Day 2 - Meeting the Rents/ Stugg City with Vocab

Today was super challenging for me.  After a delicious breakfast of un pain au chocolate, un crepe, et un kiwi we had a 2 hour informational meeting about this upcoming semester.  My vocabulary is not quite at the level where I can understand all of what is going on.  I’m going to have to figure out a lot on my own.  Learning French is such a challenge, but I love it.  Every second I have to be thinking in a new way.   This isn’t a class for 4 hours a week, this is my new home.   Now, I’m casually walking down the streets of Grenoble talking French with my classmates, having conversations with my host family and their grandchildren over dinner, and using French 24/7. 

Let’s see, what happened today.  Minou gave us a tour of Grenoble and in the middle of it a random bum came into our group and asked her what she was selling.  He also told a girl in our group that Minou was lying.  Oh, city life.  Definitely not in Fort Kent anymore.  After having lunch at Pain & Cie, we went back to our hotel and our host families came to pick us up.  Found out that I have a classmate staying in the same house as me.  Un nouveau frère!  His name is Elliot.  He’s super nice and more advanced at French than I am so helps me out with some of the vocab my host family used at dinner.  Speaking of my host family, they are ADORABLE.  They are an elderly couple in their 70s.  The wife, Nicole, teaches cooking classes which I hope to take this semester!  Drew, another guy in my program, is living with my family’s son, his wife, and their two children.  They are all super nice and very patient with our broken French. 

Tonight, we had the most delicious dinner.  French food is literally the best.  I can’t even describe it.   For their gift, I gave them a bag of ploy mix, maple syrup, and an Acadian cookbook.  Two French cultures emerging into one = yummy.  They have a big house with a garden in the back.  It is beautiful.  Get excited for pictures.  I have my own room and my own shower.  Score.

One last thing, here’s a quote I’d like to borrow from Bill Bryson’s Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe.

“I had an urge to roam.  I wanted to wander through Europe, to see movie posters for films that would never come to England, gaze wonderingly at billboards and shop notices full of exotic umlauts and cedillas and No Parking sign o’s, hear pop songs that could not by even the most charitable stretch of the imagination be a hit in any country but their own, encounter people whose lives would never again intersect with mine, be hopelessly unfamiliar with everything, from the workings of a phone box to the identity of foodstuff” (38).

Everything here is new.  There are things every second that I could write about.  It’s amazing to think about how this place has already started changing my life.  These people and lifestyles are so different and I would have never gotten the opportunity to come here if it wasn’t for Bowdoin’s help.  For that, I will forever be grateful.  Being “hopelessly unfamiliar with everything” and “encountering people whose lives will never again intersect with mine” is an experience like no other.  After going back and forth all year about whether to study in Cameroon or Grenoble, I am now certain I made the right choice.  European life is much more different from American life than I expected.  Contrary to what I thought, everything is “hopelessly unfamiliar.”  I’m excited to start classes and become comfortable with my new lifestyle.  It’ll be great to focus on Parisian French in the classroom.   Without that structure, I feel like I would get much less out of France linguistically.  It’s hard to pick up on French right now, because I have so many questions about the structure of the language that I need to discuss.  I am especially excited to have my own personal French tutor.  

Alright, I have limited time on the computer so I am going to go now and get ready for bed.  I unfortunately somehow lost a part of the power converter so am relying on Elliot’s to charge my computer.  Plus, Elliot and I are going for a run at 8 tomorrow morning so I should probably get some sleep.