Given that my “paper” is due tomorrow, this’ll probably be my last official update here. I’ve grown to like blogging, though. Maybe I’ll be back.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it’s been like to be in Bordeaux. “Well, duh,” some of you may say. But such a simple question really deserves some complex thought, as naive as it may sound to say. Being here, being away from America, being in Bordeaux, being in a foreign country, speaking a foreign language; all of these descriptors are slightly different and carry their own subtle intricacies of meaning.

This could get pretty difficult to parse out, though, so lets use some images. Figure 1: my class notes from a few days ago. (Bear with me here.)

Now, I’m a 4th year student at a liberal arts college who majors in the humanities. So rest assured that I could go on for days about the above image, tongue firmly in cheek, describing in full detail just how, exactly, the juxtaposition of French grammatical notes with a doodle of a man riding a dinosaur perfectly symbolizes my Abroad Experience. But we don’t have days, do we, and it’s hard to enunciate with one’s tongue in one’s cheek. So I’ll give you the abstract.

As silly as it seems: the juxtaposition of French grammatical notes with a doodle of a man riding a dinosaur does perfectly symbolize my Abroad Experience. (“Well, duh,” some of you may—ahh, who am I kidding.) Let me explain. Being in Bordeuax, studying French every day, has been a very strange experience for me, but also a totally natural one (the notes, and the doodle, respectively). Being out of my comfort zone is difficult, but it hasn’t radically changed my outlook on life in any way (the notes, and the doodle, respectively). Although I’ve had to struggle with new material and a strange way of doing things, I’m still more than ready to fall back into old habits (the notes, and etc).

Hm. Hopefully you’re not as lost as I am. Let’s try a different tack, shall we? Figures 2a, 2b, and 2c:

On the Saturdays of my childhood, I would wake up early, kick my parents out of bed, install myself in front of the TV, and gorge myself on cartoons and sugary cereals. I decided that I’d do the college-age version of this practice while in Bordeaux: every weekend, I woke up late and gorged myself on sugary cereals (parents and cartoons are so elementary school).

The Bordeaux version of my tradition has been, much like my grammar notes-doodle combo, a strange mixture of familiar and alien. Who ever heard of “Jumblies,” for example, which taste pretty much exactly like Nutella? On the other hand, that “Miel POPS” mascot looks strangely familiar…

Shoot. This isn’t really working either. The point here is that I’m not exactly sure what to make of my time in Bordeaux. I’ve gotten very accustomed to being in Bordeaux, but it still takes me a little while after I walk out the door every morning to re-realize, or remember, that the world is “in French”, if that makes any sense at all. I’ve gotten into routines here, but the “here” itself is still foreign.

Maybe that last sentence is getting at what I’m feeling, but I think that’s as close as I’m going to get, now. I’ve rambled on quite enough in this particular post, and I’m not convinced that rambling has been to good end. Oh well! It’s sure been fun trying.

I’ve seen more things. Dare I say it (and I do): there have been more things to experience.

1. Every Sunday in Bordeaux, you can go to services at any number of churches, like Saint Michel (pictured below), and afterward, you can hit up the dirty/enormous/fascinating flea market right outside Saint Michel (pictured below). It’s like two rituals for the price of one.

2. This door has a face. Creative graffiti artist, or sentient egress? You decide.

3. We went to Karl for lunch yesterday. This was the assiette de season. Yes, that is paté on the right. And yes, those are lots of other delicious meats and cheeses and fruits, everywhere else.

4. When you take really long walks, in really cold weather, you get rewarded with views of really beautiful sunsets.

5. The best puns in Bordeaux are bilingual. Or perhaps better to say “cross-lingual.”

I guess Bordeaux is pretty cool.

Yesterday, we started learning the subjunctive. Today, we learned the plus-que-parfait. I’m so very glad I took Latin in high school, or I would have had a LOT of trouble figuring out exactly what the plus-que-parfait is for. Now, thankfully, I’m not having trouble with it. (It’s the pluperfect.)

The subjunctive, on the other hand, is a mess. And the workbook we’ve got isn’t helping at all because it thinks the best way to learn a new tense is to ONLY PRACTICE WITH IRREGULAR VERBS. What.

Alexandra is ok. She’s no MaryJo - much more businesslike, less humerous, etc. Most notably, she didn’t really give herself any sort of introduction, or even really acknowledge that she was a different teacher, and she didn’t make (m)any efforts to make us feel comfortable with her. We more or less just walked through the textbook’s numbered exercises today in class. I think it’s gonna be a long week.

On the plus side, qualités are feminine and defauts are masculine. Vraiment. Who said French was a sexist language?

And two, as they say, to go.

In other news, all of Bordeaux is on sale right now. It’s a good thing my suitcase was already fit-to-burst on my way here, or I’d be shopping everywhichwhere right now. Seriously, things are 30-70% off. That’s a heck of a post-holiday-season liquidation, folks.

In other news, French class was fairly different today, and will be even more different tomorrow. It turns out that it’s standard Alliance Française operating procedure to switch a class’ teacher ever two or three weeks. So today was our last day with MaryJo (that’s Mary-Josephine) until next Tuesday, and we start with someone named Alexandra tomorrow, for one week. That not enough (totally needless) confusion for ya? Well, how about this additional shake-up: our class got cut in half! There were so many A2s - another four were to start this week, I think, which would have brought our number up to eighteenish. So today was our last day with MaryJo for a while, and our first day with nine people. Except that three people didn’t show up, so there were only six of us.

I was initially pretty worried about the small class size, for reasons one might expect: fewer students means more per-student exposure, etc etc. But as it turns out (as some of my readers, especially those with a professional background in teaching, nod to themselves sagely), more per-student exposure isn’t too bad. I was scared that my various failings as a French speaker (and, especially, listener) would be revealed in dramatic and embarrassing fashion, but I managed to get over myself and just let things be. I spoke in class more today than I have any day in the past two weeks, and I (usually) wasn’t afraid to just admit that I didn’t understand this or that. So, yay me! We’ll see how the chips fall with Alexandra starting tomorrow; hopefully I feel as comfortable with her as I do with MaryJo, who (I haven’t said yet) is a really excellent teacher. She’s encouraging and helpful without holding anyone’s hand or, alternatively, getting judgmental.

In other news, I made my first French pun today! I told Holly, “Your gloves are very elegants.” It was unintentional, of course, but it’s a start.

I think the only “usual” thing about the Bordeaux public transportation system is the fact that it does its very, very best to never be “usual.” I haven’t taken the tram enough to test my hypothesis fully, but I know for a fact that the bus system is—well, the technical term is “shitshow” (pardon my French). Yesterday, I hoped to get on the bus scheduled to arrive at 8:31, but it never came, and so I finally got on the 8:41, which arrived three minutes early, at 8:38, along with the 8:31 trailing right behind it. Today, I was lucky enough to get in some early-morning exercise as I quite literally sprinted to catch the same 8:31, this time making its jolly approach to the stop at the sprightly hour of 8:29.

I’m glad I made it to the bus, though, and not just because I would have been late to class, otherwise. I’m glad I made it so I could sit across from the Swiss man with his German/French dictionary. This man didn’t appear to be looking up a word or two, however. No, he seemed to be sitting there and reading the dictionary, which I found strange for a few reasons beyond the obvious “why is that man reading the dictionary, especially the half of it that only contains words he probably does not know and describes them in a language he probably does not understand” reason. I found his behavior especially strange because I would never read a foreign-language dictionary - at least, certainly not with my current level of “fluency.” I’m not here in Bordeaux, I’ve decided, “to get better at French,” or “to learn about France,” or anything like that. In fact, I’m not here for any one particular scholastic reason at all. I’m just here to be here, and learn what I can learn, in approximately that order. And when the things I’m learning are what it means to really go grocery shopping, or how nice a feeling it is to not have to think about clothes in the morning because I picked them out the night before, or that “[être] + entrain de + [infinitive]” is how you form the progressive tense, I think I’m learning the right things. Progressive, indeed.

Also, I went to a galette place called “Le Miam” for lunch today. That’s “The Yum” in English. So there’s that.

Today, I…

…got another ten glorious hours of sleep,

…did my French homework (one whole worksheet and two whole exercizes from the book! yikes!),

…did laundry,

…realized, with some degree of horror, that I think I forgot the charger for my electric razor back in the States (expect a picture of my face covered in shaving cream if I don’t find it soon),

…finished Season 3 of Mad Men,

…spilled soy sauce everywhere (but didn’t ruin Holly’s sleeve),

…wrote an email to some involved parties about the Springstreeters 30th Reunion, and

…took a really nice long walk along the quays and saw these things.

Thanks to Holly for the title. A great balance of pithiness (pith?) and truth (truthiness?). It doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the post, below, but it was too good not to share.

So, I’m one week in. That’s pretty wild. Time has, predictably, flown by, but I’m not going to start waxing philosophic or nothin’. Just making a note of things.

I’ve said this already, but A2 really is way better than B1. Beyond the difficulties I face whenever we do some listening comprehension - a process that involves listening to a recording of a “real conversation,” then getting asked questions about it, then asking, as a class, to hear the recording again, multiple times, and all the while doing my personal best to look like I’m following along calmly and competently - I really feel comfortable with the workload and the topics of discussion (grammatical and otherwise). As for my vocabulary and listening skills, they’ll improve significantly over the next three weeks. Or, heck, they won’t. But that’s OK too! As you can tell, now that things have worked themselves out a bit, I’m in a very untroubled place right now when it comes to my studies. Or maybe it’s just that I got eleven glorious hours of sleep last night. Thanks, Saturday!

I wrote this in class yesterday, from a prompt in the textbook we use. There was a paragraph with information, and then a few questions we had to answer. Dad, this is for you (get Mom to translate all the bits you don’t understand).

“Oui, j’ai connais bien Hergé et son héros Tintin! Quand j’étais un jeune garçon, mon péré a achéte les livres de Tintin pour moi. Je les aimais bien!
Hergé et Tintin aimaient voyager. Peut-être le Lotus bleu possède une place particulière dans l’oeuvre d’Hergé parce que la Chine est un lieu très exotique. Et aussi, Hergé a trouvé un bon ami en Tchang Tchong Jen, un jeune chinois, donc peut-être il aimait ecrire le Lotus bleu parce que c’est un livre des aventures de Tintin et Tchang.”

Some of you might notice that I make extensive use of the imperfect tense in the above paragraph. An even smaller portion of you (that’s you, Professor) might know that, based on my Williams College French language education to date, I “shouldn’t know” the imperfect tense. Well, guess again! The first version of the above material was written entirely using the passé composé, but when I showed it to my teacher, she set me straight - by teaching me l’imparfait! Which was awesome. And, thanks to my high school Latin background, I actually know what the difference is between the imperfect and the past (or, “perfect”) tenses! Hooray, and hooray for learning!

I cooked again last night, all by myself. Same basic dish as the first one I made - sauteed vegetables and rice, etc - but I did it basically all by myself this time. Which was very satisfying and gratifying for a whole slew of reasons. As I was cooking, and just atferwards, I had that wonderful feeling I’ve only heard about: the feeling of just wanting to cook more, to try out new things and new ingredients and all that stuff. Very exciting.

Going to see Harry Potter 7(a) this evening. Finally?

So, A2 is way better than B1. Worlds better. I’m learning grammatical structures that are more or less on par with what I’ve been learning at school - you know, indirect speech (today’s lesson) instead of the subjucntive tense (the lesson of a dark, morose, and thankfully bygone era) - and I can follow things a whole lot better. More importantly, the teacher is much more adept: she uses the board, and repeats things, and takes her time, and welcomes diversions (it’s all in French, so why not, right?). Most importantly, I’m enjoying myself much more in class. So there’s that.

The biggest challenge I think I’ll find in this class is the fact that all the students come from totally different backgrounds when it comes to our French language study. The differences we all have in our knowledge of French makes for interesting situations in class. Par example, some of us might have already reviewed the fact that the participe passé has to match the sujet when using a verb that uses être in the passé composé (Franglish, ahoy!). That’s actually a minor problem, however; the most dramatic difference I’ve found between myself and other members of the class is the relative size of our vocabularies. Although I get off easy coming from an English-speaking background when it comes to cognates, etc (I’d hate to be one of the three Japanese women in my class - no wonder they’ve always got their electronic dictionaries out on their desk), my French vocabulary still seems to be much smaller than some of the other members of my class. This is related to the problem I identified in an earlier post: my French grammar skills are much more refined than my French speaking skills. Some people in my class - the chatty Brazilian girl, the Dutch woman and the Ecuadorian woman who seem to know each other from outside of class, etc - definitely have no problem speaking out. In fact, sometimes it’s a bit difficult to follow what’s going on in class because there are so many smaller conversations going on. I especially find myself getting tripped up when I want to ask a question, or when my phrases get more complex and start including all those pesky “ce”s and “que”s. Ah well. I guess that’s why I’m here, right? I’ll talk to you in a month.

In other news, I’ve been exploring! Here.

This church - no, I didn’t write down the name, I’ll go back, don’t worry - is two blocks from Alliançe Francaise, in this small(ish) plaza that suddenly opens up out of a bunch of small winding streets. The rest of the city is so closed in around the church that the building actually shares a wall with some apartment buildings; that is, it doesn’t even take up a full city block. Which I think is cool. Also, I was in there at around 12:30pm, which was the perfect time for this incredible light to start streaming through the stain-glass windows. It was the kind of light that made me wish I had a professional camera on hand.

First the sublime, and now…

“Avocats” in French is either “avacados” or “lawyers.” So I guess Bordeaux is either oddly specific, very tongue-in-cheek, or both.

I’ve heard there’s this rule about threes.

This is the tiny little park in Gambetta, which is either the name of a bus stop, or a neighborhood, or a place, or a little bit of all three. This is where I get off the bus in the mornings before walking a few more minutes to Alliançe Francaise. You’d almost think it was warm here, huh?

Shoot. My first post that doesn’t come to an ending naturally. Oh well!

At the beginning of class this morning, we got back our compositions from yesterday. The subject matter is unsurprisingly strange. Remember, this is a language class. What you should really be looking at is the single word down at the bottom.

Now, I’m merely a student of the French language, but I’m pretty sure “bien” can be loosely translated as “Great work! You should feel confident about the level of French you’re taking for another 30 minutes or so, until the professor and textbook conspire to produce a lesson so heinous that it will totally shatter your hopes and dreams.”

Cue slide 2:

Turns out that my post yesterday, which included the unfortunate bit of clairvoyance “This week, the subjunctive” was, well, unfortunately clairvoyant. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, I learned the present subjunctive today. Well, let me rephrase: I was introduced - violently - to the subjunctive, while other members of my class were either simply reviewing that hateful tense, or learning a new usage for it. Oh, and those of you with both some knowledge of French and a discerning eye will notice that we only looked at irregular verbs. I mean, come on.

So, yes, I’ve decided to down-shift (thanks to Chris for the excellent teamwork) to a lower-level French class (A2, I think my professor said it would be). Thankfully, the books I need for that class are the same as the ones I bought for my B1 class. I’ll just be working through chapters 1, 2, and 3 instead of, you know, chapters 7, 8, and 9. That sounds about right.

My suitcase arrived yesterday. And everything was still in it! ‘ray.

I was planning on writing a post about my first couple days here, but that was yesterday, and I’ve already begun to lose the events of those primordial days to the mists of time. So, never mind that! Just know that I took some cool walks (if it’s ever really foggy and you’re in Bordeaux, go check out the housing projects in Meriadeck because it will be super creepy and awesome) and went shopping (I bought some delicious fresh bread and cheese, because that’s what you do in France, duh) and did other errands (TBC card for the tram, V-Cub account for the rent-a-bikes, etc). Also there was a lot of watching TV on the internet, and New Year’s Eve was nice and quiet.

ANYWAY, I had my first class at Alliance Française today. The professor’s name is Nelly, and besides me there are six Chinese people, one Canadian, one Norwegian, and two other Americans, a father/daughter pair (perhaps the girl is a freshman at Williams?! Didn’t have a chance to talk to her about that, and Facebook searching is, as usual, fruitless. I’ll do more research tomorrow). The six Chinese people all seem to be better speakers than me, and the Norwegian way moreso. The Canadian, with whom I spoke during the break, has been studying at AF for a month already, and although his accent is atrocious, his handle on the language itself seems strong. Can’t get a read on the Americans yet. Anyway, this is a long way of saying I’m not sure if I’m really “B1” material; especially by the end of the class, by which time we were supposed to write a few paragraphs about the current state of ecological technologies and initiatives in our country, and what we do to help, and what still needs to be done on a larger scale, I felt pretty in over my head. I’ll go again tomorrow to this class - nothing to lose, after all, and I think the books they had me buy today will work if I step down into an easier class - but I have a feeling I’ll be moving to something like A2. Truth be told, I thought classifying me as “intermediate” was a bit generous. I can read French well enough (go-go-gadget cognates!), but generating language myself, be it in speech or writing, is much more difficult.

The question, of course, is whether or not to step down and find something more comfortable (read: easier), or try and stick it out in a more difficult class and hope I rise to the challenge. A part of me is intrigued by the latter option…but another (and perhaps larger?) part of me just wants to be in Bordeaux for a month, and not have to dread the hours of 9am-12pm every day. I think the cons of staying in B1 - assuming that it is, in fact, too much for me, which it might not be! - outweigh the pros. In the best of all possible worlds, I find myself spurred on to greater and greater heights (this week, the subjunctive. February, the world!). On the other hand, I could very much ruin my Winter Study experience with an offensively large workload and depressingly difficult classes - not to mention the potential damage I could do to my interest in French.

As the French say: Je ne sais pas.

I think this is the moment in my blog when I mention that I biked home from class today, noticed that Bordeaux is especially flat and bike-friendly, and try to turn that into some over-arching symbol for my day, or for the month to come. A better writer than I would do magnificently with such potential literary gold. But I’m coming up empty. Maybe I should add that it was an upright bike (as opposed to a mountain bike - you know, the ones with baskets on the front, and you sit up straight on them, and they have three gears at most), and this was the first time I’d ever ridden such a bike, and that turning on one of those things is very different from what I’m used to. That seems like an even greater symbolic opportunity…but once again, I’m having trouble. Maybe I should let you, Dear Readers, come up with something for me. Or maybe I should just keep pedaling.

(See? Told you I wasn’t gonna do a good job with it.)