Two Months

Yesterday was my two months anniversary of arriving here in France. All in all, I think that everything is going really well and I’m starting to settle in here even while I’m still making progress and discoveries every day. I think that the biggest challenge of being here is how proactive you have to be. In order to meet people, ask questions, and make conversation you have to cross language and culture differences in addition to the innate difficulty of trying new things. Every moment I try to be ‘on’ and ready to take the leap, whether it’s talking to a new group of people or discovering a culture difference, and I know I don’t always succeed at being as active as I’d like. However, the biggest reward of being here is to see how my efforts are rewarded a hundred times over. Most every time that I do reach out, people respond and reach back to me.

Yesterday, for example, one of my friends invited me to go ice skating with a group. Of the people there, there was me, two girls I know from school, one of the girl’s boyfriend and his friend visiting from out of town. Ice skating was really fun- it’s amazing how much I retained considering that I only ice skate about once every four years. At one point, the rink set up an area for the experts who had been whizzing by us to practice on their own. We were amazed to see an entirely new form of ice skating, which appeared to be based on break dancing and street dancing. Handstands and fancy foot work are pretty impressive when done in ice skates.

Afterwards, we went to the bowling complex just across the plaza where I did neither terribly or wonderfully, and was able to translate the little animations on the screen for everyone else asked. You know the animation of the pins doing funny things after every score, which has been the same in every bowling alley I’ve been to for as long as I can remember? Well, it’s even the same in France. Luckily that makes the bowling terminology easy since “strike” “spare” and “bowling” are all the same.

I came back home by bus, and watched several episodes of Friends and the third Indiana Jones which was on TV with my family, all dubbed over in French. Two months in and I caught all the punch lines and understood nearly every word!