I have a very small inkling of how immigrants to our country feel now, and I don’t like it at all. I had two years of high school French that were, quite obviously, a waste of my time and Mrs. Meles’. (She hated me, btw, but that is a story for another day.) Today is a day for catching up on the past week which was, fairly uneventful, and also terrifying.
I have been able to remember the above sentence- and I start almost every conversation with it in hopes that the person at the other end will respond that they speak perfect English and I will be understood. This has not happened. I remember now why I said before that I would not come back to France.
It was not the people. They are very helpful- more on that later.
It was not the landscape, which is beautiful.
It was not the food, which is wonderful.
It is the overwhelming feeling of helplessness that I feel when I cannot make myself understood. It is a terrifying feeling and I am going to be spending the next 3 months with it and maybe I should’ve thought this through, lol. (For those who know me personally, I would appreciate you keeping your collective thoughts about ‘control issues’ to yourselves, okay? Thanks.)
We flew into Paris on August 2nd and spent the night at an airport hotel with a shuttle. We got a bit of a false sense of security there, I think, because the hotel staff were all multilingual. The next morning we returned to the airport to take a bus to Bourges and then a cab from Bourges to Chezal-Benoit, a tiny town in the Loire Valley. Finding the bus pickup spot was a nightmare as the signage was rare and there were very few airport employees to ask for assistance. The ones that we found spoken little English and were trying hard to explain where we should go but much was lost in translation. Once we found the correct way we could laugh about “OH, that’s what he meant!” and “Yes, we DO turn right at the bottom of the escalator- just not THAT escalator!”
Once on the bus, we discovered that the driver spoke no English, and whereas he was more than willing to pull other passengers that might, they were very few with limited proficiency. It was a very interesting trip! We did finally arrive, don’t worry, and the town is adorable with a church that is 900 years old and miles of sunflower fields. The house is very much a French country home.
We have a patisserie (sweets) and boulangerie (breads) across the street and a grocery at the end of the block. The grocer is rediscovering the English he had not used in a decade and we are learning to communicate with the town residents. They are kind and are looking after us. When we rode the community bus into the larger town and back yesterday, one of the women on the bus tried to physically prevent us from getting off the bus at what she thought was the wrong stop.
The French are often brusque, but they are by nature, helpful. A gentleman at a restaurant in Paris almost chased us down to help us order sandwiches. The bus driver made everyone on the bus wait while he tried to make sure we had a plan for how we were going to get to our end destination. The clerk in one of the stores tried valiantly to explain to us that we were missing a great deal- but we could not understand until after we left. I have spent most of my life putting the Marquis de Lafayette on a massive pedestal, but now I think maybe he was just being French, lol!
The funniest moment happened when we attended a tour of the 900-year-old church in town. We were the first to arrive and the tour guide spoke to us immediately. I used the title sentence which translates to I am sorry. I do not speak French. To which she replied “Hmm”, nodded, and proceeded to deliver most of the tour to me directly. There were about a dozen people besides our family there. ALL of whom, presumably, spoke French. But she continued to lock eyes with me and speak. AND ASK QUESTIONS! It became really funny and I had a very hard time suppressing giggles. Thank goodness I was wearing a mask! The next day as we walked down to the stables, we saw her again and she struck up a conversation about the moped accident that happened outside her home.
She is not the only person that has completely ignored my declaration that I could not speak their language. It has been an eye-opener and I know I have done it to people who speak Spanish in the US, expecting that they might be able to pick up a few words.
Je suis désolé.
