Continental Drift

France is another country. They do things differently there.

It’s due to my spending two weeks in France last month that it’s taken me this long to get through to another blog post. I went with a school group composed of 25 Year 10s, two teachers, a priest, and the principal. It was excellent. Not only did I get to see the Continent, my only responsibility was drifting around amiably behind the panicked teachers and wait to be shunted into our next hotel room or restaurant.

Seeing how much of France there is to deal with, I’m going to write about it in sections. Firstly, because I know how much people enjoy laughing at my misfortunes, a certified Leslie M. Harper list. People who know me well will be aware of the vast number of mistakes, foolish incidents, uncomfortable moments and certified all-out cockups I’m involved with on a regular basis. Especially those who read my recipes (forthcoming: a special French edition of Leslie’s Recipes). Well, strangely enough, it turns out that sticking me into a completely foreign environment in which I can barely speak the language and have virtually no idea about the culture in no way reduces the number of like incidents I get stuck in.

 

Top 5 Stupid Mistakes I Made Overseas

1. Confusing the word ‘boat’ (bateau) with the word ‘building’ (bâtiment). This wouldn’t be bad if I’d only done it the once. You know, a couple of ‘This is a lovely boat … wait, I mean building.’ (NB: When I use italics throughout the post it means I was speaking in French. I’m aware that the larger part of my readership – about two out of the three – have no knowledge of French. Only slightly less than my knowledge of French). Anyway, that wouldn’t have been too bad. What is quite bad is if you do it every day for the entire week you spend with your host family. Especially if you spend each day specifically looking at old buildings.

This led to such interesting incidents as:

 

FRENCH PERSON (FP): What did you think of the chateau, Leslie?

L: That's the oldest boat I’ve ever seen.

OR, after a day with the school group:

FP: What did you go and see today, Leslie?

L: Some boats. Some of them were built by Romans.

(my grasp of descriptive French is very limited)

OR, on the last day of my stay, when we were visiting a chateau:

FP: You can see almost all the grounds of Chateau Villandry from the top of this tower, Leslie.

L: Yes, I really like the … what’s the word for battlements? Les crenellations. It’s strange that ‘battlements’ sounds so much like the word for ‘boat’ when really it should sound more like the word … for … building …

(Pause)

L: Oh f***.

2. Locking myself out of my first hotel room after five minutes inside.

This was the scenario: I was sharing a room with a Year 10 called Rexa. We’d just unpacked when Rexa wanted to go out and see some other Year 10s she knew in a neighbouring room. I decided to go too.

‘Wait a sec,’ I told her as she was just about to go out. ‘I’ll bring the kettle with us.’

I have no idea why I thought I’d need the kettle. I'm just trying to tell the story as it was.

Anyway, we left, closed the door behind us, and found Rexa’s friends. After a brief chat we wandered out and tried to open our door again. It was tricky. This was mainly because we had no key. Rexa looked at me accusingly. ‘You mean you remembered the kettle, but no key?’

‘You didn’t even remember the kettle!’ I pointed out.

So we had to go downstairs and get a new key. The receptionist’s expression varied from mild annoyance when she saw us running downstairs without shoes on (we’d left them in the room), mild confusion when we tried to get our message across without knowing the word for ‘key’, extreme annoyance when she understood what we were saying and had to give us a new one, and extreme confusion when she saw I was carrying a kettle.

We had thought that that was the end to it. Unfortunately, the story spread around the entire school group, and it was a running joke for the rest of the trip.

3. Running loudly into a table in the middle of the hall in my host family’s house. In the middle of the night. Two nights in a row.

4. Deciding it would be a really fantastic idea to climb l’Arc de Triomphe on a really cold, wet, windy day, selectively forgetting my inconvenient acrophobia. It was not a fantastic idea. It was freaking terrifying.

5. Forgetting which language I was supposed to be talking in. The following exchange occurred in Dubai Airport.

CASHIER (C): Hello!

LESLIE (L): Bonjour!

C: What did you want to buy?

L: Oh, just this.

(I hand over the cushion cover I’m buying)

C: How did you want to pay?

L: Peux-je payer avec carte?

C: Yes, we take credit cards. Sign here, please.

L: Hang on, do you have a pen I can borrow?

C: Yes.

(I sign, get my receipt, and depart)

C: Have a nice day.

L: Et vous aussi. Au revoir.

 

I don’t like to show my face on the internet. Therefore, when I was in France, I remembered this fact and took some photos of myself that I would be capable of putting up on my blog, but which would still prove that I’d been there. Here, then, is:

 

The

Leslie M. Harper

Archive

 

MY FEET IN INTERESTING PLACES

 

          Amiens Cathedral                    Chateau Villandry

        L'Arc de Triomphe                        The Louvre

 

 

              Notre Dame                         Palais Royale

Food

French food is renowned to be excellent. I discovered, when I was over there, that while it’s not really that much more amazing than Australian food (at least, the food I had at home with my host family), there is far more of it. They always have three-course meals. At the canteen of the school I went to, they served an entrée, a main, and a dessert for each lunchtime, with a bin full of pieces of baguetta which you could help yourself from. I saw some students strolling off with nine or ten pieces of bread neatly balanced on their plates. The French love baguettes. In the space of five minutes, while I was sitting on a bus, I saw six people carrying baguettes under their arms. One had two.

There’s a greater variety of food, I’ll admit. While I was over there I got hooked on rilletes, cornichons and baguette. Rilletes is a kind of meat paste made in the Le Mans area and cornichons are basically gherkins, but together, they are awesome.

I don’t know if it’s the same with all host families, or if it was just the one I was staying with, but if they do all eat like that, I can’t understand how France is not currently undergoing some kind of terrible obesity epidemic. They had a bowl of crisps in the middle of the table for each meal. Well, not breakfast, but each meal apart from that. To eat a single piece of lettuce one of them first placed it on her place, covered it in mayonnaise, sprinkled salt over it, added some pepper, poured some salad dressing on the side, and then began to eat. They had chocolate croissants for breakfast most mornings. When they ran out, they showed me the cereals they had on offer. There were five boxes. Four were called Chokella, Extreme Chocolate, Duo Choc, and Choc Pillows. The fifth was empty.

The meals we had after we left our host families and were travelling France as a tour group were an interesting change. For lunches during the day, we were each provided with €10 and left to do what we wished. At one point, we were in Mont-Saint Michel, and were told we could buy food to take on the bus with us and eat when we got to our next destination. So several of us got into twos or fours and bought pizzas. As soon as we returned to the bus, thought, we discovered that the teachers had suddenly decided we weren’t allowed to eat on the bus. Oh, and had they mentioned that the bus was leaving in five minutes? Well, it was. So we had to stand outside the bus and eat at the speed of light. We just made it, too.

The dinners were, generally speaking, different to the lunches in that they were proper restaurant ones. There were a couple of memorable ones. For example, on the Champs-Elysées. We were told to meet at the Bistro Romain. Nobody told us that (a) there are TWO Bistro Romains on the Champs-Elysées and (b) the second one, the one we were supposed to be at, was actually hidden inside a shopping mall-type thing. Unsurprisingly, we were all late for dinner. We did, however, make an important discovery: it is possible to run from number 122 to number 26 on the Champs-Elysées in less than eight minutes, even if, like me, you stopped to take a picture of a poster for a Ringo Starr tour on the way.

 

Transport

In France, being a group of 26 plus, we spent most of the time either walking or bussing. Apart from that, we took the TGV, the Metro, and, at one point, a boat (although it didn’t really take us anywhere. It was a lunch cruise). The TGV stands for Very Fast Train. It actually does. In French, it’s Train de Grande Vitesse, or Train of Great Quickness. The Metro, on the other hand, stands for Slow, Crammed, and Frequently Stopping Metal Box on Wheels. At one point the chaplain who was travelling with us warned me not to get separated from the group in case I was kidnapped by Europeans and sold into the white slave trade. I took his advice on board.

Something I liked about the Metro is the entertainment. Buskers hang around and play inside the carriages. One accordian player did an excellent version of Twist & Shout.

 

Language 

After being forced to speak solely French for a number of days, it was an extreme relief to be back in the company of Australian students at our host school. Actually the French have quite a lot of exposure to the English language. About a third of all the products they own are in English, probably because the number needed to be produced to satisfy the American market. Three out of four songs played on the radio are in English. Admittedly, a lot of the time they don’t understand the words. I heard my exchange’s younger sister doing an excellent version of ‘Let It Be’, intoning ‘Ledidy, ledidy …’.

The most popular French song when we were over there was called ‘Toutes les Nuits’, by Colonel Reyel. On one day, every time we entered a shop, that song was playing. One souvenir shop even had a video screen up of it.

Actually, that was the same shop in which I saw the (now infamous) preservatifs de Tour Eiffel. I maintain the confusion wouldn’t have occurred had I been more fully aware of certain parts of the French language.  I was casually walking around the shop when I saw several small packets, quite flat, and about the size of a 20c coin. They made a contrast to the Parisien teddy bears, bags and T-shirts everyone else was looking at, so I strolled over and examined one closely. The tagline, in both English and French, said ‘Come to see my Eiffel Tower’. I couldn’t work out what they were. This was a show of uncharacteristic innocence on my part.

One of the people I was there with, Jacket, came over. ‘Hey, Leslie, you should probably drop that.’

‘Why?’ I inquired.

‘Don’t you know what they are?’

‘I have no idea.’

She told me.

I dropped it.

I then took a picture of the packet.

I’m presuming you’ll be able to work out what they are.

Ahem. Anyway. Back to the issue of language.

After school one day, for reasons I’m not going to go into, my exchange took me to a dance school. There, we met a friendly student who advised us as to directions. I was introduced as ‘L’Australien,’ which is how I was introduced throughout the entire trip. I was thrilled when the student turned to me and said, in English, ‘Nice to meet you. I’m Canadian.’

It turned out that this Canadian was in the same year as our exchanges at the same school. Accordingly, the next day, when I was standing in a group with the rest of les Australiens, and I saw the Canadian, I hallooed her with some gusto. The rest of the students gave me interesting looks.

‘Leslie, you remember that we’re in France, right?’

Their looks were even more interesting when I received a response in English. I should have remembered to explain to them first.

 

Accommodation

I’ve already told my ‘getting locked outside the hotel room’ story. Well, that’s not the end of my thrilling hotel-related stories. They include:

(a) being stuck outside my door at 7:00 p.m. for half an hour. I and Lea both got back to the hotel before anybody else, so we tried her door. It was stuck. We went a floor further up and tried my door. It was also stuck. We had to wait until Johann returned to the hotel, at which point he opened both doors, pointing out that we’d been using the keys wrongly. Not the first time this has happened to me. Not the last, either.

(b) being stuck outside my door at 10:00 p.m. for an hour. This was the next night. This one wasn’t my fault, I didn’t have the key – I’d left it with my roommate. Instead, I went to Lea’s room and we watched House in French for some time (that was the only thing we ever watched in France. That and music videos). I have only ever seen three episodes of House in my life. Coincidentally, those were the three that happened to be playing. People thought my French was far better than it was until they realised I already knew the plotlines.

Anyway, I was there until she went to bed. I left, discovered that my roommate still hadn’t arrived, and went to Mai and Meg’s room instead. They were watching House in English. Well, American.

I was there for about fifteen minutes, then left to wait outside my door for my roommate. She turned up after several minutes, gave me the key, and departed. Problem was that I then couldn’t get it open.

So I had to sit outside my door for half an hour. It was, to say the least, mildly worrying. Strange French men kept going into each others’ rooms. At one point I thought I heard a knocking on the door at the end of the corridor. It opened into the outside world, leading on to a fire escape – I’d checked earlier, just in case I needed a quick escape. I presumed it was my imagination. I was, therefore, slightly shocked when the door was suddenly thrown open, the man standing outside rolled two footballs into the hall, and then left as mysteriously as he’d come.

I was intensely relieved when my roommate arrived. At least, until I realised that she couldn’t get it open either.

It was lucky one of the hotel staff came up about that time and managed to open it for us. I’d been preparing to spend the night there.

(c) getting stuck inside a lift. This one wasn’t terribly urgent. I went into a lift, followed by an American couple. The lift started making the mysterious beeping noises it omitted whenever the weight limit was exceeded, so, somewhat reluctantly, both the Americans left. The doors shut. The lift didn’t move.

I have an abject terror of being stuck in a lift. I think it’s more to do with my acrophobia than my claustrophobia. I’m fine with enclosed spaces. The idea of plummeting madly towards the ground in a metallic box-shaped death trap, I’m less sold on.

After about ten seconds the lift doors opened. I didn’t even consider trying again. I just ran down the stairs. All four flights of them.

(d) getting stuck outside a lift. This was when I was trying to get my luggage downstairs in a lift the size of a wardrobe (it was about as wide as a regular suitcase and twice as long. We measured). And, strangely, the lift refused to come. So I carried my suitcase. Down four flights of stairs.

(e) the curious incident of the knock in the nighttime. I wasn’t privy to most of this incident, but Lea, whom I was sharing a room with at the time, claimed it was terrifying.

I was in the shower when it actually occurred, so I had no idea anything was going on until I came out and found Lea, standing on a chair and holding an umbrella, and staring out through the peephole in our door.

This was the situation: she’d heard a knocking on the door. She’d looked out the peephole and found nothing there. She was just going away from the door when it happened again. So Lea, being the practical person that she is, had grabbed an umbrella (for self-defence, apparently) and looked carefully out through the peephole. She was doing this when everything outside the door suddenly turned black. So she’d grabbed a chair to stand on – as she explained to me, so that anyone looking under the door wouldn’t be able to see her shadow and know she was there – and, holding the umbrella, waited for me to leave the shower so I could check outside.

Once the situation had been explained to me, I was somewhat sceptical. I had a look out the peephole and discovered that it had, indeed, gone black. Lea was worried somebody had stuck something over it.

‘Why would they do that?’ I inquired.

‘So that we have to come out to check!’ she explained. ‘They might be rapists, lurking in wait. The moment we open the door they can get us.’

I considered this. ‘Why would a rapist knock on the door twice, and then run away? It’s more likely to be ghosts. Poltergeists could do that.’

‘Well, maybe …’ Lea began, and then halted as the same dreadful thought entered both of our minds. I voiced it aloud.

‘What if it’s ghost rapists?’

We shared a look of fresh horror. At least, I was giving a look of fresh horror. Hers might have been more along the lines of bemusement.

At any rate, ghost rapists or not, there was still the issue of the dark peephole to contend with. Which left me, gripping an umbrella, Lea standing on a chair behind me as the optimal position from which to attack a ghost rapist, slowly opening the door.

To discover …

Nothing at all.

Well, not quite. I was confronted with a dark corridor, which at least explained the fact of the mysteriously black peephole. As soon as I waved an arm outside the lights went on. They were on a motion sensor, which was why the lights had gone out so suddenly.

We shut the door. Lea was still unsatisfied. ‘Someone definitely knocked on the door.’

We were just about to head to bed when, once more, we heard a knocking at the door. This time we knew what to do. Lea went back to her position on the chair, I grabbed the umbrella and held it in the optimum ghost-rapist-combat position, and I swung the door open boldly.

I’m not sure what we would have done if it had actually turned out to be ghost rapists. As it was, we were confronted with the perplexed expression of the principal, who had come round to check that we hadn’t been too disturbed by a couple of French teenagers who’d thought it would be amusing to run up and down the corridors, knocking on the doors. We assured him that we hadn’t. Given the fact that we were standing in what we considered to be attack positions – not to mention wearing our pajamas – I’m not sure we left him with the best impression.

I almost rather it had been ghost rapists. It may have been more lethal, but it would, at least, have been mildly less embarrasing, It could have been worse, thought. I was a split second away from hitting him with my umbrella.

And so, France. A thrill-filled fun-packed eighteen days of travelling, eating, talking, learning, and criminals visiting us from beyond the grave. All covered in my handy all-purpose blog post. Next time you’re drifting over the Continent, feel free to take any of my advice.

If you’re actually going to translate it literally, though, I’d suggest you travel with some very understanding people. VERY understanding people. And warn them about the ghost rapists.