Ma Vie in France

After several days of a sore throat and increasingly creaky voice, I decided today it was time to go to the doctor. This wasn’t the first time I’ve been sick in France, or the first time I’ve gone to the doctor. But in coming home from the pharmacy, I got to thinking about how illness, something which seems straightforward, is actually viewed differently from country to country. First thing’s first-I’ve found that many of the actual illnesses I’ve had since I’ve been in France are different from what I’ve had in the US recently. In other words, the germs here are different. I’ve had infections and illnesses in the past several years that I’ve either never had before, or haven’t experienced since I was a child. This also leads to the next difficulty: vocabulary. I quickly learned that it’s not as simple as only translating whatever symptom or illness I had in English into French. This was evident right away when I tried to understand the difference between a ‘rhume’ and ‘enrhum...

French news has been full of politically incorrect topics lately, from antisemitism from the comic Dieudonné, to rumors of teaching ‘gender theory’ in French primary schools. But it’s been a while since I’ve seen something in France that truly shocked me. Well last week, I found something. It was while I was walking through the subway station and read the following advertisement in passing : I stopped in front of the poster for a minute, contemplating the term extra-conjugale and then said to myself ‘no, that can’t be right. This can’t be an advertisement for an extra-marital dating site’. Alas, it is. I checked with a French person to make sure I hadn’t misinterpreted the poster. No, and what’s more, these kind of sites are apparently à la mode right now, people are ‘owning up to’ infidelity. Before discussing this further, I’d like to delve deeper into the text of the poster itself. It uses the cheeky imagery of a bitten apple, and the text at the top...

Having just returned from a trip to Paris, I’ve been thinking a lot about the French capital city.  One of the first things I realized when reflecting on Paris is how many memories I have of the city, particularly from my very first trip there. So to take this in a more narrative direction, I’m going to write in this post about my very first encounter with Paris and my memories that touch all five senses. My first trip to Paris was in January 2001 for about 10 days with a small group of students from my high school and our two high school French teachers. At the time I only had 1 semester of French under my belt, and although I could string together sentences, I still hadn’t yet learned past tense, and didn’t know the word for chicken. I remember feelings, like waking up exhausted in the morning from jetlag to get our early morning hotel breakfast (croissants, bread and hot chocolate). The sun comes up later in France, and so it was still dark in the morning until abou...

I’ve just returned from a quick trip to the US where I attended a family wedding. It’s difficult to explain, but I always find these trips unsettling. I really enjoy returning to the US and seeing family and friends. But often the comfort, the ease of communicating in English with people who know me reminds me of how hard I have to work to establish these things in France. And at the end of the day, French culture is not my culture, although I love learning about it and trying to integrate the best I can. My 'outsider' status in French culture has also made me aware of my 'insider' status in relation to American culture.  To give a concrete example: during my trip to the US I was on a road trip and a classic rock station was playing on the radio. About halfway through the trip, I realized that I had recognized every single song that had played, and could probably name most of them.  Before moving to France, I never would have stopped to question my rec...