what can i say...there's a lot to talk about over here.

For some reason, today it hit me that that this isn’t just a vacation…I am not going to be back at Purdue this spring. I can’t hang out with Missy, doing nothing and everything. The boys aren’t just a short walk down the hill. I can’t get Chinese food and have a girls night with Nicole. I won’t see anyone from the dep’t. I can’t count on seeing my family every month or so when I go home.

IES talked to us about this, they say it’s the second step of cultural readjustment, when our “cultural bubble” breaks. That definitely happened to me today, on two occasions actually. The first was that Caro asked if I wanted to babysit for them tonight. I said yes, thinking it would be a good way to get to know the kids a bit more. As it got closer to the time I was supposed to babysit though, I kept getting more and more nervous. I don’t remember the last time I was nervous to babysit. Interacting with, and taking care of children is something I’ve always been confident in. but these kids don’t know English, and I can only understand Dimitri half the time (he speaks French the same way any three year old would speak English...very difficult to understand). Any confidence I was starting to get with my French was shot by the fact that I was intimidated by a 3 year old.

The other occasion was later tonight. It ended up that Caro was able to get their “favorite babysitter” (the thought of which made me miss Colin, Karen, and Neil, and I wish them all the best and I’m thinking of them tonight), so they offered to take me with them when they went out. We went to an opening for an art exhibition of a friend of theirs. On one hand, I was completely exciting and jazzed to be there. An exhibition opening, in the middle of Paris, right next to the St. Sulptice Cathedral, in walking distance from La Louvre. Then I got there. Yea, they had an excellent spread (champagne, lots of juices and water, brie, foie gras, bread, and bon bons), but that was about all I got.

The art really wasn’t that great. It wasn’t bad, not at all, but not my taste. Very pastoral, the subjects were all geese, cows, or roosters, and they were all done in a very realistic, early impressionistic style, which is generally not that moving when you’re looking at a horse’s butt (which the artist had decided to choose as the subject for one painting). Out of about 35 paintings, there was only one that I took at second look at.

But that was nothing to realizing how stinted my French is. I met some of Stan and Caro’s family, and a couple of their friends, and there is no doubt that I am not at their conversational level. At one point, I realized I was in a room full of adults who were speaking a language I’d studied for 6 years, but could barely follow, and only if I was trying very hard. A little discouraging, and the room was very overwhelming.

I ended up leaving early, and finding a bookshop around the corner, poking my head in, and buying a couple of books. I got a little French-English dictionary that will easily fit in my purse (the one I brought, while comprehensive, is rather too large to take with me everyday) and the second Harry Potter in French. Hopefully that will be a good daily reading exercise/relaxation for me.

Reading this all again, I realized that I sound depressed…I’m not, I think I just realized that I am going to have to work a lot over here to accomplish what I want. Before getting here, I think I’d permanently been thinking “work hard, get everything done, and then I can go to Paris”…not “work hard, get everything done, so I can work hard in Paris too”. I guess I had a reality check. Handed to my by art and children, two things I wouldn’t have expected it from.