I have two more days of teaching before I'm off for February breaks. This time I'm heading to Colchester, England to visit a good friend of mine (who is actually French...go figure). I'll make day trips into London and Cambridge and wherever else the wind takes me from her place, and am thoroughly looking forward to being back in an anglophone country. Not that I don't like France, but after 5 months, it'll be nice to have a little break...
Which leads me to a few comments on language...after five months here, I feel as if I should be well on my way to fluency - especially since I also have a degree in French. In reality, I live with several other native English speakers and if I don't force myself don't end up speaking a ton of French on a daily basis. At first, this really bothered me, as my sole goal in coming back to France was to improve my language skills. However, day by day, I'm realizing how much my language as actually improved, despite not being completely immersed in it. A few examples:
- The other day I walked into a store wearing a skirt from the GAP that I had worn several times before. As I walked through the security scanners, I set them off. Having just bought a pair of jeans at another store, I assumed they had forgotten to take off the security tags. Turns out there was a security tag still inside my skirt that had never gone off in any other store as along as I've had it, which has been at least eight or nine months. The woman working at the front counter came over and made me go in and out of the scanner several times, and it took the both of us several tries to narrow down what was causing the problem. Without thinking too much, the French was flying off my tongue as she literally got on her knees with scissors to cut the tag out of my skirt - it was awkward, but at least I held my own in the language department.
- Yesterday some punk kid stole my phone, my watch and 10 euros from my locker while I was at the pool (ok, ok, so I didn't lock it...but still!). I was pissed off, and sad to lose the watch, which was a graduation gift from the family I nannied for in Bellingham. After calming down, I was mostly just annoyed that I'd have to go sort out the phone thing (and that I'd have to spend at least another 30 euros to get a new one...). I'm past the point of panicking when I have to conduct business in French, but there's always still a bit of anxiety that something will come up that I don't understood and I'll be caught dumbfounded like a deer in the headlights. I went to the phone provider's shop today, explained my situation, asked some questions and walked away with my new phone in about 10 minutes - no problem! It wasn't by any means perfect, but it was more or less fluid and I walked out of the store feeling just a bit more French than when I entered.
So, moral of the story is that I had some pretty high expectations of myself and of what my situation would be like when I arrived here in France; expectations which made me feel like I wasn't making any progress in improving my French skills. In reality, when I stop thinking about it and just go for it, turns out I'm not doing all that badly. If it wasn't for the little everyday annoyances like the embaressment of having a store clerk's hand up my skirt and the inconvenience of having my phone stolen, I might never realize the progress I'm actually making - go figure.
I'll leave you all with a few amazing pictures of the Brittany coast, taken on a little day trip last weekend with one of the teacher's I work with and her husband. I thought I'd be hard pressed to find places that rivaled NW Washington in terms of natural beauty, but it seems that la Bretagne might be a solid competitor.
