nawl

Three years ago I arrived in France alone with two huge suitcases of clothes, a couple years of university-level French under my belt, an address of an apartment in Sophia, and a student job.

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Last night there was a program on the tsunami on TV. There was a video segment on a (I'm guessing) French-Indonesian girl wearing too much makeup as she shopped for toys and then flew to what looked like Indonesia and cried about all the damage. Next on was a guy who appeared to be from a relief organization who discussed the structure of rebuilding operations. And then they trotted out a quebecois pop singer. She started singing some sappy song... and then to my horror, they started interspersing clips from the amateur videos of the tsunami hitting various regions in with shots of her (also) wearing too much makeup and looking sad as she sang on a stage among flashing lights. The whole thing hit my tasteless limit immediately. It's as if they were treating the disaster as emotionally on par with the Titanic movie.

Somehow I expect the american media is just as bad.

We changed the channel and watched Chinese TV instead. There was an awesome commercial with dancing shrimp jumping into a bag.

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Being a foreigner is tricky sometimes.

Take the bises, kissing people to greet them. It's the social equivalent of shaking hands. As far as I can tell, the rules go something like: guys kiss their families and other girls and shake hands with all others; girls kiss everyone. And no, it's not that much contact. You just put your cheek next to the other person's and make little kissing noises. And yet, because I didn't grow up with it, it feels oddly intimate.

When I was here before, half the time it felt like I ended up the only girl walking into a roomful of guys, and because you're supposed to greet everyone, I'd have to make the rounds being the only one to kiss everyone. A couple times I gave up and just started shaking hands like a guy, which of course brought laughter. There are a few other interesting issues, such as: what do you do when greeting a fellow foreigner? Kiss, hug, shake hands, or some combination of the above?

There's also the tu/vous issue. [As in, tu the informal "you", and vous the formal.] If you're young, you say tu to people your age, so that's fine. You also say vous to anybody you're relating to in a professional context, like a waiter or office person, so that's also fine. Normal people also say tu to family members. Now here comes the tricky situation: what happens when *I* go home to meet someone's family? I think I'm supposed to say vous until invited to say tu. On previous occasions I didn't feel secure enough remembering all the conjugations with vous, so I just pretended I didn't know any better.

Last weekend, Renaud's mom said vous to me until her sons said she should stop. That's fine. But the whole conversation left me horribly confused: was she to tutoie me because I was a kid, in which case I should still say vous, or because we shouldn't be formal, in which case I should say tu? In fact, to even ask the question, I would have had to choose one or the other, and I was afraid to guess, so I didn't. For the entire rest of the weekend I avoided using any second-person pronouns in her direction at all. I felt rather silly, like David Sedaris in "Me Talk Pretty One Day" where he pluralizes every noun in French because he's afraid of getting the gender wrong.

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There needs to be a fast way to express the difference between confusion over language issues and confusion over ideas. "I understood all the words that you said but I don't understand what you're trying to say" takes too long. Well, ok, "J'ai compris les mots mais pas le sens." isn't so long, but still slower than body language.

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There are also some extended issues relating to what Hixie terms "negotiating a communication protocol". Renaud talked to me about what he calls the "m'as-tu-vu" [didja see me?] phenomenon, using a language to show it off. Do I feel pretentious writing emails to friends whose written English is better than my French? Yes. Is it weird talking in English to people I'm used to speaking to in French? Yes. How about just discussing particular topics that are more familiar in one language or the other? What about when you discover that not only do people have different personalities across different languages, but that you're used to a particular configuration? I am either more confident or more aggressive in English, depending on who you talk to when. What happens to a friendship in a particular language when I let my ability slide?

Yes, I have tolerant (or easily amused) friends. I also show off sometimes.

It was interesting to see Gabriel again after two and a half years. When I left, I think we were on about the same ability level in French (hence 6 years in school + 6 months immersion == 2 years immersion from scratch). Now he is, not surprisingly, much better than I am, and comes out with these expressions I'd never think of. But he'll probably always write me in English.

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I leave for Budapest tomorrow morning.