Return of the French

French, my old friend! You’ve come back to me! I missed you so! After about a week (which, I’ll admit, was a bit longer than I anticipated it taking) my French started to come back to me. Monday was the first day I felt like I was starting to understand a decent amount again, and Tuesday evening I was able to spit out what I wanted to say. Success! Today my hosts even commented on the fact that I was getting much better. I make no promises about using the correct verb conjugations or gender (it’s been over two years since I took a French grammar class), but I can once again pronounce things and circumlocute quite well. As Betsy Warrington Ray, heroine of Betsy and the Great World (my personal travel guide), says:

“The way to talk German, is to talk German. If I bothered with forms, and genders and cases and tenses, I’d be tongue-tied. I just string along the words I want to say, and put Nicht wahr? at the end.”

Back in the day I wanted to be able to speak French perfectly, but I’ve decided life’s too short for that, plus I still have a dozen other languages I need to learn. Imperfectly will have to do!

We’ve had guests for dinner the past three nights, which has been quite entertaining (and I’m sure this is part of the reason my French has improved). Night number one (which will go down in history as the night of liver, brains, and tongue, as those were the meats consumed) two neighbors came over. There was a crazy amount of yelling at the beginning because the neighbors didn’t want to stay for dinner and the Ligers were trying to make them. I was laughing my head off the entire time. It was finally decided (after much protestation) that they would in fact be staying, and we discussed, among other things, the price of corn, the handsomeness of Obama (I was sure to mention that he was from Chicago and that Michelle went to Whitney), and how no one practices religion anymore. I love that topics that might be considered taboo in the US (for example, religion) are spoken about so bluntly here. Jean-Paul flat out asked me if I was at all religious and then whether or not I practiced. Then he went on a spiel about how no one practices religion anymore—even him.

Tuesday night Jerome, one of the Ligers’ older sons, came over with his two kids (Jeanne is five and Nicolas is nine). Kids don’t go to school on Wednesdays over here, so they stayed overnight until Jerome could come pick them up the next evening. Jeanne and Nicolas are absolutely adorable—Jeanne and I colored together, and Nicolas very proudly showed me his English workbook. It’s interesting to see the difference in the emphasis put on English in the country (yes, I’ve sadly admitted that I’m not in a suburb, I’m in the country) as opposed to even a small city like Avignon, where it seemed like all the high school aged kids spoke English. All of the Liger sons had eight years of English in school, but they all maintained they learned nothing from them. They start English much younger than we start foreign languages (usually at seven or eight years old) and take it until they finish high school, but apparently without speaking it much. All the Ligers were shocked when I told them I’d only had six years of French, and I was shocked that they didn’t learn more despite starting at a young age—all my linguistics courses seem to suggest that if you throw a young kid into a foreign language, they will magically learn how to speak it. Then again, this is a really agricultural region, and I suppose if you’re going to work in agriculture, you don’t really need to know English. We also discussed organic food (and its ridiculous cost), the Chicago Bulls (while the older generation associates Chicago with Al Capone, people in their thirties tend to associate it with the Bulls, and I’m always happy to discuss the greatness of Michael Jordan with them), and figure skating. The Ligers keep telling their youngest son, Kevin, to take me to the ice rink in Rennes. I’m not going to bother to wait around for him—when he’s not at school, he’s on the computer or with his girlfriend—and have decided that next Wednesday I’m taking a field trip to the ice rink. It will be excellent.

Wednesday was the third night of guests, although this was just one guest—Yannick, the current renter who needs to get his butt out of here so I can have his room and the cool bathroom. J He wanted to know what hospitals were like in the US (he works at a psychiatric hospital), but he mostly wanted to know all about working conditions, since there was a greve planned for today (yes, they’re still protesting any thought of changing the retirement age). He kept asking about minimum wage, social welfare, whether or not there were strikes in the US (nothing at all like the strikes here!), and we had a fun little exchange regarding vacation time. After I told him that I thought minimum wage was about $7/hour (it’s 8€/hour here), he responded, “With four weeks of vacation, right?” Then I laughed. No. He was utterly appalled that most people just get two weeks and that some people don’t even take the vacation that they have. He has ten weeks of vacation a year (which I think is really just excessive, but what do I know?) and thus decided he would not be moving to the US any time in the near future for work. We also had an in depth conversation about insurance differences between the US and France, which was the first time my Econ class from last time I was in France actually was useful. Thank you, Prof. Alcaras.

Other things: weather here was good up until today, which has been cloudy and rainy. I did some laundry today in a tiny, 19-year old laundry machine. Due to the fact that I mentioned that we ate a lot of chili at home, Denise went out and bought some microwave Mexican food for me…I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, because a) it’s microwave food and b) Europeans RUIN Mexican food. I know it’s going to be awful, but I want to be polite…hopefully it’s better than I’m expecting. I went into Rennes last Saturday with a former assistant who’s now attending law school in Rennes, and we went to a ridiculously huge flea market. ‘Twas insane. We spent at least three hours there and didn’t get through half of it. I bought a mug for tea (if you want a decent sized amount of tea at my house, you have to drink it from a bowl, because you can fit about two tablespoons in their teacups), a 2€ hairdryer with a diffuser, and then Stefanie gave me some small bowls that had come as part of a set (she only wanted the bigger ones). I also met two of Stefanie’s friends. They’re Columbian and are going to school here, and we went and had some iced tea with them later in the day. They were very friendly, and it was fun to meet some other non-French and hear what they were doing here. It was also entertaining since the only language we all had in common (French) was no one’s first language

I went to my school once this week, but I’m going again tomorrow and I’m hoping I can observe some classes next week, so I’ll hold off on talking about school until then.

A bientot!