Le weekend est arrivé (et pas un moment trop bientôt)

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Beaus parleurs et belles parleuses,

I have completed my first week at l'Alliance Française, in a 12-week intensive course by which I hope to increase my foreign-language blathering potential to nearly 65% of my English-language blathering proficiency. Those of you who know me must realize, with some degree of sympathy if not outright pity, how difficult it is for me to run my mouth off as usual with a vocabulary limited to words that when strung together form grammatically incorrect and badly pronounced phrases that can only help me find toilets and request pastries. One might better describe what I do here as "limping" or "stumbling" my mouth off. (OK, granted: It would be disingenuous of me to maintain that asking for bathrooms and food is all that I'm capable of; my need for a local bank account and renter's insurance has given me a large French vocabulary for matters of finance and fidelity. So go ahead, ask me anything you want to know en français about toilet locations, pastries, and the French Building Federation's Actuarial Reference Index.)

I just returned home and proceeded to diddle away a good number of minutes trying to come up with a less-than-pathetic joke along the lines of how "my first week just flew by and boy are my arms tired," but in fact it didn't fly by at all, and my whole being is tired.

Knowing my own limitations regarding pre-noon punctuality, I had registered for the afternoon program at l'Alliance, but my first week had to be the mornings, which has meant getting caffeined and croissanted bright and early and wedged into a Metro car at rush hour to arrive on time. I figured just the novelty of it all (and knowing its impermanence) would make it an easy routine, but I hadn't expected the all-body-cell exhaustion that comes from an immersion in a foreign language. Until it starts to flow naturally and one's comprehension improves, the energy it takes to be constantly, hastily calculating the meaning of everything said or heard makes it imaginable that mental exhaustion could actually be fatal. By only the third morning I stumbled towards the Metro a half-hour late for class and struggled to decide between a) having a much-needed café crème and b) not having one and therefore not needing to remember how to ask for one.

I was back on schedule Wednesday, but today it seems incredible that I've only been in school for one week. The first day seems to me to have been months ago now, and I've found myself stumbling during mundane interactions in shops and on the street.

Yesterday, for example, I went to the bank to deposit my rent into the landlord's account. I made a mistake filling out the deposit slip and after tearing it up I looked around for a wastebasket and found none, but on the front of all the lobby's little podia with the slips and pen stands were flap-doored slots. One of these seemed like the logical place to toss one's garbage, but when I pushed open the flap there really wasn't much more than a quarter-inch space to stuff my little scraps, and in trying I lost my hold on most of them, and they fell to the floor in a little confetti-like flurry. Juggling a knapsack and my checkbook and reading glasses and the corrected deposit slip made it hard to pick up my mess, and after transferring all that I was carrying to one hand I tried to pick up the torn paper scraps from the lobby floor with the other, but they were more than one handful; each time I would gather a respectable amount of scraps off the floor, I dropped half those I was already holding.

I decided to clean up in stages, and started to feed the tidbits of paper into the little slot, and then I noticed the little symbol of an envelope next to the slot's flap and realized that this was not a garbage receptacle at all, but a place to leave deposits if you didn't need a teller's services, and just as I realized that this was the reason the slot was so narrow, I looked up and saw that the line for the teller had grown and I was now being stared at through the hostilely squinting eyes of seven or eight bank customers.

Now this would be embarrassing enough if I did this at a bank branch in San Francisco, but my mortification was amplified by the fact that I suddenly lost all memory of every French word I had ever learned in my life. It wasn't just that I couldn't make a self-deprecating joke, or say "Oh la, ceci n'est pas la poubelle! Voyez-vous où on met des poubelles là?" -- I couldn't say anything. And when I realized that, I then realized I couldn't remember how to speak English, either. And then I had to stand in line with all these glaring people wondering what French words they were thinking of me and gather my thoughts (and recover my French) so I could explain to the teller that I wanted to deposit money into an account that was not my own.

I did not physically black out, but an hour later in the safety of my living room I looked in my wallet to find a receipt that confirmed that I indeed had conducted the business at hand. I honestly have no recollection of the transaction.

So now it's le weekend and Sunday is market day on Blvd. Richard Lenoir near Place de la Bastille. I went there last week but realized that despite the abundance and variety of all the merchants' appealing offerings, I would need considerably better French and a lesson in market banter, etiquette, and procedure to be able to shop there. Fortuitously, much of this week's course at l'Alliance used marketing savoir-faire as the basis for the language lessons being taught.

I have learned how one negotiates for foodstuffs from Paris's dizzying array of épiceries, boulangeries, poissoneries, pâtisseries, fromageries, charcuteries, confiseries, and boucheries; the communication of desired ripeness and readiness for consumption; to specify the target date of its edibility; and the terminology of its packaging, its measurements, and its level of piquance. I have learned (although forgotten) the difference between the batters for savory and sweet crèpes in Brittany and how because crèpes here use the same batter for both, one would be a fool to eat a crèpe in Paris and believe he had really eaten a crèpe; and I've learned the myriad ways that French merchants can tell you they don't have exactly what you want but might recommend something you don't know you want but that you actually want more than what you asked for.

I've yet to put this potentially powerful knowledge to work, and I am still not sure I am up to it after my first day's outing to the marché des fruits et légumes near my apartment -- a traumatizing experience that nearly resulted in my death from dehydration due to over-perspiring and a prolonged case of Bare Larder Syndrome after making a hasty retreat from the store with but three items (in the wrong quantity) from my substantially longer list of intended purchases.

It was one of the many greengrocers in Paris where one doesn't choose one's own produce, but rather tells the proprietor his or her choices (wielding the above-mentioned powers of description) and leaves the actual selection to the professional. Personally, I found negotiating for my insurance policy easier, and since that fateful day I have been stopping for vegetables in the safe haven of the grocer who lets his customers make their own decidedly unprofessional selections and bring them to the register for payment.

Perhaps when next you hear from me I will have earned the right to report to you on the joys of not just eating in France, not just cooking in France, but actually describing a food item and taking home a very close approximation of what I believed I was requesting. I make no promises, but I believe after a bit of rest, I might be able summon up enough French to say, "Comme Dieu est mon témoin, je n'aurai plus jamais le ventre creux!"

Mais je la considérerai demain. (Après tout, demain est un autre jour...)

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