30 April 2008

Home again

You know that you've gotten used to living in a place when you're relieved to get back there after being on vacation. I can barely imagine a better feeling that getting in to my house after vacation, eating some dinner, and climbing into my monster queen-sized bed to go to sleep. Oh, and not only sleep: sleep IN. It was amazing.

I think I decided sometime this week that I wasn't going to go into more detail about vacation because it means that I spend a TON of time in front of the computer. Honestly I'd rather just hang out and read and stuff. But yeah. This week has been kinda strange. Everyone (rather, most everyone) got back from their trips over the weekend. Getting home on friday night meant that I and most of my friends had time to recuperate before heading back to classes on monday.

At least, that's what it was supposed to mean. Instead, everyone was so tired monday and tuesday that the teachers spent a lot of time just standing in front of the classes, waiting for someone, anyone, to answer (and i'll bet they were even willing to hear from an american that time...). Today people were awake, but with only one reason. Tomorrow is the first of may, a jour ferié. NO SCHOOL!!! WOOT!!!

It's even more cool for me cause I don't have classes on fridays, meaning that I have a four-day weekend. Next week it's even better, because we have another thursday off, but we also have monday off. How's that for French vacation? The only catch is that tomorrow, NOTHING is going to be open. I mean, nothing. Even the buses won't be running. So everyone is stuck at home, which isn't that horrible for me, even though I don't even have homework to do. But at least I'm near people in case I start exploding and need to speak english for a while. haha...yeah I don't think the need would ever be that bad but hey you never really know.

24 April 2008

VACATION !!!!!!

i'm on the last night of the trip, which means that i'm in london paying for internet...

once again i'm just popping in to say that i'm going to have to write the entire story later, as i don't really have that much time to type and to get everything in. i'll just stick with a really quick synopsis:

BERLIN: awesome. big and crazy cool, with so much history that i could barely turn around without running into something that had a story. the wall was shorter (of course) than i thought it was going to be, but we had some great tours for free, minus of course the tip we gave the guides. on the second night we saw a string trio, and we did a ton of walking.

PRAGUE: since we were only there for a short amount of time, we didn't get to see very much. it felt like enoughm though, more about it later.

DUBLIN: actually my favorite city so far, with berlin and paris coming nearly up in a three-way tie. i loved it. we met jessica there and had some great times walking a ton and just hanging out. when we left i forgot my US cell phone and my travel journal there...whoops. don't worry, they're in the post right now, headed for france.

LONDON: ginormous. this city has the feel of new york but the size of new york plus l.a. plus san francisco...our hostel is kinda sketch, ok, really sketch, but hey, it's only €9 a night. we're finding ourselves spending a LOT of money. the pound pretty much sucks if you're not working here and getting paid with it.

all in all the vacances has been great. then again, two weeks is a long time, and we're all ready to go back to france for the last month of classes. jessica left this morning (in the rain-of course...that's what it does here in the mornings) and tomorrow we leave too. if all goes well we should be back in our own beds friday night....sleeping. sleeping a lot. i mean....a lot. like, holy cow, why do we walk so much during the days? really, man...we walk so much that we just don't have any energy to do anything else once we get back to the hostel around dinner time.

so yeah
that's it for now
i'll write more this weekend

love
chel

09 April 2008

Emploi de temps

"ah-plwah duh tah"

"schedule"

It occured to me that some people out there might wanna know where I'm headed for the next couple weeks, so here's the bare plan for everything!

Saturday, 12 avril: With Sarah, Mark, and Sophia, Leave Rennes, arrive in Berlin via Paris and Bremen
Wednesday 16 avril: leave Berlin for Prague (aka Praha)
Friday 18 avril: leave Prague for Dublin, meet Jessica
Tuesday 22 avril: leave Dublin for London (aka Londres), Sophia ditches us for free room with a friend
Friday 25 avril: leave Londres for Rennes, via Tours

It's truly amazing how condensed that can get, when you just drop everything down to the bare details. Thank you, ryanair, for being generally dirt cheap. Thank you. Especially since we have to re-buy our train tickets to get from Bremen to Berlin because they sent them to the wrong address and they still haven't arrived at that destination. Oh well. I'm probably spending just as much buying new tickets for 39 euro as I would for paying my parents back for having the tickets FedExed here ASAP.

I have a feeling that I'm going to be super exhausted after this vacation, which is why I'm glad that we're getting home friday night, and will have the weekend to recuperate and then head back to classes, haha. That's how it's supposed to work, right? You get time off so that you can exhaust yourself in a good way...hm....

08 April 2008

PARAPLUIE

pah-rah-plu-ee

"umbrella"

Today after classes I went with Jessica and our friend Anna to a café. Before that, of course, we stopped to purchase our dessert of the day, "une gaufre nutella". Waffle drizzled with hazelnut-flavored chocolate...yum....Then we went to the café and got café (haha love that wordness). This is strange for me because I don't really do the espresso thing, unless I get to take all the sugar packets on the table and put them in my mini little mug. But it just felt like a café day...

Anna had to leave after only 45 minutes cause she had internship stuff to do, which was really sad. When she left she gave me and Jess hugs. I'd forgotten how much I miss hugs... We don't get to see Anna a lot cause she's in Maîtrise and her schedule is completely opposite of ours. Our free times never line up. That's one thing that sucks about having friends in different levels, you never really get to see them because you're always done/tired at different times.

After we left the café, Jessica and I decided to head to a book store which has a MAGNIFIQUE assortment of pocket-size books. On the way, though, we got sidetracked. A lot of the stores here are having sales right now, and sometimes when you see a lot of -50% signs, you just have to go in. So we were walking past the Virgin records store (love it) when i saw a lot of those sorts of signs, and we gave in and entered. First thing I saw? A CLEAR umbrella. A clear umbrella that looked, when it was open, like a bubble. I looked at the price tag, sure it was going to be at least 15 euros, since that's how much full-size parapluies usually are...

5 euro! 5! I totally bought that baby. Now I just need it to rain...haha just watch, now it won't rain at all, and i'll have this beauty of plastic just resting in my chambers, waiting to be used.

Next interesting thing of the day: FLATTENED PIGEON

Yes, you heard me.
When Jessica and I were standing on the corner, waiting for the bus to head home, suddenly Jessica decided that she wanted to go and grab a newspaper. She walked across, got what she wanted, and then came back to me. We had been speaking mostly in French all afternoon, but suddenly she nudged me and spoke in English.

"Do you see the flattened pigeon?"
"What? Where?" She pointed toward the street, which is gray cobblestone. I looked and looked, but had no luck. "I don't see it. Where?"
"Right there...see?" Finally, and suddenly, I saw it. Smooshed pigeon feathers and two little bird feet wedged into the crevices of the stones...I started laughing. "Yeah...I almost stepped in it, too. I felt something under my boot and moved my foot just in time..." We stood there laughing and looking at the poor flattened animal.

I tried to imagine the reactions of the people around the bus at the moment it hit the bird. I hoped someone had actually seen it, just to make the moment even better.

When I got home I showed mes parents my new umbrella, and messed up in a little grammar thing (said "now that i bought an umbrella it did not rain anymore" instead of "it won't rain anymore" oh wow i got back to my room and wanted to shout out the correct phrase just to redeem myself). They smiled at me though while I opened the umbrella and showed them what it looked like, and smiled when I proclaimed it the umbrella of my dreams...I kinda felt like a child with a new toy that everyone else had gotten a year ago, but hey...it's CLEAR.

I don't know if I can stress that enough. I love it.

Oh and for dinner tonight we had pot roast and carrots and potatoes. French? I don't know...but it was yummy...I ate so much I can still feel it in my belly...

Jessica let me borrow her hairdryer...Tomorrow is STRAIGHT HAIR DAY!!!!!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

haha.....only a few more days until vacation!

07 April 2008

Les Vacances...et les autres trucs

Hey peeps. I just wanted to start off with a heads up/reminder that between the dates of 12 APRIL and 25 april, I will be out of the country. And by "out of the country," I mean, I will be out of France. It also means that you may very well not hear from me at all during that time, since it's not positive that every hostel we stay in will have internet, and as it's never a super high priority to find internet cafés while we're looking at the Berlin Wall.

I love you so much, and I know you'll understand why this separation needs to happen. Don't think of it in terms of, "She doesn't love me anymore." Think of it as...a growth experience. Yes. Growth. Broaden your horizons. It's not goodbye forever, after all, we're still good friends, aren't we? Yes, we are...

Today I had a surprise test in my Civilisation cours. Cours means class, by the way. Which is funny because the word looks a lot like the verb 'courir,' 'to run.' Hm...anyway. Surprise test. Well, to be perfectly honest, it wasn't a surprise. I remembered it last night four seconds after I set my alarm and turned my light off. I remembered it this morning right when I woke up, and I definitely wasn't surprised when M. Delebeque set the test in front of me. Twenty questions, most of which were multiple choice. Haha. Here are some of my favorites:

1. Name a French wine. (Bordeaux Superieur)
2. Name a specialty of Breton gastronomy. (la galette)
3. What is one of the emblems of the French Republic? (the rooster)
4. What is the Korrigo card? (transport card for Rennes)
I loved #4 because I use this card every day to ride the bus and metro...haha gotta love those gimme sorts of questions.

So I'm not too worried about that.
The other class I had today was my lab class. A Masters French student presides over us, listening to us practice french phonetics with thick sound-"proofed" headphones on. Wearing the headphones makes me feel really special and telemarketer-y, because they also have a mic on the left side. We sit in this room for an hour every monday, listening to a recording Laurène (the Masters student) made for the class before ours, and repeating the words that she says. Each "clip" is about 10 or 12 minutes long, with about four minutes of single words, then sentences, then dialogues. Sometimes if you listen to the tape after it's done you can hear a British lab lesson, and that's always fun.

Laurène caught me doing it the other day for the first time. There's just something so reassuring about hearing a French person stumble through English. Makes us feel happy about our own levels.

But today after labo I could barely talk, my throat hurt so much. We always have two vowel sounds and two consonant sounds to work on. Today it was [i]/[y] and [l]/[r]. Don't be fooled. The [i] is an "eee" sound, like the "ea" in "clean." The [y] is in fact a sort of "u," but is so incredibly complicated that I can't explain it without you being able to hear me. Suffice it to say that this (really difficult) French sound makes the difference between such words as "au-dessus"/"au-dessous" and "tu"/"tout". Above/Below, You/All.

The worst of all was the [r]. I'm sure you know that the French R is different from the English R. We like to swallow ours, while theirs comes more out of their throats. Oh man. Pain. BUT now I can finally say "truc," which is slang for "thing" aka "whatchamacallit this thing you know" but also "c'est pas mon truc" is "that's not my sort of thing." I love it.

But anyway. That's the news of the day. After labo Jessica and I tried to find the allusive Breton Tourism store, as Mark and I have been trying to do for a couple weeks now. It's still allusive, and seems to be very good at it. I have this feeling we just keep walking right past it...
We wandered for a while and then got home around 17h30; a little earlier than usual. OH!

There was a robbery in one of the neighboring appartements today. When I got home and put my key in the lock I couldn't put it through cause they had left the keys in the other side of the door, making it impossible for me to open it without ringing the bell and having Elisabeth come let me in. Michel showed up too, saying that he thought I was the police. I laughed and said, "Yeah, here I am, what did you do now?" And he said, "No, really, they were here today, someone broke in to one of the other appartes." Ah.

I went back to my room and read for a while before going back out to the living room and watching the news with mes parents. The Olympic Torch got to Paris today, and apparently it was really crazy. I love that there are so many problems in the world, so many people suffering and dying and going insane, and Tibet gets precedence because of the Games. The French are really suddenly upset about it all, even a lot of the mayors of the region showed up to protest. That's an interesting sight--elected officials protesting in public...hm....

The sad thing that even just letting Tibet be it's own thing isn't going to solve the fact that China is a Communist country that hates, oh, for example, Freedom of Religion and of the Press. Their nexs stations showed the Torch getting out of the Eiffel Tower, that's it, none of the violent arrests and people screaming and bleeding in the faces of blue jumpsuit-clad Games people trying not to get hurt. 3000 policemen were present in Paris today, JUST to make sure that this thing didn't get out of hand. As I'm sure most of you know, the spectacle ended with a ceremony cancellation and the extinction of the flame.

So much for international relations.

ps tomorrow is LE JOUR D'UN GAUFRE
(waffle day!)

love.
chel.

06 April 2008

Le Grêle et la grêve

Hail. That's what grêle is. Hail. I met some this morning, while I was running. I woke up and was like, "Oh, it's sunny and the skies are blue. I will go running and be happy."

It felt like I was at a Denver Christian game. In high school, whenever my soccer team went to DC for an away game, we would end up playing in rain, snain, sleet, hail, snow, and a teeeeeeeny tiny bit of sunshine. Eight times out of ten we would end up getting pulled off the fields for a while to let the weather improve before we started playing again. So while I was running along the canal in my stretchy un-French capris and short sleeve t-shirt, being pelted with little hard packed pieces of snow and ice, of course all I could think of was my coach Lind yelling instructions at us, warning that if we didn't pick up the pace we werer going to be doing the same exercise another time. Haha...I actually loved it. I miss being pushed like that.

This weekend has been pretty normal. On Friday we...uh...did nothing. On Saturday there was a manifestation about Tibet in front of the Mairie (government building thing...a mayor is "maire"). It was supposed to start at 11 but I got there a little late cause it wasn't super important, and the French are always late anyway (actually that's not true). It was lame.

You'd think that of all people, the French would be able to come up with an interesting manif. But noooooo...all their grêve (strike) practice does nothing. There was a group of maybe 200 people, if even, surrounding the maire, a dalai llammmalalma (uh...spellcheck?) rep, and some other people who are probably important. There were Tibet flags everywhere, and banners talking about how Bretagne supports the boycott and all. It probably would have been really interesting had the rep guy who spoke used an actual speaker system, instead of a megaphone.

Haha...all I really caught during his entire speach was "Mumph à la lonphmelk contre mumble mubble crackle voilà!" Sad. Everybody was really quiet, too, no yelling or screaming or violence. Made for a really boring protest thing. Although I guess technically manifestations are just for showing up and showing what you think...At noon the speaker finished and the crowd went marching through the streets chanting a French rhyme about Tibet needing to be freed from the Communist control of China.

The funny thing is that usually you gather like this to make the government listen to you- because it hasn't been. But in this case, the French government is actually in agreement with many of its citizens. Maybe that's why they didn't feel there was a need for yelling...

After the manif I ate lunch with Collin and Mark and then we went and bought some new French music. I'm pretty proud of myself. I feel so ÜBER cool now. Also proud of myself cause I found the dots for the U. I'm not enough of a nerd to be patient enough to remember the real name for the accent mark. But hey. At least I know it goes there.

Last night I almost went out. Again. But my friends were eating dinner late with their families, whereas I had finished early, and the last bus left at 21h22, and of course no one texted me until 22h00ish....which meant that if I wanted to go out I'd have to walk 20 minutes to the stop, wait for the bus, and then get to centre ville, where I would be for an hour and a half, since the last bus to go up by me is at 0h30.....man....I whine a lot, don't I?

I just need to get over this thing. I'll think of it this way: I'm saving money. By not buying a cidre with my friends at a bar every Saturday night, I'm saving about 3 euros each weekend. Yeah! Three euros in my pocket! Woot! Plus it means I get to stay home and read.

Mes parents are sick. Haha...so sad, I can actually hear them hacking from here in the living room. It's just rhume-level stuff (colds) so that's good, but it's miserable to be sick all week, and to be coughing and blowing snot into tissues half the time you're awake. Last night while I was reading (you thought I was joking about the reading, I wasn't) Michel came into the living room and was watching a series about the Challenger shuttle. It was like, 1 am. He just couldn't sleep. I wonder what time they'll be able to get unconscious tonight? I know I didn't go back to my room until almost 3, and I remember hearing him go back to their room after. I just don't know how long after.

It's bad that he's sick too cause we were going to go to a wine tasting event at the aéroport today. But being sick means that you don't have tastebuds...bummer. Oh well. I wonder if he's going to be able to get painting done this week? His art manager is organizing a show for him in juin and he needs to pop out at least 12 great paintings of birdness. Mostly roosters, since it's France's emblem, but also ducks and turkeys. They're good, but...you know. Interesting choice of subject. He'll get them done though. He has some really good work.

Do you know why the rooster is the emblem of France?
"Parce que c'est le seul animal qui marche dans le merde en chantant"
"Because it's the only animal who walks through shit while singing"

Really. It's true. I won totally awesome brownie points for knowing that.

This is the last week before vacances. I'm pretty sure that everything is together, except for those tickets from Bremen to Berlin. I told Mark what was up and he didn't seem too concerned (which really got me cause I've been FREAKING OUT all week), so we'll just leave this in the hands of Someone Else, shall we? I'm all for that.
I'm gonna ask Andrew tomorrow if he'll print all my reservation papers and confirmation emails so that I don't feel bad using my famille's printer. Then we'll get everyone's finances squared off, and my American family will get those tickets and FedEx will send them to me here for free, and then next weekend when I'm in Berlin we're all just going to laugh at how worried I was about everything flowing together alright. Alright? yeah. Totally.

ps. I still really miss the word "creepy." But seriously. "it gives me goosebumps" takes way to long to say.

à plus!

04 April 2008

Je m'en fiche

2 April 2008; 6:15 pm: Michelle en fiches.
2 April 2008, 7:00 pm: Michelle talks during dinner. All the skies rejoiced, alleluia, amen.
3 April 2008, 7:25-10:30: Michelle actually asks questions during dinner. All the skies were impressed, whoopee doo dah hoorah.
3 April 2008, 10:37 pm: Michelle begins new blog and discovers that she can no longer type on her English keyboard.

French phrase of the week: “Je m’en fiche.”
Translation: “I don’t care.”

And I don’t. I just decided that yesterday. And I just want to show you guys how in my head the French keyboard is, by retyping this same section, but by keeping all the errors I keep making.
Qnd I don4t> I just decided thqt> And I just zqnt to shoz you guys hoz in ;y heqd the French keyboqrd ism by retyping this sq;e sectionm but by keeping qll the errors I keep ;qking>
Ok. Haha….seriously. Every time I go for the period I hit the shift key cause that’s how you do it on the French board. And every single time I have to go back and correct it. Every single time, I’m not even exaggerating, that I’ve typed a period so far, I’ve had to go back and change it from the arrow thing to the period.

Ariel made her own list of how you know when you’re studying a new language…I’d like to add “and you know you’re finally getting it.”

YOU KNOW YOU’RE STUDYING A NEW LANGUAGE AND ARE FINALLY GETTING IT WHEN:
1. You type on your own keyboard and it takes you longer to type in your maternal language than it even took you before you learned how to type.
2. When you’re on skype instant messaging your friends you can’t keep track of which language to use when and you end up just using whichever one someone happens to reply in. This means you start trying to talk to Anglophones in French…
3. TV is suddenly once again a leisure activity, even though you still may not understand everything
4. You try to make a joke and people actually laugh
5. The woman at the marché replies to you in French and doesn’t give you the “oh look at the adorable American” look
6. People stop giving you that same look
7. You feel really guilty for doing anything in English, including your blog
8. You understand and use French text slang
9. The first things that pop into your head at dinner are slang phrases but you don’t want to say them cause you’re not sure about their level of familiarity
10. You decide on your way home that you’re finally comfortable and don’t care any more about making mistakes in front of your host family
11. You keep on hitting the semi-colon when you want an ‘m’ and still think the 4 is the apostrophe.
12. You forget that some words don’t translate directly and use them all the time. Such as ‘gare,’ ‘marché,’ and ‘nul.’
13. Only your friends who speak franglais ever know what you’re saying.
14. You just walked to the kitchen in your pajamas to get water and helped yourself to a Breton super galette from the cabinet. You also know that the glass you’re drinking out of is labeled with a French water company but can’t figure out why your family has it…but only one of them. Like the coca cola glass. There is one of them. One? Why not, like, four?
15. You know how to order food.

Ok, so maybe not all of those were actually related to language, but hey, I just write what I feel, man. Today there was a manifestation during my 13h30 class. The university students were yelling about how they want to be paid for their internships. We had a good laugh about that. “I pay 6 euros a year for university level education! Pay me more because I’m so poor!” Haha
So yeah. Yesterday I was walking home from the bus stop (which in all reality is a four minute walk, I don’t know why I make it sound like I’m walking a long distance, I’m not at all) when it suddenly hit me that I was being dumb. It only took like 63 days to come up with, but I finally got fed up with myself being afraid of things. I think more information is needed.

I am not a stupid person. Dur. But really…I’m not. I like to think that I grasp things relatively quickly; so when I feel like I’m not, I kinda freak out and get really angry at myself. Something about a perfectionist complex, or whatever. Hm…So this entire week Jessica and I were just beating ourselves up for making silly mistakes in our homework. They’re really not all that bad. I guess I’d put it on par with writing a sentence that read “It depend of young people and that which they do” which actually sounds like a bunch of poo, and I’m trying to ignore that, because I just translated that sentence from one I wrote on a test…anyway…the sentence makes sense in the way that you can read it and you know what the person is trying to say, but when it comes to grammatical correctness we are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off.

This is good because we’re in Seuil and aren’t supposed to be perfect. This is bad because Jessica and I tend to feel like we should be…well, perfect. For a good part of the week Mark was just getting fed up with the two of us talking about how stupid we feel most of the time.
I mean, put yourself in this situation: You get to live in a country you’ve been dreaming about for years. You’ve been studying the language for at least 5 years, if not a little more. People in the states tell you that you’re good, and that you have a good accent, and you believe them. Then you get settled in and start trying to work your way around. The people you speak to in French try to reply to you in English, a lot of them use hand motions to illustrate what they mean. When you start getting devoirs (homework) and tests back, you realize that you’re making mistakes in conjugations you learned your first year of French. When it comes to reacting to things like jokes or assumptions or questions about how you feel about things, your brain gets stopped up like a shower with a wad of hair (yeah, nasty, I know) and you just sit there trying to put words to what you want to say. Finally you settle on something along the lines of: “Yes I love strawberries” instead of “Of course I love them! When I was little I used to pick them in my back yard in my mom’s garden!” When people nod and smile at your small response you hit yourself figuratively and in your head you formulate the sentence you should have said, this time without the pressure. You realize it was easy.

And that in and of itself is the key. Everything that used to be easy is difficult. And I really do mean everything.

But I’m done with letting it bother me. I make mistakes, I don’t care anymore. I give up, I give in, I can’t be perfect in France, ok, yeah, you got me, pow I’m dead. Not fair. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to finally get over myself. That’s how I’m putting it. I finally got over myself.
In almost exactly a week I’ll be leaving for Germany. How cool is that? The only problem is that I ordered some train tickets from the Bahn and for some reason they haven’t gotten to me yet. The Bahn is the German rail system, and they’re supposed to be really amazing. I tend to disagree, for a couple reasons. First, for some reason the $29 ticket that Sophia clicked on to purchase was charged as $139 or something crazy like that. Her receipt email even read as the higher price; we don’t really know what to do there. Other reason: they sent my tickets to the United States. Yup.

Actually that part was my fault, technically, since I was talking to Jessica and Sophia at the time and didn’t click on the “My delivery address is different from my billing address” button. So instead of going to France, the tickets are apparently on their way to Arvada. This would have been nearly ok if it weren’t for the fact that they were “mailed” on 16 march but have yet to actually get there. And since we’re leaving in a week, I’m starting to get really really antsy. They’ve been talking to me and are kinda helpful, I mean, as helpful as they can be without saying sure, yeah, we’ll just give you new tickets when you get to Bremen and want to get to Berlin. Haha…yeah, it’s kinda important that I get these.

I just don’t understand why it would take three weeks for three slips of paper in an envelope to get to Colorado when it takes a week for a letter to get to me from Tennessee…

What I miss most

I miss my car. I miss my car a ton.

It hit me the other day when I was heading home from an exhibition at the airport with Sophia and Jessica. It was about 20h00, not too late. I had texted my famille about three hours earlier saying that I didn’t think I was going to be home in time for dinner. I had been half hoping that Mark and Collin would still be in centre ville by the time we got back; but they had already gone home. So we were sitting on the bus, and it was pretty quiet. Up until that moment I had been relatively awake, but all of a sudden it hit me that I was feeling a little tired. Not just normal tired, which could be fixed with either sleep or caffeine, but the kind of tired you get when a teacher asks you to complete the same sort of exercise over and over and over again until your brain melts. Finished.

I’m tired of not having liberté of movement. The grand part of my closest friends lives in the suburbs, and if anyone wants to do anything, we have to plan things at least one if not two days in advance. Even then, there’s almost always someone who is suddenly “too tired” to do anything. I would just start staying in Rennes by myself, just hanging out, you know, but it’s impossible to do without paying for something.

I mean, if I want to sit down, my choices are: restaurant, café, library, university. If I just want to be inside, add “shopping” to that list. The French don’t really believe in going into the big bookstores, though, and just reading. And as I live in Bretagne, where the weather is either gray or heading that way, it’s almost always too cold to just go sit in a park. Although, I think I’m going to start just doing that. When I get ready in the morning, I have to get ready for the entire day, cause there’s just not enough time for me to go to school, take classes, go home, rest, go back to Rennes, mess around, and go home again. It takes about 30 to 40 minutes just for one trip back to St. Grégoire. The sad part is that I love my famille too much to really stay angry or unhappy about it for very long. I just miss being able to drive myself places. When Michel drove me to the gare to go to Lyon, it took 10ish minutes to get into centre ville. 10. Not 30. Imagine the freedom I could have if I just had a car. I could eat dinner in St. Grégoire and then drive back to Rennes to hang out with people…If I forgot something at home I could drive back here, get it, and be back in Rennes in just a little bit. I could drive myself to my friends’ houses, instead of either walking 20 minutes to get to Jessica’s or Sophia’s, or heading into centre ville to get to anyone else…oh the possibilities…

Which means I should just stop thinking about it. I mean, there’s not much I can do about it. Actually, there’s nothing I can do about it. We could just start taking taxis wherever we went, but oh mon dieu, would that add up or what? Oh yes. It would. It’s just so frustrating. It even ranks up there with not always being able to express how I’m feeling in French. I can understand pretty much 87% of any given conversation; it’s throwing in my two cents’ worth that gets difficult. My brain doesn’t react quickly enough to come up with a comment, much less a comment that sounds intelligent and well put-together. That’s what’s more frustrating than not having a car. I speak perfect English, perfect Franglais, and a little French. That’s what it is. I can form perfectly complex French sentences with my fellow Americans: it’s simple. There’s this thing people do when others talk, it’s called “assuming”. People assume they know what you’re going to say next. They’re almost always right. I can do it in English and in Franglais, and it’s the reason that my friends know what I’m talking about when we talk in French.

Also because we’ve all had similar education, so when we go to say something, we all tend to say it the same way (whereas talking with non-anglophones can be super hard sometimes, since they translate their speech patterns into their French). But sometimes I’ll be trying to say or explain something in French, and the French people around me will just give me this look. It’s sort of an “Uhhhh…huh” kind of look. Sure, one problem is that usually I’m trying to explain something very American and therefore completely and totally bizarre and silly, but seriously guys…It should not be this hard to talk about the American political system. Ok, no, actually, that’s hard to get even Americans to understand. Uh, another example. Ok, so, the reason I “lost” credit when I transferred from Greeley to Boulder. Whoa now, that’s apparently confusing. And when I said I had to plan my classes for next semester so I could register for them on the 2nd, haha, oh man, Michel was like, “I know she’s saying something worthwhile, I know it, it has to be worthwhile.” But no. I’m half used to getting the “oh listen to the adorable American trying to talk” look, and the other half of me hates it.

I hate it. The funny part is that I don’t think they realize the sorts of looks that are on their faces when they listen to us. I’m sure that my face is a mix of really intense concentration and detachment, since I sort of have to set myself half in and half out of the parole in order to concentrate.

I can’t just listen to someone talking and take in the general meaning of what they say, I have to focus so much as to listen to each word individually, toying around with it in my head, and then grabbing for the next one so that I can figure out how they go together. I’m sure it’s actually a fascinating process. The result is that I can gauge how much French work I did during the day according to how tired I am each night. My brain is doing so much focusing; everything I do takes so much more effort than it normally does. Sitting in class, talking to teachers, talking to friends (when it’s French time), listening to TV…nothing is really automatic anymore. Even when I listen to music and do my homework, I almost can’t do that anymore, cause my brain can’t figure out if it’s supposed to hear the English in the songs or complete the French that’s on the pages in front of me.

And as for forming complex sentences, whoa, watch out. I suck. Maybe I’m just a little bitter with myself because I made some dumb mistakes in homework this last week. I don’t know.
Virginie came in and talked to me for like 5 seconds today. She had an urgence sort of situation this week and had to move out of her apartment, and is moving to the South. In consequence, she stayed here a couple nights. Her brother Julien came today to drive her down to her mom’s house (who is Elisabeth’s sister). But anyway. She studied in Senegal a while ago, and also speaks a little English, and she just asked me if I was doing ok with so many French people everywhere (it was me and six adult French people at lunch, plus Elisa who is 2). We talked for a couple seconds about how hard it is. But I feel like she understood at least a little. At least they don’t think I’m an idiot when I don’t just jump right into the conversation. Of course, that’s the thing that tends to hurt the most. I can hear what they’re saying. I can understand the words, the flow of meaning, everything but how to respond within the time allotted for that subject.

By the time I construct a grammatically acceptable (not to mention correct) French sentence in my head, the thing I was going to comment about is long gone. How’s that for hilarious?