A little sapin ridin' on the metro...

It’s been a shamefully long time since my last instalment of French Fail. This has nothing to do with the fact that my ‘vie en France’ has become less embarrassing, but more likely due to an increase in my intake of ‘vin rouge’ and (therefore) napping. So it’s about time I got the blog up to speed again, helped along greatly by the fact that I have nothing to play with because both mobile phones and my camera are currently submerged in a bowl of rice in a desperate attempt to dry them out after the ‘Juice Explosion of 9^th December 2011’ hit my handbag hard.

Lille’s recently been invaded by a few of Southampton’s finest, who exploited the fact that French nightclubs haven’t quite cottoned on to the fact that any decorations that aren’t nailed down will be pilfered fairly casually by the average drunken English student. We learnt it’s definitely not acceptable to be carrying a pineapple around with you like a baby at 4am but it did make a cheeky fruit salad in the morning.

In more fruit and veg related issues, never ever jump around with a broccoli in your hand if you don’t have a firm grip. Harrie hasn’t quite got the hang of taking big enough bags to the supermarket yet, so broc was riding solo in Tom’s care for approximately 30 seconds before his excitement for the Lille Christmas Ferris wheel got too much, and one leap sent it flying not only into the face of the woman behind us in the queue, but then rebounding onto her nice expensive camera. Turns out this woman’s festive sense of humour had escaped her, especially when she was asked ‘err sorry but where is my broccoli, I have now lost it?’

As if the Ferris wheel wasn’t enough excitement for one week, my favourite SDF has started dressing up as Santa – it’s probably not acceptable to have asked to have a photo with him, but I went there. I went there.

That said, my general festive spirit was killed off by a nice bout of flu which meant I had to brave the French doctors, and immediately having walked through the door, had already made myself the most unpopular person in the waiting room.  After walking in and sitting down, like a normal person, I realised afterwards that you never enter a waiting room without greeting EVERYONE in there and waiting for their amen-like chorus of hello’s back before you sit down. Technically, as ever, it was me that made a fool out of myself, but this is definitely far too retro a custom to be OK in 2011.

Another area where the French are stuck in the 1930s is their choice of names. I will never ever get a French boyfriend if I can’t keep a straight face when they tell me their name. I know it’s not personally their fault, but there are only so many ‘Wesleys’ and ‘Cyrils’ I can take. Sort it out.

Aside from accidentally being fairly offensive here and there, the biggest embarrassing incident of the last week has been my and Harrie’s trip to buy a Christmas tree (or a ‘sapin’ en France). I don’t know if the issue is that the French aren’t big on the needle-dropping little things (considering this is a country that employs an entire workforce to hand-wash the pavements every day) but it was near-on impossible to find anywhere to buy one. In a final impulsive moment of desperation, we hopped on the metro for half an hour to go out to a trading estate, and never has a plan been so poorly thought through. Also, never have I had to run to catch a metro with a Christmas tree under my arm, and never have I missed said metro, but just caught everyone on it applauding as it moved away. And when the wrapping snapped and the little thing broke free, I vowed never to catch the metro with a ‘sapin’ in tow again; a decision probably supported by the bloke sat next to me with a branch in between his face and his newspaper.

All this considered, the moral of this blog can only be: keep a close eye on your fruit and veg, and you haven’t lived till you’ve taken a ‘sapin’ on the metro. Joyeux noël à tous!

Breakdancing, Brass Bands and Bins

The past couple of weeks have been spent generally trying to sort my life out French-style, which, in short, means a ridiculous amount of paperwork teamed with a ridiculous lack of efficiency. The high point of all this was when Harrie had to send off two photocopies of her passport to Orange in order to receive her €5 free credit on her Carrefour phone.  A week later, she’s still waiting with a phone that is far less useful than the biros and razors dear old Bic should really stick to making.

Technology has also let us down in the form of the Neufbox, the all-purpose (but actually does nothing at all) router . We’ve been dismally watching the orange ‘erreur’ light flash for three weeks now, and even made two wasted trips back to Carrefour where were firmly told to wait some more for technical checks, because in France it’s OK for internet to take three weeks. The only plus side of this was that it made it OK to go to McDo daily, which I’m now missing an unhealthy amount.

 Today I whipped out my domestic goddess and rummaged around in the wires for a bit, and ten minutes later we had English TV, internet and free phone calls to England. Cheers Carrefour. Domestic goddess didn’t survive for long though, as I immediately got too cocky and tried to stick up my picture board, and ended up super gluing not only two fingers together, but my shoe to the floor, and, thanks to some rogue splodges of super glue, my foot in my shoe. It was all painfully reminiscent of the time I tried to dry my shoes in the oven after a rainy day and ended up with a ruined oven and a very small pair of shoes.

There’s been none of this pathetic behaviour in class though, I’ve stepped up my game there after coming home after my first day with an invitation to visit a boy’s family in Morocco and ten Facebook friend requests. This would have actually been my second day, but the pupils casually went on strike the day before, and the day after that, the trains did the same thing. There’s nothing quite like a good strike in France; they’re averaging two a week since I’ve arrived.

In my classes this week we’ve been going through news articles and having vague debates about the topics, but I remember being in classes like mine and thinking it was all a massive doss. To try and get the students out of this mindset, I worked out you don’t need to shout or get angry, you just need to calmly tell the student who claims he ‘doesn’t need to know English because he can breakdance so well’ that unless he gets up and immediately demonstrates, he can do the work like everyone else (or go back to Tonga as I was thinking myself, but I don’t think Summer Heights High’s really hit France hard yet.)

Despite all this, I don’t really feel like an English teacher, and ‘don’t look like one either’ according to the bloke selling metro tickets, who has no idea when he isn’t part of a conversation.  I’ve actually spent an unusual amount of time in gay bars this week, and the other night, after the long struggle of wheeling Harrie’s granny shopping trolley back from Carrefour in the rain, we whipped out the 1 euro wine (lethal) and headed to La Plage, my favourite bar in Lille. There’s just something about the sand on the floor, the absinthe, Sambuca and red wine mixure that is a ‘flaming dragon’ and the barman who will take 5 minutes to make your drink because he wants to show you what he learnt at bartender school that is beyond funny. This only gets better when a brass band barges in, complete with trumpeters and a tuba bigger than me, and insists on playing ‘hot stuff’ over the DJ until he gives up completely. Vive la France.

There are plenty of other ridiculous occurrences that I could go into, but the final pathetic issue in ‘ma vie francaise’ is that we can’t find our own rubbish bins so we have to nip out under darkness and deposit our plethora of empty wine bottles and pasta sauce jars in the neighbours’ bins, which they are so tragically obsessive about that they employ someone to monitor them during the day. They probably have a point though, as like some kind of grubby trackie-clad Santa, it’s time once again for one of my frequent illegal bin trips followed by an unhealthy (but very French) amount of cheese for dinner. A bientôt. 

A less than casual first fortnight..

I have been in Lille nearly a fortnight now, preparing to start work as a teaching assistant in a lycée for my year abroad, and even I am shocked at the amount of ridiculously embarrassing incidents that have occurred so far. Yes, I love the food and yes, I’ve made friends but what I really want to document is how awkward it is trying to casually blend into another culture when you make as many daily faux-pas as I do.

On my first day here I thought I’d try and master the metro as it only has two lines here in Lille, but sadly even that was too much, and I instead marched purposefully down a flight of stairs into a multi storey car park. It took ten minutes of looking for my pretend car and acting casual before I resurfaced again, and gave up on the metro completely.

The second lesson I learnt in Lille was to beware of nightclub lurkers. Fairly obvious in any dingy club in England, but when you’ve just arrived in a foreign country, all you want is friends. Surprisingly enough, nightclub lurkers don’t want to be friends.  In fact, if you’re stupid enough to give your number to one who claims to be an ‘English student’, you might just end up getting voicemails demanding English lessons to top up his ‘studies’, which actually turn out to consist of listening to Eminem, Jay Z and Kanye West.  

However, despite common sense fails like this, there is something that genuinely confuses me about Lille, which is the tramps (and there are a fair few). One came up to me the other day, asking for money, wearing the exact Adidas jacket I tried on and sadly decided was way out of my price range.  To make this worse, I was then approached by one wearing chinos, with an iPod. I can’t get my head round this at all, but definitely won’t be paying for a matching jumper to complete his look. In fairness, my general bitterness towards suspicious tramps comes mainly from what happened to me yesterday morning, where someone actually did try to mug me, while I was just minding my own business on a bench in the train station. Out of nowhere, one by one, more and more gypsies came and sat far too close to me, until one grubby child was on my lap and another one was playing with my hair.  Thirty seconds later, I’m completely surrounded and the dad appears, asks to borrow a pen and the kids are trying to open my handbag.  I made my sudden bid for freedom and had to send a couple of sticky toddlers flying, but a quick anti-bac of the pen and the handbag and luckily I didn’t lose anything. But this proves that lurking extends from nightclubs to train stations and beyond, so beware all suspicious (and possibly well dressed) lurkers, particularly if they ask to borrow your pen of map. They’d really rather borrow your phone and your iPod. Permanently.

Along with these weird little incidents come repeated issues that mean I will never appear even vaguely French if I don’t sort it out. The first is that I get stuck in about half the doors I open, if I manage to open them at all, today’s highlight being that I couldn’t even open the right door to get into McDonalds, and then  noticed my landlord laughing at me from inside. The second issue is that I nearly get run over at least three times a day, so it will be a miracle if I even post another blog.

It will also be a miracle if I ever understand how to behave at a French house party. Never before have I been in a room where silence breaks out for ‘everyday I’m shufflin’ followed by a manic scuffle of shiny Cuban heels all shuffling backwards around the room. I stood motionless and confused in front of this tragic phenomenon, which led to me being asked, in all seriousness: ‘You do not shuffle?’

Cultural differences aside, obviously the biggest issue is the language barrier, where a good proportion of every conversation is lost in translation. The best moment this week was telling my French friends that a cat had adopted me and slept on the sofa and that I thought it was very cute. After a few weird looks and some awkward laughs I decided to look up what I’d said in a dictionary. Sadly, I actually announced that I thought the cat was ‘REALLY fit’.

In reality, adapting to another culture is always going to cause embarrassing incidents. Aside from the fact that I’m gradually becoming numb to social humiliation, I generally take solace in the fact that I can go back to my cheeky city pad and watch Gossip Girl with a cup of tea after a long hard day of pretending to be French.