Joie de vivre

September 29, 15h50 France time

Very French experiences in the past few days:

I tried steak tartare this past weekend. This is essentially raw hamburger meet with capers, an uncooked egg yolk, and onions mixed into it. I thought it would be revolting, but it was really quite good.
http://varmintbites.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/coquettesteaktartare.jpg

I have been to several cafés and have tried French coffee, which is more like a tiny cup of espresso.

I get a pain au chocolat almost every day from the same boulanger who has a little open-air shop.

I’ve dressed myself in scarves and a sweater over the past few days, creating a French disguise that fools people as long as I don’t have to say too much to them.

I was called a string of French curse words when I refused to look over at a car full of Frenchmen who tried to address me (possibly for directions) the other night. I just figured I wouldn’t take my chances, which must be how those people who just stare in another direction when solicited for help feel.

Things that the French have messed up:

Twix bars. There are some products, such as Coke, that the French and other Europeans improve upon; Twix bars are not one of them. I had one the other night, and it was like cookie sawdust with caramel and chocolate. Of course, maybe it was stale.

The movie “The Hangover” was cleverly renamed “Very Bad Trip” here in France. This is not to say that the direct translation of the French title was “Very Bad Trip,” but rather that here the title was changed to another English title which makes no sense.

“Where’s Waldo?” is “Où est Charlie?” in France. The only thing that I can guess is wrong with the name “Waldo” is that the French rarely use the letter W.

Traffic lights. The system of traffic lights and signals is great here, but I’m beginning to wonder if it has any bearing whatsoever on how the French drive. Pedestrians walk whenever they want to, people run red lights constantly, and drivers don’t use turn signals or anything like that. Not even the bus drivers. Come to think of it, I wonder if they have turn signals.


Last night, I got to talk quite a bit more with Paula, the Scottish girl next door. She was very interested in learning about health care in the U.S., and for the most part she was appalled by what I told her. She said the U.K. uses a very clever system for healthcare which has its drawbacks but which requires very little money from its citizens. She and I also discussed the fact that we have no clue how to teach English to whole classes of students by ourselves, and we agreed to share all of the material and ideas we could. And then she told me that she has lived in Limoges before, so she knows where all of the interesting stuff is. Perfect. And she says “bloody hell” all the time.

This afternoon, I met up with another American teaching assistant and his boyfriend, who is French. We sat down at a café and got to know each other in French and in English. It was the most linguistically mixed conversation I’ve ever had; everyone was constantly switching. But I felt very comfortable speaking in French today.

September 30, 1h30 France time

Tonight I met up with a bunch of the American assistants, plus one Scottish assistant and one French boy. We had a lovely chat at a brasserie (like a bar) that was quite close to my building, and everyone started proposing that we do things together. “Come over to my apartment! …I need company,” or “Let’s all go to the open-air market on Saturday morning” or “There’s live music in the centre-ville this Friday, let’s go see it!” Fantastic!