Friday, 04 July 2008

• I Am Alive! And in Paris!!

  WARNING: This is an excessively long post to make up for my silence. It will take you a long time to read. You might not want to try to read it all in one go. It is indicative of my rambling personality and of little value to most of the world and certainly lacking possession of any literally merit whatsoever. Plus, it is really long. Really, really long. So, without further ado…

   

  Hello, everybody! Wow, it’s been a really long time. Well, not too long, but relatively. A week and a half, yes? It seems like longer than that, and shorter at the same time. It’s pretty weird how that happens, huh?

   

  So, where to begin? I left Kansas City at precisely 1:35 pm on Saturday, June 21^st. I spend the entire flight to Dallas reading Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris. I continued reading it during my layover and finished it on the flight to Paris.

   

  I don’t know if you’ve all read that book, but it has about three chapters devoted to the writer’s years in Paris, his awkward and terrible attempts at French, and the French people’s scorn and contempt of all foreigners, especially Americans, especially those who don’t speak French well.

   

  …and I was reading this book on my flight to Paris. Where I’m beginning my first real job. And I haven’t spoken French in months, thanks in part to my lazy streak and in part to those wanna-be professors on the College Board who plan APs at very inopportune times. (Yes, I will always find a way to blame my problems on the College Board. It will always be their fault. Always.)

   

  So, needless to say, I was more than a little nervous. It also didn’t help that I had a corpulent middle-aged Texan in the aisle seat next to my window seat. At first, when he sat down, I thought, “Oh, God, what am I getting into? He will probably fall asleep and snore and drool and have bad breath and turn the air conditioner up too high and I will freeze because I always freeze on planes but he will just make it worse and when I get to Paris I will have both residual goosebumps from being frozen but also pit stains from being so nervous Oh God did I pack deodorant in my carry-on to battle the pit stains?” Yes, all my thoughts are run-on sentences and tend to resemble James Joyce’s. Or perhaps The Sound and the Fury might be more accurate, since part of the time it’s narrated by a crazy person. Not that I would ever dare compare my inner thoughts to great literary works. It’s just that they’re very, well, confusing. And they digress a lot.

   

  Speaking of which…

   

  The Texan turned out to be pretty cool, even though we never exchanged one word. But he ordered Perrier to drink, and he was reading a book on marriage that was by an interracial couple, (MAJOR points in his favor) and ALSO, he complained that the plane was too cold and asked the stewardess if she could turn down the air or something. So this guy basically rocked. As a gesture of my goodwill towards him, I strategically timed my bathroom breaks to be at the same time as his (as soon as he got up to go the bathroom in the front of the plane, for example, I would race to the back of the plane, do my business very quickly, and then race back to my seat before he got back.) so that he wouldn’t have to get up every time I needed to go. I like to think that my gesture was appreciated.

   

  Anyway, so I got off the plane at 9:40 am on Sunday, June 22^nd (Paris time.) I met the person who was supposed to pick me up at the airport and immediately panicked because she was speaking French, of course, and I could barely understand her. During the drive to the apartment, I learned that she was Laotian and therefore had a Laotian accent to her French. I immediately felt better.

   

  Anyway, she dropped my off at the apartment where I’m staying (for all of you who want to know, as many of you so desperately do, it’s in the 3^rd arrondissement, also known as Le Marais. Picasso spent a lot of time there. So do gay people—more on that later.)

   

  So I arrived and immediately met Barbara, the woman in whose apartment I am currently living. She’s leaving (for BALI) on vacation soon, but for those of you who are raising your eyebrows right now and skeptically saying, “You’ll be living alone?” (And you’re right; if I live alone I’ll probably wind up living on bread, apples and other delicious fruits, rice, and the occasional dark chocolate bar with almonds. A most nutritious diet, of course.) Anyway, for those of you who are raising your eyebrows with skepticism, fear not! For there is Steve! Steve is one of Barbara’s friends from Boston who can pretty much work from anywhere as long as he has his computer and a decent Internet connection, so he’s chosen to stay in Paris for a few months. Anyway, he’s living here in the apartment as well; his wife is somewhere in Eastern Europe at the moment, but she will be joining us as soon as she finishes visiting all of her mafia contacts. (There are no mafia contacts; I just made that up.) So Steve is here to make sure that I don’t die of anti-scurvy, if that’s even possible.

   

  Although he is a vegetarian, so maybe we’ll both end up dying of anti-scurvy after all.

   

  ANYWAY…

   

  So I am working in an office that hires out teachers to teach business English to French businesspeople. Already I have had many, many, MANY lessons. There are essentially four types of lessons that we offer, and they are the following:

   

  INDIVIDUAL

  It’s pretty self-explanatory. The teacher (in this case, me) goes to the student’s office once a week for an hour and makes them do listening comprehension exercises, read articles, learn grammar, build vocabulary, etc. It’s basically just your normal English class. For an hour.

   

  GROUP

  The same as individual, only with more people.

   

  TELEPHONE

  Also the same as individual…only (wait for it; waaaait for it) on the telephone.

   

  INTENSIVE

  The student comes to our office for eight hours a day for an entire business week (five days) and learns English in two four-hour sessions a day, from 9 am to 1 pm, and then from 2 pm to 6 pm. That’s FORTY HOURS of ENGLISH CLASS in FIVE DAYS. It’s pretty much my idea of my own personal…well, you know. The opposite of heaven. And these people do it voluntarily. Usually just to “brush up” on their English before traveling somewhere where they’ll have to use it. Like Poland. (I taught an intensive last week where the woman was going to Poland to do audits. In English. Which is apparently the lingua franca of the business world; who knew?)

   

  Anyway, my job pretty much rocks. Even if coming up with enough material to keep a student interested for four hours is a little difficult.  

   

  The best part is, having just been a student myself, I get to revel in the fact that I am now the one to cause them pain, and not the other way around. The student has now become the teacher…ha! I was giving evaluations the other day (when we assess the student’s level to decide what kind of material/classes we should give them) and there’s a section on there that is pretty much like a normal oral language exam at Pembroke—we give them a topic, usually something about their job, and then they have two minutes to prepare and after that, they have to talk for three minutes.

   

  All those who were with me in Spanish class will say, “Oh, that’s pretty much normal.” All those who were with my in AP French will say, “Oh, that? In my language class, we had to talk about a series of six pictures plus two other questions for five minutes, and we only had a minute and a half to prepare.” Which is totally true. Although it sounds strangely like the dear old “Back in my day…” refrain.

   

  Moving on. I get such sadistic pleasure out of seeing these businessmen squirm. Because a lot of them work in insurance or actuaries or something and always get to inflict pain upon people.

   

  No, that’s a terrible, terrible lie. They’re all very sweet people (at least, the ones that I’ve had so far,) and I’m a horrible person for enjoying their anguish.

   

  It’s just that, well, I was there not so very long ago, and I survived and look! Now I am happy and content in the job of my dreams! But I worked hard and went through a lot more agony than they are right now in my language classes, let me tell you.

   

  But again, I digress. I’m supposed to be talking about my time in Paris, not exploring the possibly sadistic tendencies of my innermost psyche.

   

  Here are a few observations about Paris that I have made:

   

  1.      French keyboards are very different from American ones. This means that when I’m at the office, the Q and A are switched, as are the W and the Z. The punctuation is all shifted around and messed up, and the M is where the semicolon is supposed to be. (The semicolon, on the other hand, is somewhere around where the greater than and less than signs used to live.) Also, you have to press shift to type all of the numbers because all of the letters with accents are in the normal number-spots, as are a few random punctuation marks, such as the hyphen. Also, where the semicolon is supposed to be, there is some weird û mark.
  Anyway, now that I’m just getting used to the weird freakish French keyboards, I come home to type on MY computer and my fingers get all confused. So sorry if I accidentally end up typing Qilea instead of Ailea. It’s not my fault. It’s the College Board’s.

   

  2.      Which brings me to my next point: the French cannot pronounce my name correctly. Not even to save their lives. Not even to save someone else’s life. Not even to save a baby’s life. Not even to save baby Jesus’s life. Well, maybe for that. Seriously though, it is worse than in the US. Everybody, and when I say everybody I mean every single French person that I have met in Paris is physically unable to pronounce my name. They put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. They say Ay-lea instead of I-lea. They even add consonants that are not there in the first place, such as D. So far, I have known only one person here who can say my name the right way, and that was after five solid minutes of tutorial. Plus, he was Spanish to begin with and spoke five different languages (Spanish, Catalan, French, English, and Hebrew.) So he doesn’t really count. I repeat, the French cannot pronounce my name to save their lives.  (Added later: I have now met TWO people here who can pronounce my name. One is the person described above. The other is Indian—I don’t know what region he’s from, so let’s say for our purposes that his first language is Hindi. The important thing here is that it’s not French—lived in Atlanta for a month, and now speaks fluent French. And he only got it after several repetitions, corrections, and spelling lessons.)

  3.      I somehow have ended up in the Gayest Neighborhood in Paris. You think that this is just youthful exaggeration? That in my adolescent enthusiasm there is an innate tendency to exaggerate? You may be right. However, after attending a gay pride parade last weekend (which was pretty much awesome to watch but actually a little frightening if you stayed there for more than about twenty minutes) I found that all of the people there came to my neighborhood afterward to celebrate. Also, once I told that story to one of my friends at the office, she said, “Well, where do you live?” And so I told her. And she said, “Yeah, that’s kind of known as the gayest neighborhood in Paris.” Which, when you think about it, is kind of impressive because, well, it’s Paris. Anyway, this experience is quite good for me, I think. Eye-opening, in a way. And I feel very safe walking around at night because nobody here is interested in me. It is strangely liberating.

  4.      The French have terrible, terrible, terrible double standards when it comes to speaking a language. All of the people that I teach think that their English is terrible even if it’s pretty much perfect. However, my French, which is nowhere near as good as their English, they call excellent and almost perfect. When I protest that I have an accent, they tell me that it’s normal and not to worry about it, even though when I speak everybody can immediately tell that I am an Anglophone. It is unfair, I tell you. Unfair.

  5.      Which brings me, again, to my next point (are these actually in some kind of logical order? Wow!) French guys, much like American guys and American girls, love accents. Especially English ones. Especially when the speaker (in this case, me) speaks some semblance of good French, or at least continues to endeavor to speak French even when somebody talks to her in English, which is incredibly annoying since she came to Paris in part to improve her French and what’s the point if everybody talks to her in English? Hypothetically, of course. Did that make sense? I didn’t think so. To briefly sum up, then: the English accent is irresistible and cute.

  6.      Everybody smokes. Everybody drinks. When I tell people that I don’t smoke, they say “Really? Well, good for you! Smoking kills, you know. It’s really bad for you.” And then they proceed to light up and chain smoke for the rest of the evening. With drinking, they’re a little more skeptical, mostly because it’s just a part of the culture here. “Really? You never drink alcohol? What about champagne at a party? NO? What do you mean, it’s illegal in the United States? You’re in France now! It’s not illegal here! But your parents aren’t here either, so it shouldn’t matter, right? Well, if you insist…Waiter, she’ll have a Coke.” Or something to that effect.

  7.      You know that joke about how in Texas, there’s a church on every corner? Well here, there are cafés on every corner. Yes, cafés, plural. There are at least, at least two per block. And even that’s unusual. It could be a bar. It could be a Moroccan restaurant. It could be a little lunch place. It could be a bistro. Or it could be just a tiny restaurant with a bar in front and four tables in the back. You never know. But they are everywhere. And it rocks.

  8.      People walk very quickly. Enough said.

  9.      There are a lot of interracial couples and/or friendships. I’ve almost become desensitized—almost. However, when I described my ethnicity to one of my colleagues, she was all surprised, so maybe I’ve just been hanging out in liberal neighborhoods. (Since I live like, two blocks from the Centre Pompidou, which is something like the biggest modern art museum in the world or something, this assumption is not too far off the mark. Seriously, do a Google Image Search of the Centre Pompidou, and you’ll see what I mean. Even the building itself looks like a modern art sculpture.)

  10.  The metro is the greatest invention. Ever. For just fifty-five euro a month I can go wherever I want to in Paris as often as I want to from something like five am to one am. (If you do the math, that’s way less than I’d be spending on gas if I were to drive around Paris instead. Actually, I don’t know if that’s true. I’m going to assume that it is.) It’s amazing. It’s ridiculous. It is, again, the greatest invention ever.

  11.  People here stay up really, really late. I was talking to somebody on like, a Tuesday night and they were like, “I get off work at eleven; what will you be doing then?” So I said, “Probably about to go to sleep…” and they were all SURPRISED. I was like, “It’s a TUESDAY NIGHT. I’m sorry that I have work in the morning and I want to get eight hours of sleep!”

  12.  The grocery store is separate from the fruit and vegetable market. Which is separate from the bakery, which is separate from the butcher, which is separate from the poissonnerie (seafood market), which is separate from the fromagerie (cheese) which is separate from…well, you get the idea. To give you an example, here is my grocery list from a few days ago.

  a.       Fromage blanc (it’s a white cheese kind of like yogurt that I like to have for breakfast).

  b.      Apricot jam

  c.       Avocados

  d.      Baguette(s?)

  e.       Chocolate

  f.        Goat cheese

  Only seven items, right? Guess how many stores I had to go to in order to find all seven of those items? Three. Ohhh, yes. Luckily, I found the goat cheese at the grocery store/regular market place thing, so I didn’t have to specially go to a fromagerie to get it. But I went to the fruits and vegetables market (conveniently placed right next to the grocery store) to get the avocados and the bakery (also conveniently placed down the block from the fruits and vegetables market) to get the baguettes. In a way, it’s nice—you know that you’re getting good quality stuff because it’s the specialty of the places that you’re getting it.

   

   

  Well, that’s all for now. This is already excessively long. I promise that there won’t be such a delay between this and my next post. But, just to reiterate, I love Paris. I absolutely love it. I don’t want to leave.

   

  But I miss you all terribly, and the winds of home shall inevitably pull me westward.

   

  Oh, and happy Fourth of July!!!

   

  Love,

  Me!

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