Cincinnati has that je nei sais quoi

Got back recently from Cincinnati for work, a place that I was curious to visit because all I know of Cincy is the WKRP jingle, and that I always spell it wrong, with two “t”s instead of two “n”s. Alas, I didn’t get to try Cincinnati chili, but I did get to taste Graeter’s ice cream (which has Oprah’s stamp of approval) and ride a Tallstacks boat. I didn’t get to stray too much outside of the business district, so I don’t think I saw enough of the city to get a feel of the real Cincy, but overall it was pleasant enough and everyone was very nice. (Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever met an Ohioan who wasn’t nice and didn’t speak in broadcaster’s English.)

I was there to visit various local companies (including one particular consumer products company that runs the city, pretty much) and on this trip I met some French and German folks who were also quite nice and pleasant enough, but whom I was amused to find were very French and German, in the way that most Americans seem to think the French and the German will be.

The Germans were friendly but definitely had the more booming of voices. The French women were rail thin and smoked whenever they had a few spare moments, and were never quite satisfied with the strength and taste of American coffee. (“Is this coffee, or is this tea?” asked one French colleague when she poured some of the admittedly bad and weak coffee provided by one of the companies.) At one point we were visiting a place that wouldn’t allow smoking within 25 feet of the entrance, with a menacing sign proclaiming so. The French women stopped at the sign almost like it was invisible fencing, puffing quickly away on the cigarettes they had just lit ten feet earlier.

So I was surprised to read this NYT article when I got back into town that says France was working toward a smoking ban. I remember being culture-shocked when I went to visit Paris a few years ago to see people smoking in the airports and the subway. At that time, indoor smoking in NYC had been a thing of the past. Smoking seemed so entrenched in the Parisian culture to me that it seems near impossible to rid it of its tobacco habit. Then again, they said they’d never be able to ban smoking in New York or LA, either (or in Ireland, for that matter), and now I can’t imagine people lighting up in enclosed quarters anymore here, like back in college, when I would step in a bar or club for two seconds only to emerge reeking of cancer-stick residue.

The best thing about the French losing their right to smoke indoors, however, is their protesting.

My favorite quotes:

“I see this as a personal attack,” said André Santini, a center-right member of Parliament from a Paris suburb and compulsive cigar smoker, who posed for photographers this week in the tobacco kiosk in the National Assembly building. “What disturbs me is the ayatollahs you meet everywhere. They tell you how you have to make love, how you have to eat.”

And…

“I’ll end my life where I started it — in the men’s room,” said Jean-Pierre Balligand, a lawmaker from eastern France. “I started smoking like every other schoolboy, in the toilets of my junior high school. And that’s where I’ll end up, in the toilets of the National Assembly, while the school principal, Mr. Debré, screams at us for smoking.”

Gotta love the French and their poetic metaphoric rants. So, ah…how you say…so dramatique!