Faites attention!

I have this really bad habit of not taking the time to fully read directions. I'm too impatient, and they're completely unnecessary at least half of the time anyway. In my SAT prep class in high school, they kept stressing the importance of taking the time to carefully read the instructions. They always went something like this: Read the following excerpt, and, afterward, answer the questions based on it. I wouldn't know what to do with a "following excerpt" except read it, and those handy question marks at the ends of those sentences always tip me off about the fact that they're looking for an answer. That, and the fact that they're followed by four statements with bubbles next to them.

Today, though, I was really kicking myself (among other things) for not paying a little closer attention.

I've been wanting to print some photos to mail out to people as postcards, but, until recently, had no idea where to find a digital photo kiosk. Stores like Target or Wal-Mart, all-in-one shopping centers, just don't exist here. I finally came across a little photo center in one of the larger metro stations, and, with my roommate, took the time today to pop my memory card in and choose a few pictures to print. The total came to 2,50 euros, but I noticed a little sign that said that the machine didn't take change. A bit of a bummer, since I have a ton I need to get rid of, but I shrugged and stuck my smallest bill, a ten, into the slot. The machine printed my pictures, thanked me for my patronage, and then returned to its main screen. No clinking of 7,50 worth of coins in the change slot.

"What the?" I dug around some more, my roommate pushed various buttons, but still nothing. Figuring I'd been cheated out of almost 8 bucks in change, I glanced around for a number to call. Then I saw the little sign again. "Attention: cette machine ne rend pas la monnaie."

I swore. I'll admit it. I also kicked the machine as hard as I could. Upon receiving the blow, its screen went black for a second and my roommate, afraid that I'd broken it, started to hurry me away from the scene of the crime. Turns out it was just the display re-setting.

The verb prendre means "to take." The verb rendre means "to give back." Only one letter's distinction, but it was the difference between me reading the sign as "This machine doesn't take change" and, as it was meant, "This machine doesn't give change." Suck.

So, if you get a post card from me, know that it was at great expense to my wallet, my pride, and a Parisian photomaton's well-being.

Always, always, with the bread.

I love bread. Always have. As a little kid, I would sneak slices of cheap white bread from the bag, roll it between my palms like play-doh, and pop the newly-formed bread balls into my mouth. As a teenager, I could be found on many a summer night rolling up to the WINCO checkout stand at 1 AM, my only purchases a Green Squall-flavored Powerade and a loaf of French bread. And now, in this wonderful, artisan bakery-filled land, hardly a day goes by without me leaving a boulangerie, demi-baguette tradi or brioche au chocolat in greedy hand.

Recently, I realized that my love of bread extends beyond a mere appreciation and into a full-blown fixation, as evidenced by the fact that it is, apparently, on my mind even when it's nowhere in sight. These stories illustrate just what I'm talking about.

As a high school freshman in Monsieur Raney's French class, we were taught our articles of clothing. A skirt is une jupe, a blouse is un chemisier, etc. Pretty straightforward stuff. And I felt pretty confident with the material when it came time for our in-class review before the chapter test. As was custom, Raney danced around the room, pointing at the things he wanted us to name, while we shouted "un chapeau! les bottes, les bottes!" He then came to me.

"Haley, qu'est-ce-qu'on porte à la piscine?" (What do you wear to the swimming pool?)
"Un maillot de pain," I reported proudly.
"Un maillot de quoi???"
"Un maillot de.....pain?" I repeated, losing confidence.

At this point Monsieur Raney descended into a case of adult giggles that lasted for a full two minutes.

"Maillot (gasp) de bain. Bain." He said, still trying to catch his breath. "Un maillot de bain is a swimming suit," he explained. "Un maillot de pain would be a suit of bread."

Once I realized my mistake, I was right there with M. Raney on this one. Something about the visual of some guy showing up to the pool with a bread Speedo, ready for a long day o' swimming, is just so darn funny.

And then, a few days ago, craving some good old-fashioned English, I bought a book of British poetry, "From Spenser to Arnold," and took it with me on our bus tour of the Loire Valley. There I was, lovin' on Coleridge, when I came across a phrase that I just couldn't decipher.

Languished in bread? I know it's been a while since I was in a lit class, but I just don't get where he's going with this image... He's...suffering in the stifling bread-and-water-alone conditions of lower-class life?

I had to stare at it for another few seconds before I realized that what it actually said was "languished in pain." You know, pain. That English word denoting discomfort or injury. The sad thing is that, if I hadn't figured out that my confusion was French-induced, I, in true English-major form, would have eventually forced some significance into the phrase "languished in bread."

Mmm mmm good.

Yesterday night we ate cod liver spread on bread as an appetizer and had grain-flavored yogurt for dessert. Sometimes France is so weird.

Listin'

5 things the French do better than Americans:

1) Cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. Everyone knows to expect good cheese in France, but I'm telling you, folks, the yogurt is to die for. It's creamy and less sugary but somehow sweeter and more delicious than what we have in the States, and they have flavors that I wouldn't have thought would be good, but I would have been wrong. Pineapple is my current favorite. And all of the above goes for ice cream, too--creamy and smooth and perfect. Even the vanilla is enough to make you renounce your American citizenship. I thought about simply saying that the French do dairy products better but, strangely enough, they fail when it comes to the original dairy product: milk. They don't refrigerate it. It's all what my roommate calls "hurricane milk"; super-pasteurized, room-temperature milk in a cardboard carton. Bleh.

2) Dress themselves. While I'm not overly fond of the whole black-on-black-on-black thing that the Parisians are rocking, they undeniably dress better than us. Everyone, from the tiniest children to the white-haired great-grandmas, looks très chic. No sweats, no highwaters, no ratty tennis shoes, no belly shirts, no so-tight-they're-love handle-inducing jeans. And everything is age appropriate. Come visit, I promise you won't see a 35-year old in velour pants that say "Juicy" across the butt. Can you guarantee me the same aux Etats-Unis?

3) Show their students some love. Being a student in the EU is probably the closest I'll ever come to being treated like royalty. Things like museum entrance fees and concert tickets are pretty deeply discounted for everyone ages 18-26, and if you, like me, have identification that lists you as an art history student, lots of things are free. I only had to pay 13 euros for a card that gets me into the Louvre any time I want, and it's good for a year. It makes the buck-fifty I get off a movie ticket back home look like crap.

4) Architecture. Okay, I'm not an expert, but I can't help but compare the buildings here, especially the churches, to the ones in the States and wonder why we ever decided that steel was superior to stone, and bullet-proof nonsense better than stained-glass. I mean, seriously:


5) Drugs. I can't speak for the illicit substance scene, but the French have their pharmacies down pat. You can't walk two blocks in the city without spotting the neon green plus sign that marks a drugstore. My roommate went to the doctor about a foot injury and came back with a scribbled-over note with a prescription for, as near as I could tell, jibberish. All she had to do was hand it to the lady at the counter of the pharmacy and about two seconds later she was paying just 5 euros for both the medications she needed. Easy. Maybe a little too easy.


5 things Americans do better than the French:

1) Their hair. Well, the women at least. The French women all (exaggeration) have gorgeous Andie MacDowell-esque hair that they don't bother to do anything with, throwing it back in a ponytail or wearing it down but frizzy. And those who don't have naturally beautiful hair seem to have accepted their fate and given in without a fight. Maybe it's superficial of Americans, but it seems like we all work with what we have and put a little (or a lot) of effort into making our hair look the best it can.

2) Salads and Mexican food. I like salads. Back home, I've had great experiences with restaurant salads. So I ordered one here, figuring that, if the French are just better cooks generally, a salad here would be an even better experience than ever. Wrong and wrong again. Really, I tried it twice. The general French salad is just lettuce. No tomatoes, no carrots, no cheese, no croutons. Nothing but lettuce and dressing. That was the first mistake. So the second time I made sure to order one that sounded a little heartier, with chicken, cheese, and haricots verts. This is what I got:

Yeah that's a cold poached-ish egg on top of cold green beans on top of un-dressed lettuce, with some fried chicken and Kraft singles thrown on there. Never again.

The bad Mexican food I can't really blame them for, given their distance from Mexico. And I would just make my own but even the ingredients are either absent or inferior. Tortillas are a rarity, canned foods, like beans, are both expensive and a bit of a cultural affront, and cheddar and mozarella are virtually impossible to find. Chipotle may be the first place I hit once I'm home.

3) Bathrooms. Loos. Les Toilettes. Firstly, public bathrooms in Paris are all but nonexistent. And I don't just mean ones in parks and on sidewalks--those are sketchy and I'd be hesitant to use them anyway. Many stores, restaurants, museums, and even malls are without restrooms. And water fountains. I guess the two go hand in hand. The city should figure it has a problem when it's got men relieving themselves in the corners of metro platforms. Secondly, the bathrooms in residences are completely backward. They generally have a tiny closet with a toilet in it, and then a room next to it that houses the shower and sink. I don't know about the French, but it's my inclination to wash my hands after just having peed, not after showering.

4) Keep their hands to themselves. Maybe this is just a big city thing, but leave it to the Paris metro to make you wish you weren't a young woman.

5) Customer service. Nearly everything about Paris can be described as bustling, and many small boutique employees, especially at grocery stores and bakeries, don't waste time smiling. They expect you to get in, choose what you want, and get out. Even people whose title is customer service or information are sometimes less than helpful. Last week, I showed up late to my art class at le Chateau de Versailles. My class had already started their tour so, rather than wander around the huge facility trying to find them, I figured I'd see what help the employees could offer. I started with a guard, who told me to check with the people at the ticket counter, who sent me to the information desk, who sent me to the first floor of an office building. There, I told the guard that "J'ai un cours de l'histoire de l'art avec Valerie Bajou mais je suis en retard et je ne peux pas la trouver." (I have an art history class with Valerie Bajou but I'm late and can't find her.) "Tu as un cours d'histoire de l'art," he responded. Rather than addressing my problem, the guy took the opportunity to address my sentence structure, which had one determinant too many for his liking. I just about popped him one.

Cela m'est égal.

Very quickly: the whole language barrier thing can be very frustrating, but it can also be exceptionally amusing, sometimes inappropriately so.

Our host family sometimes switches to English in order to ensure our understanding of important details. Normally, this is helpful. Sometimes, it is hilarious. But probably only because we're immature.

Mme asked Emily about her summer, and she explained that she had spent it in California, working for Pottery Barn, the large furniture chain. The brand unfamiliar to her, Mme tried repeating what she heard: "Potty barn? Potty barn?" And every time we burst into laughter, she tried harder, to the same end: "Potty barn? Potty barn?" It took us a full three minutes to stop laughing and help her with the correct pronunciation. Like I said, we're immature.

And then, tonight at dinner, Mme was telling us, in English, about some of their good friends, a couple whom they met years ago when M., a surgeon, performed an emergency operation on Anne, the wife. "Yes, it was awful. She got hurt very badly. She broke both legs and her spine in a car wash. Yes, it was a very bad car wash." We knew she meant car crash. And the story was really very sad. But it took all our self-control (which we ended up losing when M. finally corrected her) to keep straight faces. There's just something about the idea of someone being severely maimed by soapy water and soft, spinning brushes that makes it impossible to stop laughing.


Note: I have yet to have anyone laugh in my face for my mistakes with the language, but I now fully expect it. Karma, I think they call it.

Les Fêtes: A solid basis for cultural misunderstanding.

The French, in many ways, seem very similar to Americans--they're efficient, driven, and modern, and, walking among them every day, I could be among the people of any big city back home. I think this is why the little differences I find seem so much more interesting and pronounced, and amusing.

Parisians are completely obsessed with time. My host mother, in giving us any instructions, always includes an exact account of how long it will take to carry them out. "Meet me downstairs in 5 minutes, I will spend 10 minutes showing you how to use the washing machine." And then, "A load of laundry will take 1 hour and 27 minutes, or 1 hour and 37 minutes, depending on what materials you want to dry." A friend's host father informed him that the walk to the train station would take him 7 and a half or eight minutes, depending on the traffic at key cross streets. And the trains, oh my, the trains. They represent the worst of it. Paris is served by a fantastic metro system: at major stations, you can expect a train headed your direction every two minutes. And even where I am, well into the suburbs, I never wait for more than ten minutes. And les horaires, the electronic timetables, are constantly updating, letting you know exactly when to expect your ride. But the French, always conscious of the time that would be better spent eating any of their various delicious cheeses, sigh and tap their feet if their train rolls in even 30 seconds late. And (and this is one of those things that's hilarious to witness and just downright uncomfortable to be a part of) they will never pass up a train to wait for the next one, no matter how full it is. The average car can comfortably hold 8, maybe 10 standing passengers, and 12 would be pushing it. But I watched in horror last week as the door to my already-fifteen- passenger-deep car opened and 9 more people shoved their way in. There were no more handholds available, but we were packed in so tightly that it didn't matter, no one was going anywhere. All that to avoid waiting the two minutes for the next train.



The food. C'est delicieux. But there are a lot of rules attached to food here. Not so much rules, I guess, as social customs that, if not followed, peg you as an outsider. The French traditionally take at least three courses for their dinner: an entrée, le plat (main dish), and then le fromage, eaten alone or with bread. Emily and I managed to make it through the first two courses without much trouble, but proved ourselves thoroughly American during the last. M. Grandmaison set first a tub of butter, and then a large wheel of Coulommiers before us, and gestured for us to help ourselves. The expected procedure a mystery, Emily used her butter knife to slice off a tiny wedge of cheese, which she placed on her plate, and, unsure of what to do next, passed everything to me. I followed her lead and passed to M. Grandmaison, who had been watching us in silence. He grabbed a piece of bread, smothered it in butter, cut off a huge piece of Coulommiers and spread it on the slice, too, and then laughed at us while he ate. The French also do not snack on the go--walking while eating is a major faux pas (except in the Jewish district, where everybody seems to do it), and we've already received several disgusted stares from strangers for forgetting this one. Eating is supposed to be an enjoyable break, and any attempt to make it faster or more convenient really just doesn't fly here--most pâtisseries and boulangeries don't even have seats of any kind. I bought a tomato quiche at the bakery near the institute building, intending to sit at their little bar and eat it in the time between my classes. But when I bought it, they double wrapped it and put it in a bag, without any utensils and only one napkin. The message was clear: don't eat here. I did anyway, and ended up looking like a total neanderthal--tomato sauce squirted out with every bite and the one napkin was barely enough to keep one of my fingers, let alone my face, clean.

My favorite cultural-disconnects, however, have come in discussing holidays. Shortly after we arrived, the Grandmaisons left us alone one night in order to visit and eat dinner with their married son and his wife. The next night, they explained that they had celebrated a late Fête des Rois, a Christmas-time celebration of the gifts the wise men brought the Christ child. The key part of the holiday is the cake, wherein is baked a bean or a tiny figurine. Whoever finds the bean in their slice is then crowned Le Roi or La Reine and gets to choose their reine or roi, respectively. Mme finished telling us about the custom, and then asked if our families observed any Christmas traditions. I hesitated for a moment before trying to explain mine, hoping my French was good enough to pull it off.
"Oui, chaque Noël, mon père cache un cornichon sur l'arbre de Noël, et tous les enfants essaient le trouver, et la personne qui le trouve gagne un prix." (Each Christmas, my dad hides a pickle on the Christmas tree, and all the kids try to find it, and the person who finds it wins a prize.)
"Un cornichon???"
"Oui. Eh, attendez, non, pas un vrai cornichon...c'est un... ornement?"
I assured her again that the pickle was of the ornament, and not the Vlasic, variety, but I think her belief in my sanity dwindled a little bit anyway.

And, if the Grandmaisons had any faith in my mental health left, it was surely depleted after February 2nd. Le 2 février is La Chandeleur in France, also called Candlemas and Jour des Crèpes. It originally had religious ties to the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus (what doesn't in this Catholic, Catholic country), but is now just an excuse to light candles and win good luck through the flipping of crèpes. Or just to eat crèpes, if you're my host family.



Sitting and enjoying pancake's more delicious cousin, I started to explain to the Grandmaisons that February 2nd is a holiday in America, too. "Oh," said Mme, "what do you celebrate?" This is where I figured out that I had made a mistake in even mentioning it, but it was too late.
"Umm...il y a un animal, comme un rat, qui s'appele un... couchon de terre? (There's an animal, like a rat, that's called a... pig of the ground? Mme's eyebrow raised.) Et, le 2 fèvrier, nous le prenons de son...maison? et nous lui demandons s'il voit son ombre. (And on February 2nd, we take him out of his...house? and we ask him if he sees his shadow. The eyebrow got considerably higher.) Et s'il dit qu'il le voit, nous avons six semaines plus d'hiver, et si non, nous avons le printemps en avance. (And if he says that he sees it, we have six more weeks of winter, and if not, we have an early spring.)"
"...s'il dit qu'il voit son ombre??? Comment est-ce qu'il parle? (..if he says that he sees his shadow??? How does he talk?)"
"Oh, non, c'est pas vrai, c'est...Je ne sais pas exactement--il y a un homme, peut-être le maire, qui décide pour le...couchon de terre...Il fait semblant d'ecouter, et alors il nous dit ce que le...couchon...a dit... (No, he doesn't really talk, he...I don't know exactly--there's a man, maybe the mayor, who decides for the...pig of the ground...He pretends to listen to it, and then tells us what the...pig...said...)"
Mme, thoroughly confused, not that I can blame her, then looked over, helplessly, to Emily--"And you know zees story also?"
We couldn't help but laugh. I eventually brought my laptop down to the table and played, with French subtitles, the Punxsutawney groundhog festival scene from the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, and let it clean up the mess I'd made. Mme and M. both thoroughly enjoyed it, Mme even hitting the side of my arm in an "oh, stop" kind of laughter. At the end, M. said "Well, I've always said that the British are eccentric, and the French are a little crazy, but I don't know what to make of Americans." Maybe they'll have to invent a whole new phrase for us--aussi fou comme un couchon de terre*, as crazy as a ground-pig.

*Turns out they don't have groundhogs in France. They call them marmottes d'Amerique.

Bombardment!

Okay so I'm taking a French history class and a "Paris Walks" class while I'm here, and, as part of the coursework for each, we have to keep a log of the walks and places of historical significance that we visit. So I could either try keeping two physical journals and paste things like receipts and bits of leaves into them, or I could combine the two into one blog. Sooo now I have another blog. Now, in addition to this blog and the pictures I post on facebook, you should have the complete picture of what I'm up to here. Sorry, I know it's a lot of me, in a lot of different places. I'm posting a link to the new blog here--it's focused on specific sites that I'm required to visit, and I'm graded on it, so if you've always wished that I'd grow up and appreciate the finer things, this is where I have to at least fake it.

Paris Walks Blog