Avoiding French Boys: Speak English

(1 in a series of 3)

“Remember, the French only smile when they’re laughing or when they’re interested in someone, “ my French professor says to me every semester. 

For those of you who know my overwhelming tendency to smile, you may be concerned to learn that tidbit of information.  Not to worry Mom and Dad, we’ve got that under control.

At this point I have developed three strategies for avoiding French boys:

1) Speak English. 

Example: After we got off the train, we had to travel below the train tracks to get to our next destination.  Due to my inability to pack lightly, I found myself with two large suitcases, a backpack, and a purse, together equaling my bodyweight.  (This, for once, is not any sort of exaggeration.  My luggage really did weigh as much as I did.)  The exit signs all pointed to a sketchy, dark staircase but, being the smart women that we are, we knew that was not a good idea to go down those stairs.  Dangerous people could be lurking in all sorts of corners. 

So instead, we took the elevator.  The elevator was not full of any dangerous people but it had the same sketchy feeling as it slowly made its descent underground.  As I looked around the elevator, enjoying the sounds of the gears clicking and grinding against each other, I noticed the big red sign reminding the riders not to have more than five occupants.  Since I was currently crammed between Megan and Hannah and standing on one foot to make room for all of our luggage, the thought of five people made me laugh.

*click, click, click, pause

But then I remembered I was carrying around an extra person with me.  That would be fine.  Four is less than five.  I remained calm and reassured myself that the elevator always made those sounds.  Then I mentally calculated the weight of Megan’s bags.

*click, click

Not quite a whole person.  We’re still ok.

*click, pause

The three of us look at each other.  Now, I can’t read minds, but I’m about 99% sure that the three of us were thinking something along the lines of, “If this elevator breaks down, that’s it.  We’re about to be eaten by French rats.  Not Ratatouille.  He’s nice.  But those other ones will get us in no time.”

*click, click, click

The elevator keeps moving but at this point I realized that the three of us and our luggage would be more than the weight limit.  (Now, you Americans are probably thinking that we’re nothing but little girls and when they talk about people for occupancy reasons they mean full-grown men...  Well in France full-grown men are smaller than me.  I hope you feel ashamed of what the Obesity Epidemic in America has done to you.) 

*click, click, stop

*pause

(panic starts to set in)

*door opens

While we walk through some type of underground tunnel we all breathe a sigh of relief that we are done with that elevator.  And then we see another one... this time going up.  At this point, my arms are burning from dragging around my extra self all day but there was no chance the three of us were getting back on any elevator.  Instead, we start carrying our bags one by one to the landing, then finally to the road.

As we are in the process of doing this, a teenage French boy decides he will take a break from his cigarette and scampers down the flight of stairs towards us.  I thought he might want to help us but he also could have wanted to steal my luggage.  Either way I wouldn’t have to carry it up the stairs so I just went with it.  As he goes to grab it with one hand, I warn him in English that it’s heavy.

Maybe he didn’t speak English.  Or maybe he was trying to be macho.  Regardless, this frail teenager picks up my 50-pound bag with one arm, Hannah’s bag in the other, and stumbles to the top of the stairs, being sure that we noticed his impressive physical feat.  Personally, I was too concerned that his twig-like arms were going to snap into pieces to be impressed by his good deed but he pauses just long enough at the top of the stairs to give us a big old smile.

He runs down the stairs again to bring up our last bag and tries to say a few suave things to us in French.  We, of course, don’t know what he’s saying but out of habit we say something to him in English.  He looks at us confused for a moment then mutters a disappointed “Good night”  to us as we walk away.

(Note: The “Speak English” tactic will not always work.  Sometimes that only makes you more of a target.  If you think this might be the case, you better hope I post the other two defenses really soon!)

Bonjour!

I’ve been using “bonjour” since I was in middle school.  We would say it walking into class or passing the French teacher in the hallway.  I figured after seven years of French I had pretty much mastered that word.  It’s a simple greeting used as you pass someone, just like saying “hello”, right?

Turns out, I’m wrong. 

Ok so before you all judge me I just want a chance to defend myself. I really did know this before, I just had never really thought about it or needed to use French outside of the school day.  The literal translation would look like this:

Bon= good

Jour = day

Bon + jour = good day

Being the die-hard Muskies that we are, we thought we had the right to try out the Muskie Bonjour while in France.  Therefore, when we saw a group pass us on campus one night, we put on our best French accents and said, “Bonjour!” 

We were feeling pretty fluent in our new language until the passing group all responded, “Bonsoir!”

Of course.  Soir means “night”.  So at 8pm we probably should have not been greeting them “Good day”.  And although Bonsoir Group didn’t say anything else to us, I bet they were thinking that Americans couldn’t even tell the difference between day and night.

On a related note, today I saw a girl dragging around a huge suitcase.  I greeted her with a well-timed “Bonjour!” and she responded with “Hi!”  I was convinced she was an American just arriving in France so I started talking to her in English. 

She’s Italian and doesn’t even know English.  I guess it’s ok to use English greetings here, which is great to find out after spending all that time figuring out the French ones.

Showers

By some sort of miracle (and the help of a dozen people) the three of us safely arrived at our school.  I thought life would get easier being at the school but that is not the case.  Many of the upcoming posts will be about the simple things that I just can’t master.  I suppose I should also take a moment here to apologize to every American I know.  If the French people didn’t stereotype Americans as loud, lazy, and stupid before I got here, I’m pretty sure I’ve done everything possible to validate that stereotype.

Within minutes of getting into the dorm I wanted to take a shower.  Now, I realize that this was probably a little ambitious of me.  After all, there are showers in the U.S. I still can’t figure out.  Not showering after 30-some hours of travel makes people do dumb things though, so there I was, preparing for my first shower in France.

The shower in front of me was not like any shower I’d ever had to figure out before.  This was more like one of those sinks you see in public bathrooms with the one knob that has to be pushed down.  So you use all your strength to push it in and, just as you start rinsing your hands, the handle pops back up.  Now you take your sudsy hands and try to get the water to start again but due to the soap on your hands, your hands fly off the knob, causing you to punch the wall in front of you.  Naturally, you resort to using your forearms this time but the only way you can reach now is to prop your stomach against the edge of the wet sink.  You eventually get the suds all washed off your hands, only to find your stomach has absorbed all the water off the sink and your shirt has an unexplainable large wet spot for the next thirty minutes.

That’s pretty much what it’s like to shower in my room.  I push the button and start washing my hair.  Then, just as I start to enjoy the nice, warm shower, the water shuts off.  Shivering, I hit the button again and then the whole cycle repeats.  This happens over and over again until I decide that the shower has won that day’s battle.  The other option, of course, is to figure out how to shower using only one arm to wash myself and the other arm propped against the button.   Today I tried this technique.  It went something like this:

• Use left arm to wash right half of body while body weight is pushing on right elbow to get the knob to stay in.

• Switch.

• Switch back to get the forgotten right shoulder.

• Switch again to get the unreachable spot on back.

• Use both arms to get unreachable spot.

• Shower shuts off.

Also, my first shower resorted in not only my entire bathroom flooding but also puddles of water in my room.

Frankfurt Failure: Part 2

As we exited out of the hidden door we saw something scarier than Next Room: airport security.

Now, we knew a thing or two about airport security.  We had already passed through security three other times.  Once probably was enough, seeing as those men have quite the sense of humor.  My first time through I asked the man working if I should take off my sweatshirt and he responded that I probably should unless I wanted “to find out what the blue gloves were for”.  I, of course, took that sweatshirt off because I was not looking to find that out right then.

I wasn’t really looking to find out in the Frankfurt Airport either but that’s sure what I got. Maybe I got a little too confident in my security-passing abilities after the previous day’s three trips.  Or maybe the lack of sleep was starting to affect my thinking abilities.  Or maybe the machine malfunctioned. All I know is after I loaded the conveyor belt full of all my belongings, I stepped through a machine to find a German woman pull me behind a divider.  It was the sweatshirt!  In my rush, I had forgotten to take off my sweatshirt!  (Alright, you caught me.   Really it was the belt I forgot I was wearing.)

As I waited for my bags after bonding with the German woman, I saw them call Megan aside too.  A little part of me wanted for her to get a pat down in Germany as well, just so we could truly share our study abroad experience.  When I looked back, however, I saw her chugging the water out of her waterbottle.  We’d forgotten the “no liquids” rule and Megan’s water could not pass through security.  When I asked her why she didn’t just dump it out she said she had tried but was told it was “bad for the trash can”. 

I would have thought Megan’s experience was funny but I didn’t have a laugh at her expense and it’s not because I’m a good friend:  it’s because I knew that I was in for the same fate.

Surely enough, the hydration man called me over to his station.  He told me, “Get rid of it”.

So I did the only thing I could do: I chugged that water.   Now we could be done, right?

Wrong.

As my carry-on passed through, I saw it make the dreaded detour to the Hydrator.  Unless he just wanted help emptying some extra waterbottles he had around, I didn’t have any idea what he wanted this time.  Had I accidentally packed a sword?  Did I put my handgun in my bag instead of my blowdryer?  Were my new shoes actually made of some explosive material?

Not quite.  The Hydrator asked me if I had packed nails in my bag.  Nails?  What, did he think I was a professional roofer?  Did he think I was going on some big construction conference in my cheerleading sweatshirt and skinny jeans?  Sorry buddy, you may have forced me to chug a bottle of water last time but this time I’m going to win.  And I began to dig through my bag, worried that maybe I really had packed nails.

We did find the nails, if “nails” is the German word for “voltage converter”.  As I walked away from the Hydrator, carrying a random assortment of clothes, one shoe, and my nails in one arm and my overflowing bag in the other arm, I remembered that I hadn’t slept all night.

So there I was at 5am in a German airport, sitting on the floor with my belt still unbuckled, stuffing articles of clothing into my bag and I realized that I was about to begin the semester of a lifetime.

**Disclaimer: I really don’t have a problem with airport security.  I just thought describing my interactions with them would be fun for me to remember.

Getting there is half the battle

"Maybe my problem is just that I don't travel enough," I thought to myself as we waited in a German airport for our fourth, and final, flight.  Sure, packing has never been my best talent.  It had long ago joined cooking, tidying, and singing on my mental list, "Things I Wish I Could Do Well But Have No Chance of Ever Mastering".  As I desperately tried to squish my carry-on, using every pound of my body to allow the zipper to painfully pull the bag closed, I recalled the past 20 hours of my life.

My voyage to France was going flawlessly...until the first flight was cancelled.  Hannah, Megan, and I glued smiles on our faces as we worked out a new set of flights to get us to France.  Snowstorms in Philadelphia meant our Philadelphia-Frankfurt flight would not be taking place.  This was not a real problem, however, seeing as we would never make it to Philadelphia because the Pittsburgh-Philadelphia flight was cancelled as well.  After patiently waiting an extra four hours at the Pittsburgh airport, the journey to France took us through Raleigh, Charlotte, and now, Frankfurt.  Although we had made it this close, Frankfurt brought more than just language barriers for me and my (limited) french-speaking travel companions.

Going through customs seemed easy at first: show the official-looking German man my passport, tell him I'm studying in France, and go to the next room.  I watched Megan, our guinea pig, successfully pass into the next room and followed her lead.  What I found was not what I wanted to see: Next Room is a bad place.  Next Room is a dimly lit room full of conveyor belts and machines.  Today, however, the machines are not running and nobody is in Next Room to help.  Next Room has no exit.  So I did what seemed obvious at this point; I waited for Hannah.

Hannah was right behind me and I'm fairly certain this girl has never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit.  Hannah enters, looks around but also sees no exit.  Now I've known Hannah long enough to know that when she's stumped, the rest of us are in trouble.
"Typical.  So typical.  I make it all the way across the ocean to get stuck in a room," my brain tells me.
But then, another girl enters Next Room and she looks like she knows what she's doing.  She only pauses for a moment before she maneuvers around our paralyzed group and walks straight into a wall.  I tried to stop her.  I warned her that we couldn't find the exit but she ignored all my input.  Really, I didn't want it to have to come to this.  As I mentally quiz myself on my first-aid skills (after all, a lifeguard is never off-duty), I see the wall open right before her face would have bounced off the foggy glass door.

So we learned our first lesson: traveling to other countries means plenty of embarrassing moments.

And that's where this blog came from.  Instead of spending my time embellishing travels to make me sound cultured and sophisticated, I'm going to spend my time embellishing all of my embarrassing moments to make me sound as lost and clueless as I really am.

Look for Part 2 of the Frankfurt Failure to read what else can happen on a six-hour layover in a foreign country.