Pau at last

My head hurts from hearing and speaking French. Right now it takes so much effort to concentrate on everything people say to me, process it, then create some sort of halfway comprehensible response. It's so easy to glaze over and listen to the pretty sound of the language without actually processing what it means.

I took a language placement exam at the University of Pau today (just to determine what language level I should be in), and I realized it's been about 3 years since I took a French grammar class. I can barely remember how to conjugate certain verbs, when to use what pronouns, and how to write a business letter. I hope I don't get placed in too low a level and suffer consequential boredom for the next three months.

Where my last blog left off:

We left Paris on Tuesday and took a bus ride to Versailles, but the palace was closed due to workers' strikes--quite common in France. The study abroad group wrote a complaint letter, but I chose not to sign it. Striking is how the people get their government to cooperate, and as a foreigner, I feel I have no place in that argument. I can always come back to Versailles. We were, however, able to tour the sprawling gardens. I spent an hour riding a rental bike, and it turned out to be my favorite part of the entire Paris tour. I miss being on my rusty old cruiser back in Denver.

The bus ride to Pau took two days (with a few stops in between to see the Château de Chaumont and Château Azay-le-Rideau). We stopped in Tours overnight on Tuesday and woke up to heavy rain on Wednesday, which made lugging our suitcases to the bus a lot of fun (!!!). Every day since I left the U.S. has been exhausting; the tours start at 9:00 every morning, we spend the whole day doing something, and I go to bed at 11:00 at night. And now that we're finally in Pau, things are getting a lot more interesting...

My host family is great. The parents are professers at the University of Pau, and they have two sons, one who is 27 and a lawyer in Paris, the other who lives at home and is 23. They also have a 20-year-old niece who should be coming back from vacation tomorrow. They live in a 3-story house with yellow walls and palm trees in the front yard. It's about a 15-minute walk to the University, and the kids have their own private kitchen and bathroom on the third floor, where my room is as well. I seem to be staying in a boy's outgrown room; the ABC wallpaper and petite wood furniture is very cute though. I can understand most of what they say, but my efforts to formulate intelligent responses are usually thwarted by huge brain farts that prevent what I want to say from translating into French. Ça va.

Today was the first day of school. And man, do I hate the first day of school. Really just an orientation day, but this was also my first full day in Pau. Charles (the host brother) walked me to the meeting place for my study abroad group, but at the end of the day, I got a little lost trying to walk home by myself. Not only was the map slightly incorrect, but the streets in France are much more nightmarish than in the U.S., I don't care where you live. According to my host mom, the concept of "blocks" doesn't really exist here. The streets are long and short, winding and truncated, and one street becomes another quite frequently. There is really no direct route to school; I have to take a bunch of neighborhood streets.

I'm also not sure how I'm going to handle this whole leftover-baguette-for-breakfast thing. I'm used to a plate of eggs and vegetables in the morning, not a piece of bread and butter. By lunch at 12:30, I was starving. I went to the grocery store after school to pick up some yogurt and fruit, but because all the brands are different here, it took me quite a while to figure out if the thing in my hand was really what I wanted. The homestay contract only guarantees me breakfast daily and 2 dinners per week, so I need other stuff to eat when I'm not with the family.

Let's talk about meal time in France.

I seem to get a different story from everyone, but my experience has been that the French are not at all big on breakfast. If they do eat in the morning, it's a leftover baguette from dinner the night before with butter and jam. Here at my homestay they gave me instant coffee to drink, but even in cafés the coffee is more like an espresso--tiny.

Meal times are set in stone, too. Lunch is only from 12-2 p.m., and dinner is 7:30-10:00. You no snacky-snacky long time! The combination of food at the University cafeteria was strange today: your choice of chicken cordon bleu, plain pasta, carrots, and/or eggs. No sauce (except ketchup), and sides consisted of cucumber salad or tabboule. The French seem to love tabboule--I've seen it everywhere.

Dinner is usually three courses, with an appetizer, entrée and dessert. My homestay mom is a great cook but isn't big on meat, so I think we'll be eating a lot of cheese, bread and vegetables. She's also diabetic. I mentioned my (real? how should I put that?) mom can't eat gluten, thinking that would be a shock to people whose main staple is flour, but it wasn't a surprise. I guess more and more French people are starting to discover gluten intolerance.

My host family doesn't eat slowly, contrary to the myth I had heard about marathon-length French meals, and the portion sizes aren't really smaller. I'm still usually the last one done :( But because the food appears on your plate in increments instead of all at once, I don't feel like I have to hurry up at the end of the meal when everyone else has a clean plate and I'm still munching on half my potatoes au gratin.

I watched TV with the family and had them explain to me in slower French what was going on--like a mini lesson in the politics and current events of the country. Channel-flipping seems uncommon in this house. We watched a solid 30 minutes of a show where the people have a conversational debate about something and wait for the chef in the background to prepare their meal. Then they eat the meal and debate some more.

I told my family if this were an American show, the chef would have to finish the meal by the end of the debate or face having her head chopped off. No pun intended.