11 August 2003

Days of Lives, French Style

The cats and I are under the weather…for different reasons, of course.  My cold took a long time to take over.  I am sure it is in reaction to the news that we are moving to England in the fall.  The cats, on the other hand are a different story.

When we began to discuss the possibility that we might move to England I quickly made an appointment to take Lucy and Christopher, our American cats to the veterinary clinic.  In England they have something called a “Pet Scheme”.  To me that sounds like some kind of gambling game, but in England it means that every dog and cat must have a tiny metal chip placed under the skin in the neck so that they can be identified.  The chip has a long number on it and can be read with a little metal detector.

England is scared of rabies.  They have managed to keep rabies out in recent years because they don’t let animals in unless they are kept in quarantine for 6 months or have a metal chip.

Our first visit to the vet got Christopher so terrified that he promptly threw up all over the place.  I think Christopher didn’t like it when the vet picked him up and promptly announced, “he is big enough to eat!” just before injecting him with a giant needle full of rabies vaccine.

A month later the cats were drug back to the vet for more torture.  The vet gave them an anesthetic to take a huge blood sample and also to place the metal chip under their skin.  When I brought them home Lucy and Christopher were like two stoned idiots for two days.  That must have been some g-o-o-d stuff.

The day I brought them home I was feeling terrible from my cold so I sat down to hold them on my lap.  My brain was pretty much gone so I decided to try watching a little television.  To my surprise I discovered that the soap opera Days of our Lives (Des Jours Des Vie) is on TV here.  Marlena and Hope had just been shot by some unknown person (I can’t understand enough of their dubbed French to know all of the details). 

After each scene the picture fades to black, and another scene comes on right away.  I finally figured out that they do this in place of the commercials that normally appear when this show is aired in the US.  As I watched I kept thinking, “Now this is the way to watch soap operas…you don’t have to wait for the next part of the show because the commercials aren’t there!” 

The cats sat on my lap during the whole 15-minute show.  That’s right…15 minutes.  Days of Our Lives barely got started and it was over.  Wow!  It’s hard to believe that each episode is actually 15 minutes of commercials…and not even good commercials at that.

At least in France, at the end of each show there is a series of commercials called “Publicite” (poo bli ci tay) with clever little stories about animals or silly people.  After Days of our Lives there were several commercials selling bath products by having naked women take showers.  The French don’t seem to have any problems with nudity on TV.

The next commercial was about a car.  A small boy and girl in space suits were using their special powers to play tricks on each other.  First the boy zapped the girl and she was suddenly wearing a lovely princess dress.  Then she zapped him and he was in a field with sheep.  Then he zapped her and she was back in her space suit.  Then she zapped him and he was bald right down the middle of his head so he jumped in the air in shock and ran after her.   I sure am going to miss French TV.