Becca Weinstein • France
A few weeks ago, I had a revelation.
I had just arrived at the Portugal airport to meet my cousin and begin our travels before I started school. My bags had (thankfully) arrived, and I began to search for a taxi to get to our hostel.
I looked around at the signs, expecting to be able to ignore the English words in favor of recognizable Portuguese ones. I mean, I was a recent speaker of French and had taken Spanish a few years back, so couldn’t I essentially speak Portuguese as well? However, I saw nothing familiar in this alien tongue.
Yet I found the taxi stand without a problem, ignoring my urge to act native and reading the English signs. Thus, I thought that the taxi driver would speak English as well, knowing that no one could understand his exotic language except for people who wouldn’t need a taxi from the airport. “English?” I asked when I got in the taxi. “No English,” he responded. I sighed.
But then he asked one magical question: “Français?” “Oui!” I replied. And then we arrived at my hostel and lived happily ever after.
Thus, my revelation was born.
Not everyone speaks English, but many people do speak multiple languages. By only knowing how to speak one language, I would be severely limited in my ability to travel the world. It is difficult living in France (and especially with a family), where I am not yet a fluent speaker, but I realized, during that fateful cab ride, that the struggle will be worth it.
Honestly, I have been too scared to create a blog post the past few weeks. As my French skill has increased exponentially, my talent in English has decreased at the same rate. A few weeks ago marks the first time I couldn’t remember the phrase “turning point” while speaking. Since then, it has only gotten… what was the word? Worse. Regardless, I will do my best to write good.
This week, I have moved in with a French family, started French classes, and made many new friends, some American and some international. When the dust begins to settle and I regain my native tongue, I will once again update The 195 regularly. Stay tuned.
Firstly, I apologize for my weeklong blog absence. I have been quite busy with homework (grammar quizzes and French essays), sleeping (5 hours per night means daytime naps), and, most importantly, eating.
I am dedicating this post to the food in France, whose government subsidizes wine and cheese because it deems them necessary for its people.
Cheese is everywhere. It’s cheap and there are endless varieties at the supermarket. But it would be remiss to neglect another of their scrumptious staples: bread. In fact, France has taken these two seemingly simple ingredients to create a baffling number of different dishes.
There are quiches and cheese tarts, cheese crepes and cheese bread (pain au fromage). Cheese sandwiches like the croque-monsieur, which has cheese inside the sandwich and on top, line counters at the boulangerie. Thin-crust pizzas and Paninis with melted cheese are go-to dinner dishes when one is not in the mood for kabab, with which there is even cheese-stuffed Indian naan. And, of course, there is always gourmet cheese atop a warm piece of baguette.
And I have not even begun to describe the various types of each of these dishes. To explain the different kinds of cheeses and breads alone would take more time than I can bear while sitting in my small sauna of a dorm room.
Leave it to France to show the world just how versatile cheese and bread can be. C’est incroyable!
I am a coffee drinker (and an occasional addict). That being said, it took me until today- two weeks after I landed in France- to realize that I have not seen one Starbucks in Montpellier.
In fact, there are very few vendors that revolve only around coffee. Most also serve Paninis, crepes, ice cream, and salads, or else they serve baguettes, quiches, croissants, and various other types of bread-based snacks. I am not sure there is significance to this cultural difference, but I do know that I love my daily espresso shot with sugar- and a quiche or croissant on the side.
I have yet to encounter a bad espresso, or one that does not taste like it was made from the hands of angles. An example is pictured above.
On my right sits a guy from Brazil, who has a tattoo of female sailors up one arm, and across the room there is a fashionable girl from Germany with a buzz cut. I even had my first acquaintance with a girl from the island of Cyprus! (It is located in the Mediterranean and has two official languages: Greek and Turkish. Fascinating.)
Though the Americans can boast having the most students from one country, there is a heap of international students in my French class. Some come from Spain or Venezuela, others from Norway or the Czech Republic.
You would think that with such an international melting pot, we would speak to each other in the language we are all currently learning: French. But for the first time with my own eyes, I can see that the U.S. has had a huge influence on the world. All of the students speak English—at least enough to learn names and nationalities. Many countries even require that students being learning it at age 6. Thus, it is our common language.
I had a Dutch friend tell me that since being here, his French has gotten a little better, but his English? Much better.
I initially thought that this was cheating, that I should be speaking only French from the moment I landed. But the truth is, I am lucky that English is my native tongue.
If we were speaking in French, I would not have learned that Norway’s culinary specialty is wale meat, that a popular career goal in Europe is to work for the EU, or about Germany’s school system (which keeps kids in school only until mid-afternoon, forcing most mothers to be housewives). At least, I would not have learned these things as easily. My French is not good enough yet.
The truth is, this has been a great transition period. It has only been two weeks, and I remind myself that I’ll be here for another 4 months, the majority of which will be spent speaking French with my host family. With them, I will not use English, even if they speak it fluently. I will be speaking French morning, noon and night.
These few weeks have been perfect- I can refine my French grammar during the day in class, but can still speak in my comfortable tongue to make friends. I am quickly picking up the local pronunciations, slang, and habits (here, they kiss each other on the cheek three times, not two) before I have to truly put them to use in a few more weeks, when the French come back from their national month-long summer vacation.
So, for now, I am enjoying the benefits of winning the language popularity contest, allowing me to make friends from around the world and survive the first few weeks of French immersion.
Untitled from Becca Weinstein on Vimeo.
C’est mon anniversaire! (It’s my birthday!) And there is no better place to be than here in Southern France. Before I begin to post about my class, new friends or metropolitan excursions, I will try to explain the festive ambiance of this sun-bathed city that sure knows how to celebrate life. In fact, it celebrates every Friday.
There is a festival downtown complete with wine tasting, food, artists, vendors, and musicians every week until the end of summer. For 4 Euros, you can try 3 different wines. And for a little bit more, you can sample all kinds of delicious foods from around the world, from Indian samosas to Japanese teriyaki chicken, Middle Eastern tabouli to fresh Mediterranean oysters.
As a coastal city almost on the border between France and Spain, Montpellier also has a large Spanish influence that is especially visible here. I ate seafood paella for dinner, watched in awe as Flamenco dancers performed, and salivated over numerous tapas dishes (promising myself I’d try them next week). And like any other country around the world, there was bound to be some influence from my home country. As I ate my scrumptious Spanish specialty, French singers belted out contemporary American music late into the night. There was even a very nice, slow rendition of Hey Ya! by Outkast.
Did I mention that this was every week?
Next are the street performers, which were among the most impressive I have seen. As my friends and I walked towards the tram stop away from the festival (at La Place de la Comédie), a man setting up for his performance caught my eye. We decided to sit in front of the crowd and stay for the show. Little did we know, fire was about to be swooping down in front of our faces, balanced atop the heads of performers, and dancing around them via hula hoops. I have included a video of this phenomenon.
This was where I sat as the clock hit midnight, signifying that I had finally entered into my third decade of life. Again, there was no better place to be. You’ll know where to find me every Friday night until Sept. 10.
It was my first night in Montpellier. I had been asleep for a mere 6 hours (after enduring 36 hours of alert travel), when a rowdy bunch of boys from the program woke me at 3 a.m. from my Benadryl-induced reverie. They had arrived home from their night on the town and were lively, to say the least.
To them, I am sure it was a good idea (at the time) to drunkenly run down my hallway banging on doors, asking everyone to come out and play. Needless to say, les hommes were speaking English. I could make out only one of the boy’s comments before I decided that I wanted to hear no more. “Man, she was crazy. I mean, biting and scratching!”
Now, that is not exactly what I had expected to wake me up my first night. If I had known that American college life would be uprooted and transported half way around the world to the capital of wine, cheese and perfume, I may have had second thoughts.
If I were back at Northwestern, it would be a different story. We expect that out of our American college students. But in France? C’est vrai?
Then I had a thought. If these boys were not from the U.S., but from another country speaking a different language, would I have been more open-minded of their boisterous behavior? Maybe I simply would not have understood them, and would have thought that they were talking about something more sophisticated than female animals. But maybe I would have given them the benefit of the doubt in favor of being culturally open-minded. In fact, I know I would have.
This leads me to my question—while I am in France, should I extend to the American students the same reservation of judgments and stereotypes that I will be doing for international ones? Is it fair of me to judge my fellow Americans who are exploring the country in a different way, seemingly through girls and alcohol?
It has occurred to me that accepting my own culture in France may be a harder task than being culturally curious about everyone else’s.
I have not arrived, yet I haven’t quite left, either. I am en route, trapped somewhere between my amiable adolescence and my foreign French future (fully fearful, frankly). I am on my way to Montpellier, where I will soon begin a three-week French class before my semester beings.
As I sit on the plane and listen to the automated flight directions in French, I can make out a few words here and there, but don’t feel the need to listen carefully and/or follow along. My interpersonal relationships do not yet depend on my ability to speak the language of love and romance. I still feel the comfort of my known world—I know the airplane script like I know how to order the usual at my favorite Evanston Chinese restaurant. To display this, I have absent-mindedly stowed away my overflowing backpack under the less-than-roomy space beneath the seat in front of me, but not before rifling through its contents to find my book. That book is The Hobbit, which seems fitting for my looming journey. Just like Bilbo Baggins, I am looking forward to unexpected adventures in foreign lands. Dragons included.
It is only a matter of time before I lose this behavioral ease. In France, I do not know whether it is acceptable to burp, scratch, say hello, or start conversations with strangers on the bus—though I do know I am expected to kiss them.
But I need not worry about that yet. Here in the solitude of limbo, sitting between home and potential adventures, I turn to someone who has done it all before, someone who left the comfort of his dwelling to be thrown into new, foreign, and dangerous circumstances. Take it away, Baggins.
In one episode from Boy Meets World, Cory Matthews is upset to be average. Who can blame him, really? He is one of the most ordinary characters I have seen on television. He has featureless brown hair, wears plain clothes and has an ordinary, loving family (admittedly with above-average humor).
I like to think I’m not like Cory, that I’ll be above average in life and will have life-changing adventures around the world. But the truth is, I am exactly like Cory, stuck in an average body from an average family. Daily, people confuse me with someone else, probably because I have the average height for a female (5 foot 4), average shoe size (8), and average hair color (right in the middle between blonde and brown—blonde when I have recently showered). Furthermore, my family is averagely Jewish. Considered conservative, we are right in the middle between Reform and Orthodox. We even manage to be average for average Jews— my father is a lawyer, my mother is a doctor, and my name is Becca Hannah Weinstein. In other words, I am a Jewish wet dream.
Sometimes I am scared that, to use Cory’s words, “I’m never going to be good at anything because I was raised to be average.” I am average, and I’ll be the first to admit it. I am not an award-winning poet or a straight-A pre-med student. But while Cory sees being average as a handicap, I’ve found that being average creates—paradoxically—an above-average opportunity: freedom. I can do anything with my life because a remarkable talent does not confine me. As an ordinary young adult, I am free to learn about the world around me. I can take off for six months to explore France, during which I plan to simultaneously explore my interests and myself. I may not be sure of my future or what makes me special, but for now, I will do my best to overcome my average encasing by broadening my mind, which, in the end, I hope will make me something I have never been: an above average human being.
