Submitted by Kayla Dickens on the 2014 fall semester study abroad program in Paris, France…
Thus far the biggest long-term problem I have encountered is figuring out how to get around the city. Regardless of how many maps I look at, I never seem to end up where I need to be (except in the case of going to class, but I have a routine to get there so that I can’t get lost). Just like the intentional adventures outside the classroom, it is usually rather entertaining and informative to simply wander around, find tourist attractions, parks or monuments by accident, learn something, and then continue the process until you run into a metro station that can take you home. The only time that doesn’t work is when you really need to be somewhere at a particular time, but we don’t have too many obligations outside class so it generally has not been a problem. At home, I would be one hundred percent irritated if I didn’t know where I was (I give directions by telling people which cardinal directions to face and I know that when I wake up in my bed at home that I’m facing East North East—clearly I like to know where I am on the map), but here I have come to learn that it’s not such a bad thing.
In fact, getting lost has led to discovering two of my favorite places (and people) in Paris. There is a little shop up near Sacré-Coeur called “Le Monde en Couleurs” (The World in Colors) which we found while running from a rainstorm, where the store owner was very cooperative with my French and in fact encouraging, which I very much appreciated. And the other favorite person is at a little crêperie called “le Fournil” (“the Bakery,” again a place we found by just wandering), where the man preparing my food (presumably the owner again) began speaking English to me, then remembered that I had ordered in French, so changed his mind and repeated himself in French. Around here you really have to appreciate any native French speaker who also knows English actually choosing to speak French with you. Most of the time, they assume you don’t know enough or maybe they feel like you’re butchering the language with your accent, but they typically are pretty persistent in speaking English with you. If you really push the French and just refuse to speak English, it occasionally works and they cave back to French (I managed to accomplish that when ordering at Ladurée on the Champs-Elysées), but usually they just keep on with the English. It still blows my mind that everyone around here automatically speaks English to me most of the time. I just don’t know what gives away the fact that I don’t actually belong here before I even open my mouth and I cannot figure it out. My goal by the end of the semester is not to look like I’m not a tourist, but to at least look like I’m a tourist from another part of France (or maybe I could settle for from Europe, at least), rather than looking like an American foreigner.
As for my French, on a short aside, I feel as though I have made very significant progress thus far. I asked for a language exchange partner from a school here called EpiTech and we have met twice. The first time was a mild disaster because he was already basically fluent in English, but then when we spoke French I was not doing so well, especially in regards to comprehension. While we’re supposed to meet once a week we had to go ten days between meetings due to scheduling, but we met again yesterday and I understood all of the French (even though I had to ask him to repeat himself a few times, I still understood in the end), and only had one time when I really couldn’t express what I wanted to say and had to move on to the next topic. Small feat, but important confidence booster.