sort of adopted my ancestors for the time we were in the village. It was really like hitting the reset button for our family there. In what way? Well, Jim and I have a fairly modest lifestyle here in the Midwest, but even a family like us sort of in our American culture tends to supersize everything and we were just ready to kind of get away from the American buzz and we went back to a most basic way of living. We were living in a small pension in this very small village that felt like it was suspended in Amber since my great grandparents left and it really gave us the time and space to connect as a family. We wanted less busyness in our world and we thought there can really be no better way of doing that than going to a place where there was really nothing going on. We had heard a few things about Mirkapa. I had done some research and a scouting trip and indeed it was sort of this quiet time out land it felt like to us. And so when we got there the neighbors had a cow on the first floor of their house and the gathering space was sort of the cafe bar in the middle of town and everybody throughout the generations they knew poverty like their backyards because they had lived from their gardens for so many generations through good times and bad and we just really melded into this slower lane, I guess. Let's just say I'm one of these Mirkapa residents and all of a sudden I see this Cherry family come in and here's this Sam and Jennifer and Jim and Zady. So how are you received? What are these people supposed to do when they see you? You know, from the very first day it was crazy. I'm a travel writer by trade and so I thought that I would be sort of easing the way for my family into this village but I've done a lot of traditional travel stories, you know, Paris and Mexico and New York and going to sort of easy travel destinations. I was the one that was knocked off my pins in this town so I was sort of walking around wondering what we were going to do for entertainment and so I was a little fish out of water. My husband immediately because he had a year away from his desk job and that was just the happiest moment of his life when he walked to this village where there was nothing to do but hang out and talk to the neighbors and so they immediately embraced him and of course the Croatians love kids and so they were part of everybody's life immediately. So your kids are seven and four at the time and they just had friends to kick the ball around or how did your kids pass the time? I would have wondered if your seven-year-old son Sam would have just go, what's going on here? I mean I don't have my TV shows, I don't have my friends. From that very first night we just sort of released them into the mountain meadow with our landlords' daughters and they were just part of the family and they had more freedom and space than they had ever experienced in their whole lives. I mean they learned how to climb trees, they learned how to walk up a mountain. I mean it was amazing and they, my daughter especially, physically grew over the time we were there, a noticeable amount, they really enjoyed it. You know it's interesting because my grandparents came from Norway and I would love my kids to better know from where they came, Norway and you spent just a few months basically and you've given your children something that will enrich their lives from now on. They know from where they came. How was that? Was that successful? You know they were a little bit young to really get the full depth of the Croatian experience. I mean they didn't quite understand the things that make Croatia what it is now. It's been made up of so much strife in the past several decades since World War I really so they didn't get that part and they probably won't tell their old enough to hear the stories that the people in the village told us. But they understand food and they understand the accents and they have still good friends back in the village that I have a feeling as they get older they'll go back and visit again and again. How did the kids communicate and how did your husband Jim fit so well and did the locals speak English? He spoke the international language of who wants a beer. That helps. It got along really well. But he's also just a very open-minded, easy-going guy and so he just did a lot of smiling and nodding. We had actually taken language lessons here in Iowa before we left but really it was so hard to learn that language. Slavic language is so vastly different from anything we knew and no matter how we studied we didn't pick up a ton. We talked about the level of toddlers. But the kids, it was funny how they all understood each other although they didn't speak the same language. I mean it was a lot of pantomime and giggling and let's just go run and play soccer. For the village kids I would imagine as, hey there's two more kids to play with, this is fun. That's exactly right. You know, let's see if these guys are any good at soccer and we'll play it in the meadow tonight to find out. More with Jennifer Wilson and her family's journey to the Croatian Mountain Village of her ancestors and more Mother's Day tributes. It's all just ahead on Travel with Rick Steves. Jennifer Wilson is our guest right now on Travel with Rick Steves. She wrote Running Away to Home, Our Family's Journey to Croatia in search of who we are, where we came from and what really matters. It's about their decision to pack up from Iowa and try living in rural Croatia for a while. Her website is jenniferdashwilson.com. What was the sense of privacy like in the village? Could you have your own space or was it so humble and people living close together that you were all part of a big extended family? People did live close together in a certain extent, but the houses were quite big. The traditional European family house has three floors and a different generation on each one. So we were on the top floor in like a big dorm as a family. So we had our own private space on the top floor, but we didn't have much privacy from each other. We were all kind of lumped together. I thought that that would be an issue. We have so much privacy in the United States, in our homes, but we found that living in this big space where we could all see each other all the time and it sort of helped us be closer as a family. We derived a lot of comfort from that too. I would imagine, you know, you come from middle America and you're all tuned into the American dream. Did you find people in Croatia have the same dream or do they aspire to different things? You know, that's a great question because one of the things that I kept noticing while I was there is how many parallels there were between the village of Mirkapa and the United States as Jim and I were experiencing it. You know, since Croatia had earned its freedom in the wars of the 1990s, it just seemed to us like they were at this point where they got everything they wanted and weren't sure what to do with it. And I feel like we're kind of at that place as a family in the United States now. I mean, that's one of the reasons why we went to Croatia to kind of take a time out and think, well, now what do we want to do with our American dream? What does it mean for us? Because it really doesn't mean just buying a bunch of stuff. That doesn't feel good to anyone. And I feel like the village was struggling with the same thing. Now we got what we wanted. Now what do we do? And I don't really think those questions have been answered yet. I do want to make a point, though, of saying that I've had so many families who are wondering how on earth we would do something like that and how we could afford something like that. And to us as a family, we made this our priority. We were going to save every single penny that we could to make this a time out for our family. We didn't shop at the super stores. We didn't buy new furniture. We didn't buy big Christmas presents. We buckled down. And it's an amazing thing that in this American economy that's even as dismal as everyone says it is, by the end of about a year-long savings binge, we had enough for a nine-month frugal journey to Europe where we still stayed in Paris and we still stayed in London and it can be done. It's just about your priorities. You know, we have a lot of 9-11 baggage. What baggage do Croats have? Well, you know, something that I found really interesting was everybody wanted to know, as soon as I hired an interpreter to help me ask questions of people, as we all kind of wanted to know each other a little bit more deeply and they were really frustrated that we couldn't speak freely. And I hired everybody's favorite bartender to translate for me. And one of the first things, almost every person I interviewed in depth wanted to know is what do Americans think of us after World War II? And, you know, one of the things that humbled me in the most about this trip is how little I knew about international politics and what the circumstances were of the World Wars and who was what. I thought of everything as such a black and white thing, but it's really not so when you really look into European history. And Croatia was aligned during World War II with the Nazis and the fascists, not the entire country, of course, not all of the people, but that's where the dominant political party was. And they were very interested in explaining how all of that came to be. They were very concerned about that. And I think that's baggage they still carry. And it's something that they still argue about in this village amongst each other, is in the bars at night. And it's something that we kind of felt torn about as well. I mean, what if you went back to Norway and found out the village that you're from was torn apart by politics that are important to the rest of the world? I mean, it was hard for us to wrestle with. During World War II itself, the village in Croatia was aligned with the Nazis and fascists. The Ustasi government was in control for a while. And of course, they lost in the end. And then Tito took over. But the baggage that Croatia still, I felt, carried with them in this village, I can only speak for the village itself, was we don't want you to think that we're a bunch of Nazis. I mean, that's really not how it was. We had two awful choices. We had Communist Russia, and we had the fascists and the Nazis. And we had to pick whichever one was going to let us keep going to church. And one woman kind of said to me, we're Catholic the way Israel is Jewish, and we had to choose who would let us continue to worship as we wanted to, as we needed to. Everybody was very concerned about talking about that with me. And so then it became very important for me to relay that part of the story. And I wasn't really going there for politics, but it seemed like a responsibility to talk about that. That's the history that we missed because my great-grandparents left. I found that throughout my Eastern European travels, there is that lingering sort of concern about were you partisan, or were you Nazis, or were your relatives fighting against the Nazis, were you Communist up in the hills. And even today, families would be known as, oh, their family's a partisan family, or that family was a Nazi family. And what, 60 years later, it's still with them. I'm Rick Steves. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with Jennifer Wilson, and she's written a book called Running Away to Home, Our Family's Journey from Iowa to Croatia. Jennifer, living there in this little village of 800 people, you must have had an intimate look at just the structure of society. What was your take on a woman's place in Croatian small-town society? You know, I was a little intimidated at first. There weren't a lot of women in the bar, which is where I went when I first scouted the place, and I was there alone. I was sort of seen as an oddity, and eventually I was kind of teased a little bit for being so independent of my husband's life, you know, traveling alone. And also, when Jim was there with me, they couldn't believe that Jim was staying home with the kids while I was doing my research. In fact, there's a whole chapter in the book that sort of talks about how everybody thought Jim was living the life of a Croatian woman. But in terms of the older people in the village, they had such a vigorous life that it really is something that we should shoot for more here. I mean, the neighbor guy who was well into his 80s used to dig our car out when we were stuck in the snow when we would visit, and everybody still had a job and ran their farm, no matter how old they were. And as a result, I mean, everyone... there were tons of people who were well into their 80s who were still quite vital. I get the sense that the seniors would pass on skills to the younger generation. It's just that... the feeling I get when I look at the photograph in your book of the old woman with your family out, foraging, it looks like. Well, they certainly did to me. They kept reminding each other. My guide, Stefania, used to tell me, they kept reminding each other where all that she has. And so each of them would teach me something different. I learned how to make different recipes from Bakaana. Zora showed me where the old foundation of our family home was. They wanted me to come back so they could teach me how to knit with five needles. The women sort of passed down to me the things that my great-grandmother might have taught me, including the herbs in the field and what we could harvest and drink as tea. It was the most touching and important part of that trip for me as a woman, separate from my family's journey. One of the things about that village, Rick, it was crazy. They would tell us everything. I mean, I knew who was having problems with this woman. I knew who was messing around with who. They would just talk about these things openly. They told me about their World War II stories and these awful things that had happened during the Yugoslavian wars. But when I asked them for the village recipe for rakia, knew. I mean, doors shut. Done. Wow. But they'd share it with you. They'd share it in copious amounts. The old women in the morning made sure we had a shot every morning about 9.30 on my way back from my morning run. A shot of rakia at 9.30 in the morning? Uh-huh. The old ladies. And I turned out to be a morning drinker. I don't like drinking at night, but wow, that was kind of nice to start my day with a little buzz like that. Makes a woman more laid back, that's for sure. What is rakia? I mean, is it an anise drink? No, it's not. It's boiled from plums, usually. So it's fire water. Right, right. And I didn't really go out to the bars at night so much. It wasn't really my thing, but, you know, I'd love sitting around with the old ladies in the morning and just doing a shot of something strong. And they always told me it would help my digestion. And then they'd talk. Would that be a lubricant, and they'd tell you stories? Yeah. Yeah. It was some of the most pleasurable times in my life, sitting around a table and listening to these old women, and they were very physically demonstrative. They would rub my arm, you know, and treated me like a great-granddaughter. It was quite a gift. What did they like to talk about? The old women liked to talk about how little I knew. That was one thing that they really enjoyed. They liked to talk about the teas in the meadow there. They were having me on a steady diet, drinking Gospina Trava, which turned out to be St. John's wort, because that was such a wreck when I first got there. We're talking teas that were made of herbs from the surrounding meadows? From flowers in the meadows, yeah. So they were experts at this? They were absolute medicinal experts. There was not one ailment that we had in Mirkipai. Of course, it was all minor, travel stuff, cold, flu, whatever, that they weren't ready with, you know, boiled pine needles in a sap. For us, or something to that effect. So the old ladies had folk remedies for whatever your family encountered. They did. Our first neighbors, that was the phrase in the village, for your best neighbors, the ones who you trust the most. Our first neighbors, Mario and Yasminca, took us to the secret bowl in the mountains. That on like a one-week period of time in the fall, cranberries and blueberries fruited at the same time, in the same foliage. And everybody was just laying on the side of this hill, just picking berries and putting it into cups and eating berries, and just kind of this big local laid-back party out there. And I just remember looking around this heath of purple and red, and thinking, there's really nothing more beautiful than this moment in all the travels I've ever made. Whoa, a Croatian utopia. So it's that one week when you've got the secret bowl in the mountain, where the berries are ripe at the same time. Right. And there was actually an old fellow that came over and asked Mario and Yasminca why we were there, and kind of grousing that, listen, there's only so many, we don't want everybody to know about this. And Mario explained to them that we were family. I was going to say, it sounds like you were not just considered newcomers, but you were part of the family. It really felt that way. I mean, I was going there seeking my immediate family's connection. I was also seeking a little bit more connection to my own family. I talk in the book a bit about how my own relationship with my mother was a little tentative, and I was looking for my grandmother, who was Croatian. She had a very heavy Croatian accent, and I did know her. I was kind of looking for some comfort from her in these unstable times, I guess. And I think everybody recognized it. You were not really having the fulfilling close relationship with your actual mother, and you found your great-grandmother, and you got that from her. My mother's mother, Grandma Kate, she was the daughter of the people who were from Merkapai. And she and I connected. We absolutely were inseparable as grandmother and granddaughter. And when she passed away, that was when I started kind of becoming interested in the place where her parents were from. And then the last of my immigrant relatives died, sister Mary Paola Radosovic, and the nuns gave me her personal papers that talked about Merkapai Croatia. I got those papers at the exact time that I started just feeling really restless, and Jim was unhappy in his job. He had one of those awful jobs where you have to ask permission to have a day off to go to the dentist, you know, or to prove you're sick. And we just started thinking, what if we just took a break? And to me, I was thinking, what if I just got to see my grandma one more time? And it was amazing how the village recognized that need in us. And you know, as Americans, I think a lot of times we travel and feel like we're superior somehow. Like, we're going to visit these smaller countries from our very big country. We're a superpower. But they felt sorry for us. I found that repeatedly they couldn't believe that I was coming there to find out who my great grandparents were, who doesn't know their great grandparents, you know? It was fascinating that they really felt bad for us. I mean, they don't have any malls, they don't have any good sushi joints, but they knew who they were, and there was no doubt about that. And they saw in me, especially, that I just wasn't sure. And you know, I had not traveled like that before. I did when I was in college, I was backpacking, but I was from a very small town in Iowa. And it was my sister Paula Rodasovic, the last of the immigrant relatives, who told me, you must travel, you must get outside of this small town. And so I just, I hit the road and I just went to learn things. I went to look in the loop because I wanted to know what everybody else saw. That sort of thing. It was a very cursory trip. But this travel with my family gave me such unique entry into a culture that you never would have gotten in any other circumstance. I really felt like it was the first time that I had truly traveled. Because you know, when you're a travel rider, you have a guide or a fixer who tells you, try this, try that, and they hide everything from you, you know? Because you want to have a little happy travel story that will end up in a travel magazine. And that's why everybody feels like they fail when they read travel stories in there. Trip didn't turn out like it did in the magazine. But this was, and I was committed to writing everything in between. And I don't look great a lot of times in this book because I talk about how I was uncomfortable. We don't always look perfect. The village doesn't always look perfect. But it truly was this immersion into another world that we loved as a family. And me as a traveler, I think I really learned how to get outside of my comfort zone and see what that has to offer. In a sense, then running away to home is a guidebook. I think it's permission for people to go ahead and not enjoy it sometimes. Because in the end, you're going to get something different than you expected. And isn't that why we go somewhere anyway? I stepped so far outside of my comfort zone, I had no idea if I'd ever snap back. And in some ways, I haven't. It's a way to go and try to open your mind and learn a new way of being. Maybe you don't want to snap back. Maybe you just want to snap to a different place than you would have been had you not traveled. That's true. And now you're back home. Your kids are a couple years older, seven and nine. And you look back on it. Was it worth all the trouble? What was the main lesson? Definitely gratitude for the lives that we have. My great grandparents took an enormous risk when they left their village behind and they didn't look back. And came to this place where they didn't speak the language. And my great grandfather had $14.50 in his pocket when he arrived at Ellis Island. I believe that as a family, we're never going to forget what that sacrifice meant to us. It's helped us have a better life. And I hope as Americans, we don't squander his great sacrifice. Jennifer Wilson, that's an inspiring story and I'd call it heroic parenting at the same time. Thanks a lot for sharing and good luck with your book, Running Away to Home. Thank you so much for having me. Please keep me low. Jennifer's book, Running Away to Home, is available in paperback. We also have a link to Jennifer's novel called Water, in which a reporter grapples with an all too real water crisis in her Midwestern community. You'll find it with this week's show notes at ricksteves.com. It's a Mother's Day tribute with a little international flavor today on Travel with Rick Steves. We'll meet another young American mother and hear what it's like to raise a family in Paris in just a bit. Right now, let's pay tribute to the strong Sicilian mama, as our friends Tomasso and Alfio from Sicily explain. I'm joined now by Tomasso Pante and Alfio Di Mauro from Sicily. Thanks for joining me, Tomasso and Alfio. What's the Italian word for mama's boy? Mammoni. Mammoni, what does that mean? Mammoni, mama boys. I mean that we are the preferred of our mammas, so our mammas, you know, prepare our food. She makes our laundry. It's a great way of living. I swear. Because this is famous in Italy also, but I mean in Sicily there's still this deep. Oh, this is much more, you know. Even in extreme. You have a strong umbilicone. Umbilicone. That is fun. Oh, I think you're right. The umbilical cord. I don't want to tell you that word. What is that word? Yes. So it's hard to cut that umbilicone. Well, you know, our mammas, they always, I think they love us so much, probably too much, that they don't want that we leave the house. Absolutely not. So that means that you're going to have a kind of close relationship with your mama because she's going to take care of you or what you eat or what you're going to dress or the laundry and things like that. And I must say that sometimes, you know, Sicilians, they really enjoy that. When you get married, there is a big competition between the mama and the wife. Don't forget that. That's why the mama and the wife, you know, the wife should stay very, very far each other. Otherwise, we have always, you know, fight. So can you imagine this poor Sicilian man struggling between this two women? Yes. Life is tough. Life is so tough. Wow. Yes, I'm looking. Tomaso, Alfio, Milagrazia. Andiamo a visitare la stupenda isola di Sicilia. Wow. Tomaso, what did you say? I said, let's go and visit the beautiful island of Sicilia together. Amuninni. Amuninni, what was that? Andiamo. Andiamo. Let's go. Our next stops are Paris and San Francisco on this Mother's Day tribute edition of Travel with Rick Steves. Thanks for coming along. Bonjour, je suis Ellen Sciolino, j'habite Paris, et je voyage avec Rick Steves. Hello, I'm Elaine Sciolino. I live in Paris and I travel with Rick Steves. Bonjour, je suis Ellen Sciolino, j'habite Paris, et je voyage avec Rick Steves. So many people dream about living in Paris. We're joined today by somebody who not only lives in Paris, somebody who fell in love with and married a Frenchman, moved to Paris and now has a delightful little baby. She writes a blog, howtomariaffrenchman.blogspot.com, and she joins us today to give us a little insight into her life. Mary Bouronne, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Rick. So walking around Paris, very pregnant. How do people treat you? Yeah, they are very excited about it. They love, they, the French, love families, love babies, and love to see young women making more of them. I was exiting my bakery one day and had an older gentleman come up to me and he took my hand in his and he told me he thought I looked beautiful. And then he thanked me for making a new French citizen. Really? Yes. So there's that sort of almost patriotism about bringing another child into the French realm. Thank you for bringing us another taxpayer, I think. And how old is your baby now? She is 15 months. Colette. Colette, nice. You wrote in your blog, by the way, your blog is so interesting, howtomariaffrenchman.blogspot.com, you wrote about a room full of Gemini. Yes. Now, Paris is a very popular half-baby, so there are a lot of young families in Paris. There's a lot of services, but there's so many babies that you really have got to get your organization down. For example, when you want to give birth in a specific hospital, you really have to apply right away. So for example, I had a lot of girlfriends who were starting to get pregnant or thinking about getting pregnant, they would call the hospital every month, reserve a bed, and then if they got pregnant at the end of the month, keep their spot, and if they didn't, they'd call back and cancel. They reserved a bed nine, 10 months in advance. Oh yeah, exactly. Really, so just in case you can conceive, you've nailed a bed. You've got a bed down, yeah. So that's the first thing's first is book your hospital in advance. And then the same thing is true with daycare. So the most popular month to give birth in Paris is May because you have to have a three-month old baby in order to leave them in the daycare system. They can't be under three months. And every school year, there's something called la rentrée, which is the big September opening. And so all of the spots fill up in September. So if you're angling for a top-notch daycare, you want a baby that's three months old in September. Exactly. And then once you have a baby, you have to have a lot of pregnancy symptoms appear. That's right. And they make those lists in May. So you want to have a springtime baby. Wow, that requires a little bit of art history. Are the Prussian women pretty good at that? Oh yeah, they're really good at it. In fact, I was completely sort of blindsided by this. We had an August baby. And then afterwards, when I'm telling people, oh la la la August. Oh, what a difficult month to give birth. You write in your blog about the Mammys of Montmartre. Tell us about that. Yes. So, for me, it is a nice name for grandma. And there are a lot of elderly people that live on this hill. And they are really involved in children's lives. Their children, other people's children. Even yours, a strange neighbor. Even my child. Yes, yes. I think it's the, it takes a village to raise a baby. Are they judgmental? I mean, I know it's kind of odd when an older person kind of makes some judgmental comment on how you're raising a child. Yes, it took a little while to get used to it. But these elderly women would just march right up to you and tell you what they thought of you. You know, oh, madam, look at these poor baby's arms. You've exposed them to the wind. Or the other way around, even 10 minutes later, they could come up to you and say, oh, madam, your baby's suffocating with all of these scarves. So they're very concerned about... So without any sort of invitation, they'll give you plenty of advice. No, no, no, no. Even if you're sort of, you know, sort of moving your eyes out over here to sort of avoid them, they'll march right up to you and say, oh, madam, madam, and give you a little nugget of advice. Is it annoying or is it endearing? Both. I try and take the endearing track because it is really sweet. That's a good positive mindset. Yes. When you're living in a complicated and dense sort of environment like Paris with so many strong feelings about how to live and what's right. There's also no winning here. So I just... I don't try and debate. I just, oh, madam, thank you. Yes. Oh, you're right. We're going to go right home right now and bundle up. How long have you been married to Greg War? Four years. Four years. What's your advice to an American woman hoping to fall in love with a Parisian or a Frenchman? Do it. Do it. Yeah. It's a lot of fun. How is that? How are Frenchmen unique, different? Yeah. It's, I would say that, you know, very generally speaking, you know, it's hard to sum up a whole people's here, but that they're very sensitive. They're very sweet. So it's not just until they get you. They're sensitive even several years into the marriage. They really are. Yeah. They are just unique. Well, Greg War is particularly sweet, yes. But generally speaking, they're a little bit softer than American men and they make really nice life partners. So, Mary, your baby is 14, 15 months old now and you've learned about maternity leave and daycare and this sort of thing. How does that work for a French person compared to what we would expect in the United States? Yeah. It's actually pretty different. And since this is my first baby, I didn't realize sort of all the differences until I was starting to describe this to my mother and my girlfriends and all of this. And they just, some of the things they couldn't believe, for example, maternity leave starts a month before your due date. Okay. So, where here, you know, I know that I had friends that would bring their hospital bag and store it under their cubicle in case they had to rush off. That's when your water breaks. Yeah, right to work. And then they'd have a few weeks at home, of course, just like, you know, and then they'd come back where there it starts early. So that last month before you're even due, you're already at home. You're fluffing the toys and the nursery. You're getting things ready. And you're getting paid leave at this time. You are. Yeah, that's when the paid leave starts. Yes. And then once your baby is born, so you have a month before, and then you have sort of depending on the contract exactly, you've got between two and three months afterwards. Okay. And then you go back to work. Does your place of employment accommodate your new needs now as a young mother? They do. So there's two kinds of contracts you can have in France. You can have a CDD, which is a determined amount of time, or you can have a CDE, which is for an indefinite amount of time. So if you've got an indefinite amount of time contract, which is essentially you'd have to, you know, steal out of the cash machine to get fired. You've got a job for life almost. You've got a lot more flexible benefits. So after that three month period, let's say, and you're ready to come back to work, you could come back four days a week instead of five. You could also choose to take a year of unpaid leave, and they'd have to keep a job available for you, not necessarily the same position, but same level of pay, same level of responsibility. So your employment would not be threatened if you chose to take a year off to be with your child. That's exactly right. And then you would get back into the system, and then you could get pregnant again and just sort of keep on going. So it's a really amazing amount of flexibility if you have one of these contracts. Contracts of indeterminable length. I know in Scandinavia they have paternity leave also. In France what's the approach to dads? Dads get a couple of weeks as well. It's not as generous as the leave for the mom, but they get a couple of weeks to be at home. And does it use it or lose it? Yeah, I don't know anyone that hasn't used it. I can't imagine why you wouldn't. Now these benefits that are so, so great are only, of course, available to people that have these amazing long-term contracts, which are a little bit hard to get if you are a young married woman thinking about having babies. They can kind of sniff that out. Oh, because it's expensive to hire a woman who may be pregnant in a year because you'll have to give her these generous benefits. So that might make it tougher for you to land a job if you're in childbearing age and just to be a mom. Yeah, that's right. Now each company, it's in post, just like the number of vacations or the number of work hours, the government just decides that everyone has to have it. So it's not, you can't go to one company and get less or whatever. But they're hesitant about hiring you. With the economic challenges in Europe now and in France is having to look hard at their entitlements and so on. Sure. Do you feel like these things are going to be changing or do you feel like the French are committed to this? I think they're really committed to this. They'll find a way to. They'll find other things, getting rid of fiscal niches and there's plenty of stuff to cut there. But I think they're really committed to families and kids. And Mary, let's talk about the practicalities of a little baby out in the big city Paris. What about taking a child, an infant to a restaurant, changing tables and so on, baby seats? Well, first of all, I would encourage people to travel with their kids, even if they're little. It's so much fun. And I think you'll really connect with the locals. More people are going to want to come up to you like we're saying these mammies and give you some advice. But even in a restaurant or at a bakery, maybe they'll give your baby a little piece of cake or they'll want to tear off a loaf of bread. And so a baby is a fantastic accessory, a prop for getting to know the locals. That's for sure. But it comes with a few challenges. Parisian restaurants are rarely equipped with high chairs. I know of two restaurants in all of Paris that have a changing table. I asked one of my Parisian mother friends when I first started, you know, why are you supposed to change their diaper? I don't understand. And she said, well, what you do is you go into the bathroom stall. Close the door. Put your knees together. Put your baby facing you on your knees and you change your baby on your own lap. You make your own changing table. That's right. You put the white piece over here. You put the diaper over there and you are a human changing table, which I now got this moved down, but it took a couple of tries. Yeah. One thing great about Paris is all the public spaces for little kids as far as parks go. In fact, when we had our little kids at this age, we'd go to Plastas Vosges and they got a wonderful sandbox there and the young families are out playing or I remember going out to the Montmartin Museum and on the way from the walk from the metro station to the museum, delightful carousel and park and playground and the whole neighborhood was there. The whole neighborhood is there because their living rooms are so small. So you really... People don't have their own yard. They don't have their own swing set. People don't have their own yard. They don't have their own swing set. Their living room is probably sort of half adult space and maybe a little corner for the kids. So you go out to those parks a couple of times a day for sure. So you're really going to meet a lot of people there if you've got your kids there. That's fun. Mary, I would love to check back in with you and Colette in a couple of years and see how things are going. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Best wishes. Thanks. Since our interview, Mary has become the mother of three and she now works as a food stylist in Paris. We have an online link to an archive of Mary's blog, How to Mary a Frenchman. It's at ricksteves.com. Let's finish our vintage Mother's Day edition of Travel with Rick Steves with a tribute from a former show producer, Sarah McCormick. She found that a family trip to San Francisco and Berkeley brought up a lot of bittersweet emotions about the important things in life. It was the first time I'd been on an airplane with my family in 20 years. My parents, sister and I, were flying from Seattle down to San Francisco to say goodbye to Barbara. When my parents left Seattle and eloped to Berkeley in 1966, Barbara and her husband Allen were their first neighbors and soon became their best friends. Their family became our second family and Barbara was our California mom. My parents took us back to Seattle when I was just two years old, but we visited our friends in the Bay Area often. Dad would drive us around the curving streets through the Berkeley Hills. We'd drive past their first home together, a little cottage with a secluded garden and a view of the Golden Gate. Mom would point out the lemon tree that she had planted decades ago. And dad would tell the story of how he'd flown down from Seattle ahead of mom and found this perfect little home for his pretty young wife. In the back seat, we'd roll our eyes while mom smiled at him across the car. We'd hang out with Barbara and Allen's kids while the parents had ice drinks on the back patio and reminisced. My parents always looked a little younger, sitting there in the Northern California sun. When we weren't with our friends, we'd do all the touristy things, drive back and forth across the Golden Gate Bridge, pile onto crowded cable cars, and buy those little silk purses and shiny finger traps in Chinatown. And everywhere we went, inevitably someone would break out with a hearty rendition of, I left my heart in San Francisco. Because in a way, we had. The night before Barbara's memorial service, the four of us wandered the streets of Chinatown together, reminiscing. My sister and I bought the same tourist trinkets for our kids that we used to pick out for ourselves. We all made plans to take a cable car ride the next day. But in the morning, when my sister and I met dad in the Hotel Café, he looked gray. Mom had collapsed in the bathroom the night before, he said. He'd had a hard time reviving her. He hadn't called 911 because he hadn't wanted to worry everyone the night before Barbara's funeral. He said, I thought I was going to lose her. Mom joined us, looking a little pale, but otherwise okay. We decided to go ahead with the cable car ride. But in the cab on the way there, mom said she felt dizzy. She didn't look good. We took her to the hospital. At the hospital, only dad was allowed to accompany her. He insisted we go ahead with the cable car ride, that mom would want us to do that, and that he take care of her. Maybe it means we're horrible children, but we went. Cable cars are the closest thing we have in this country to the kind of crowded death traps people ride every day in the third world. But in this litigious country, cable cars strike me as lawsuits on wheels. There's a sort of running board along each side, which you stand on, with your backside hanging out and exposed to oncoming traffic, holding onto a pole. You lurch up one side of an improbably steep hill and careen down the other. Just a couple of feet separate you from the cable car going in the other direction. The driver, while cranking the Victorian-era gears, yells at the foolish tourists to pull themselves in and for God's sake, to watch their backpacks. As the car climbs the first hill, I think of mom, and of how these are the streets where she was young, younger than my sister and I are now, and with almost everything still ahead of her. I think of Barbara, and of the impossible loss of our California mother, and of the fact that we're going to lose another mother, maybe not today, but one day. I reach for my sister's hand. Her face is grim. I suggest that we sing a song for mom. And we talk the other people around us into singing too. You can probably guess which song. I am the hell of a crowd. It calls to me. There we go. I'm following up. Hello. Hi. We're on the cable car. How's mom? Did she have a fat skin yet? Mom, I'm not sure. Mom turned out to be okay. No stroke, no heart attack. At least they couldn't find anything wrong with her. Or if they did, my parents didn't tell us. Mom looked really happy hearing about our cable car ride. That afternoon, we crossed the bay and drove back up through the Berkeley Hills for Barbara's Memorial. We hugged her kids and grandkids, cried for our friend, and during the service, my sister and I sat on either side of our mom, each holding on tight to one of her hands. Mom will sign for me. Look it out. Handle the line. This is Sarah McCormick for Travel with Rick Steves. Travel with Rick Steves is produced at Rick Steves, Europe in Edmunds, Washington by Tim Tatton, Kaz Mara Hall, and Donna Bardsley. Affiliate relations are by Sheila Gersoff. Website uploads are by Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Court. Our theme music is by Jerry Frank. We had editing help this week from Sarah McCormick. You can find out more about our guests each week on our website at ricksteves.com. We'll look for you next week with more Travel with Rick Steves. Hey, I'm Rick Steves. Thanks for listening. The busiest corner at ricksteves.com is our travel forum. That's where a vast community of Rick Nicks exchanges advice, experiences, and tips. This entirely free resource, which empowers real travelers to share real experience, is a beautiful compliment to all the content we produce. Think of any travel topic, hotels, tricky itinerary decisions, dealing with or avoiding crowds, and you'll find a world of advice based on real experience. Hey, we're all in the same traveler's school of hard knocks and it's okay to compare notes. See you there at the travel forum at ricksteves.com.