Month: August 2017

July 2nd – 8th

For the first time in my life, I spent the Fourth of July outside the United States. There were no Fourth of July commercials on TV. There were no red, white, and blue decorations in streets and buildings. (There was a red, white and blue flag on the Palais de Justice in Tours, but that’s the French flag and it’s always there.) In class, my professor asked if anyone knew what day it was. I looked around, saw a class full of blank faces, and remembered I was the only American in the class. It really put my place in this world into perspective. I don’t know any Swiss national holidays. Why should the Swiss girl in my class know any American ones? It was amusing and humbling, but a little lonely. I was glad to meet up with some of my American friends at lunch (and to discover that Tours had a Fourth of July Snapchat filter. Thanks, France!) Our host parents also served a celebratory aperitif before dinner that evening, and wished me and my roommate a bonne fete! before we left.

This was my last week in Tours, and it felt really short, especially because I was consumed with packing and with planning (I’m traveling around France and Spain for the next week and a half with my friend, and we left most of our planning till the last minute.) I did get to see one more castle, bringing my grand total for the summer to nine: the castle of Amboise, which offers amazing views of the Loire valley and river. You’re also allowed to sit on some of the furniture. After Amboise, we toured the Clos Luce, which was Leonardo da Vinci’s queen-gifted residence while he was in France. Then, on Friday, my host mother took me and my roommate to the house of Balzac, a famous 19th-century French writer who spent a lot of time in Touraine (the land in and surrounding Tours). That completed my history-and-architecture tour of the Loire Valley, at least for this summer.

Here I am sitting on the furniture at Amboise. I don’t have other pictures because my phone started being almost constantly dead when I went to visit places. It was dead at the Clos-Luce. It was dead at Balzac’s house. I did take a picture of the facade of Amboise, but I can’t find it. 

I also finally ate escargots. My host mother cooked them for Thomas’ and my last dinner in Tours. (I thought I had eaten escargots in Brussels; the Belgian food truck called their boiled sea snails escargots, but everyone I talked to in France insisted that those aren’t actually escargots. Escargot just means “snail”, though, so I’m not sure what to think.) Anyway, I’d been apprehensive about trying escargots, but I actually really enjoyed them. I just tried not to think too hard about the fact that I was eating, you know, snails.

Looking back on my six weeks here, I can see that my French skills have in fact noticeably improved. My conversational and oral comprehension skills are much better; my vocabulary is bigger, and I can read French faster. When speaking French, I no longer have to plan out what I want to say in my head before I say it.  My confidence in speaking French has also multiplied exponentially. My common sense has not. The other day I saw a billboard advertising a drink flavored with menthe poivrée, which I correctly translated, since I’ve improved so much at French, as meaning “peppered mint.” As I continued walking I thought about how weird cultural differences can be, and how no one in America would ever think of flavoring something with both mint and pepper, and how honestly that sounded kind of disgusting. And then I realized.

I’ve also gotten really used to living in Tours. The things that stuck out to me so much at the beginning of the summer, like the tiny elevators and the coffee bowls, are now just things that I take for granted. (I still don’t use the elevators, though.) I’ve gotten used to walking to school every morning through narrow streets, and to stopping in at bakeries to grab a sandwich for lunch. I’ve gotten used to four-course, hour-plus-long dinners with my host parents. I know some people here that are more than ready to go home. Part of me understands that feeling, but most of me has no desire to leave. I’m definitely going to miss Tours.

June 25th – July 1st

I’m back on my castle-visiting kick. I visited three this weekend alone. (It’s Sunday evening.) Yesterday I went on an Institute trip to Cheverny, a castle that was an aristocratic (not royal) residence still furnished with its own original 1800s furniture, and Chambord, a gigantic (seriously, gigantic) castle built by Francois I in the early 16th century. Today I took the train on my own to Blois, a castle which I’d never heard of before but is now maybe my third favorite of all of them (this is significant, since I’ve visited eight castles so far. My French summer is one part language immersion and one part history/architecture tour of the Loire Valley.) Blois was a primary royal residence in the 16th and 17th centuries, and was then the subject of a massive restoration project in the 19th century, which means it’s a) full of history and b) really well-restored. Catherine de Medici died in it.

Cheverny, featuring me and some of my friends. I didn’t get any pictures at Chambord, since my phone died. Which is awful, because I loved Chambord, and it was really impressive.

Blois makes a U shape; this is the left side of the U.

This is the right side of the Blois U-shape.

Class sessions at the Institute last four weeks, so at the end of last week I moved up a class. Now, in phonetics class, we’re learning how to speak and understand “familiar” French (French slang, informal pronunciation, etc.). This is fun, but difficult, since I’ve been having enough trouble learning how to speak and understand formal French. My new class is also more lecture-heavy than my old one, which focused a lot on discussion and student presentation. I miss the discussion, but I’m now learning some significant things about French writing structures, and have added several words to my vocabulary.

I went to see a documentary with a friend this past week, and I was actually able to understand and follow it really well. Not perfectly, but really well. Unlike Finding Nemo, I had never seen this documentary before, nor was I familiar with its subject matter.

Sometimes it’s difficult here to actually gauge my language progress. It’s slow and gradual, and it’s difficult to see changes day-to-day, or even necessarily week-to-week. To make matters worse, the more I learn, the more I realize I still have to learn. Paradoxically, the more competent I actually become at French, the less competent I feel. But having benchmarks, like understanding a documentary this week when three weeks ago I couldn’t understand a two-minute sound byte, helps.

In other news, nearly all the American students have left the Institute. June is a really big month for American university groups to go to the Institute, but they usually only stay four weeks. So, in June, the Institute is majority American, but now I’m actually the only American in my class.

However, even though the Americans are nearly all gone, almost everyone here still speaks English to each other. This is a problem that we actually had a (French) discussion about in class the other day. The thing is, practically no one from a non-English-speaking country is learning French as their second language. If you want to learn a useful second language, and you don’t already speak English, you’re going to learn English, and then after that you’ll learn French or another less-widespread language. It’s not everyone, but the majority of people at the Institute have either grown up bilingual with English, or have been learning English for years. (There are also some people who are here learning French as their fourth or even fifth language). So most of the time, everyone’s highest-competency common language is English. And everyone is at different levels of French. So most of the time when we all talk to each other, we speak English. I’ve hung out with people from Taiwan, Turkey, Colombia, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Sweden, and China, and that’s just a few of them, but with minimal exceptions we’ve communicated for the most part in English. It’s made me realize how lucky I am to have such a ubiquitous language as my native one, but it’s also been a real difficulty (for all of us) as we’re trying to immerse ourselves in French. Sometimes, we’ll impose a strict French-only rule on ourselves for lunchtime or something, but most of the time we take the English path of least resistance. I speak only French to my host family, and in class, and to people like shopkeepers, museum guides, bus drivers, and doctors, but I would probably be making even more conversational progress if I were speaking French with my friends here too.

June 18th – 24th

As I write this, I am actually not in France; I’m on a bus driving through Belgium. My roommate and I found cheap bus tickets to Brussels, so we spent the weekend there. It was so much fun, especially since I didn’t know much about Brussels, or even Belgium, before actually going. I saw the Grand-Place, Manneken-Pis, a section of the Berlin Wall, and the European Parliament. I visited art museums and cathedrals. I ate Belgian waffles, Belgian fries, and boiled sea snails. And I accidentally ran into one of my best friends, who has been studying in Germany but, unknown to either one of us, ended up visiting Brussels the exact same weekend as me. And French is one of the official languages of Belgium, so I spoke a lot of French too.

Brussels. I tried to take an artsy photo with the flowers in the foreground, but they just washed out the rest of the picture. 

Here’s me with Manneken-Pis. It’s a fountain, and the fountain part is a little boy peeing. It’s Brussels’ self-proclaimed city symbol. It was smaller than I had expected, and it was crowded with tourists taking pictures, so it was basically the Mona Lisa, but Belgian.

Me and my friend Amber meeting up with each other in Brussels.

I also visited another castle this week: the castle of Azay-le-Rideau. Unfortunately, however, due to a miscommunication (which I maintain was solely the fault of the Azay-le-Rideau tourism website) I didn’t actually get to go inside the castle. The inside of the castle was closed for renovations, so my friend and I just walked around the grounds.

Azay-le-Rideau

French graffiti in the town around Azay-le-Rideau 

I did get to go inside the other historic Loire Valley building I visited this week: the Chapel of St. Radegonde. The newest parts of this chapel date from the 1800s; the oldest parts date from actual Roman times, a.k.a the 100s.

This fresco is an 1800s restoration.

This fresco dates from the 11th century.

So that was the touristy part of my week. The week, however, was also an important one in terms of two other things: language development and character development.

Language development first. On Monday, I had to give a ten-minute-long oral presentation. I chose for my topic the history of Chenonceau (the castle I visited a couple weeks ago). Giving presentations in English is not a difficult thing for me; although I do have many phobias, public speaking is not one of them, and I even in my day-to-day life I tend to talk a lot. In French, however, things are different. As I wrote about last week, my lack of vocabulary and eloquence in spoken French often tends to frustrate me into silence. So I was a little worried about how that presentation was going to go. However, it turned out that I didn’t need to worry. I talked for twelve minutes straight, with minimal pausing and only a few glaring grammatical errors. And I used the subjunctive tense and the plus-que-parfait tense, two verb tenses which I usually avoid at all costs in spoken French.

It wasn’t just during formal oral presentations that I started noticing real changes, either. While at dinner the other night, I began to realize that I was speaking much more quickly and smoothly, with more types of sentence construction and better diction, than I had been able to three weeks ago. I also realized that I was using phrasing and idioms that I’d recently learned in class. It’s really cool to be able to learn something in French class and then get to try it out twenty minutes later, instead of at best two days later, or at worst several weeks later and only while writing a paper.

All this language development got a very practical application on Wednesday. That’s the character development. I hurt my foot a week or two ago, and it was getting steadily worse until finally I caved and agreed to go to the doctor. Going to the doctor in a foreign country whose language you speak at only an intermediate level isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. (Luckily my host mother was supremely helpful throughout the whole thing, referring me to their family doctor and driving me to the appointment so that I and my foot injury didn’t have to walk there). I was prepared for the worst. But surprise of surprises, I was actually able to effectively communicate with the doctor. Like, explain all my symptoms and answer all his questions (I did have to ask him to repeat himself once or twice, but in my defense he spoke very quickly).

I was supposed to get an X-ray, but I went to Belgium instead, so that hasn’t happened yet. Oddly enough, though, my foot has been improving since Wednesday. So hopefully that X-ray won’t actually be necessary.

In other news, we’ve been suffering through our second heat wave of the summer. As far as cultural differences go, here’s one: while I’m sweating through shorts and tank tops, I pass people on the streets wearing jeans and even jackets. While I love the four-course dinners and the way you greet shopkeepers every time you go into a store, I think I’m okay without the wearing-jeans-in-95-degree-weather custom.

June 11th – 17th

I’m very touristy here in France. Wednesday afternoon I went on another Institute trip to the castle of Chaumont-sur-Loire. Thursday afternoon I went to the Cathedral of St. Gatien (Cathèdrale de Saint-Gatien) and the Fine Arts Museum in Tours (Musée de Beaux-Arts). Then, Saturday, I went to the Puy du Fou, which is a French park which puts on circus-type shows (“spectacles”) about the history of France, from Roman times to the world wars.

Chaumont-sur-Loire

Chaumont hosts a garden festival every year, in which they invite landscape designers to design gardens all over the Chaumont grounds. This was one of them, a little water garden with mirrors at each end. This was my friends’ and my attempt at a mirror selfie with the garden. It kind of worked.

Going to the cathedral on Thursday was actually an accident. I had been planning to just go to the Fine Arts Museum, but because I have no sense of direction, I got lost and stumbled upon the cathedral instead. And it was an incredible surprise. I had known there was a cathedral somewhere in Tours, but people don’t really go to Tours for the cathedral, so I wasn’t expecting much from whenever I got around to visiting it. But here was a giant Gothic cathedral, rose window and all, absolutely dripping with stone decorations, basically appearing out of nowhere in a random Tours town square. And when I say giant, I mean giant. The ceilings were some of the highest I’ve ever seen. There was a side chapel every five feet, and every side chapel had a tomb or a relic or an altar. I almost didn’t believe the stained glass was as old as it is, because the windows were huge and the colors were so bright. I spent nearly an hour walking around it.

The Cathedral of St. Gatien

Inside the Cathedral of St. Gatien

This side chapel is dedicated to St. Martin of Tours. There’s a relic in that little gold monstrance. I don’t know what it is because it’s really small. St. Martin is a big deal in Tours because, well, he’s St. Martin of Tours.

The pipe organ, rose window, and people for scale.

The choir behind the cathedral. Technically it cost 3 euro to get into the choir, but I didn’t have any euro on me so the ticket lady let me in for free.

The towers of the cathedral as seen from the choir.

And then I did end up finding my way to the museum as well; when leaving the cathedral, I found a city map (my phone was long dead) and planned out my route home. I had taken barely two steps from the map when I walked directly into the museum. It was still an hour and a half before closing, so I went in and then spent an hour and a half walking around the museum.

As for my actual classes, this week has been the best week of classes so far. My new class focuses a lot on discussing and on oral presentation, which are two areas in which I can really use practice. I can also tell that my oral comprehension, which I’ve mentioned is abysmal, is improving very slightly. I went to see Finding Nemo (Le Monde de Nemo) at the movie theater with some friends on Friday, and I was actually able to follow more than 50% of the dialogue without much of a problem. To be fair, I’ve practically memorized the movie anyway, but that was still really a milestone for me.

I have had a couple of those funny-but-cringeworthy fiascos that come with trying to communicate in a language you don’t know very well, though. For example, earlier this week I went to a bakery. I didn’t yet know what I wanted, so when the baker came and asked me what she could get for me, I tried to tell her I was just looking at the moment. I realized later that I had been off by a preposition, and had actually said something closer to the connotations of “I’m just watching the pastries right now, thanks.”

Despite faux pas like these, though, I have noticed that in general my conversational French has improved. I speak slightly more fluidly and can comprehend people slightly better, although verb tenses other than simple past and present still mess with my head in conversation. I have also realized that my French vocabulary isn’t very extensive. I actually knew that already, but I guess I just never truly realized how much I used French/English dictionaries when writing papers, because my actual mental store of French words is pretty small.

Truthfully, that gets frustrating. In English, language usage is my thing. I’m that person who gets physically uncomfortable if someone uses the wrong form of “they’re/their/there,” and privately judges people really hard for using dangling modifiers and ending sentences with prepositions. I’ll legitimately spend time deciding which synonym of “angry” exactly fits my state of mind: am I irritated? Outraged? Indignant? Offended? In English, I’m eloquent. But in French, I am not. I mess up on grammar constantly. I often get stuck while trying to say what I really want to, and end up resorting to a far simpler and less expressive sentence, or just not saying anything at all. I have to keep reminding myself that I have nineteen years’ worth of experience with English, and only five years’ worth with French.

That being said, I love it here. I’ve been getting unreasonably panicky all week because my time here was almost half over (now it’s officially half over). But it’s been a great three weeks, and I’m really excited for the next three.

June 4-10

I moved up a quarter-level this week. (Those six levels I mentioned last week are further divided into four sublevels apiece, so we’ve got A1.1, A1.2, etc. You move up a quarter-level at a time, so you’d move from A1.1 to A1.2, for example.) The class I was originally placed into felt too easy for me, and my professors agreed that it was. So they let me move up.

That is, my professors agreed that it was too easy for me when it came to reading, writing, and even speaking. But I took my first oral comprehension test (that’s how well you can understand something you hear) this week, and I absolutely failed it. Everyone has different levels of competency in different areas of the language, and oral comprehension is definitely my lowest. Luckily, I’m in a really good place to practice that.

Outside of classes, I was barely in Tours this week. Last weekend my host parents went to visit their country house in Chinon, which is about 45 minutes southwest of Tours, and invited me and Thomas to join them. Two of my host parents’ grown children joined us there too, and we spent two days hiking, exploring the pre-15^th-century underground house on my host parents’ property, going to French Mass, and of course, speaking a lot of French.

Here’s the house at Chinon. It dates from the 16th century. I asked my host mother to repeat herself three times to make sure I wasn’t translating that date incorrectly.

Hiking in Chinon

Hiking in Chinon

I made Thomas take this picture of me because I really liked this giant dandelion. You can already see the farmer’s tan I got while hiking the day before. My sleeves are rolled up in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to even out those tan lines.

Then, on Wednesday, I went to visit two castles. Tours is right in the middle of the Loire Valley, which is where French royals throughout history built practically all their castles. So there are a ton of castles within an hour or two of us. The Institute organizes trips to them on Wednesday afternoons, when there’s no class, and I signed up for as many as I could. This Wednesday we went to Langeais, a castle built in the 15th century with a very medieval-fortress feel, and Villandry, a castle built in the 16th century with a much more Renaissance-palace feel.

Langeais

The original keep of Langeais, dating from the 10th century. The rest of the original castle of Langeais was destroyed.

Villandry

The gardens at Villandry

Then, Friday, I went with my host mother to tour the Marmoutier Abbey, an old abbey just outside Tours. The current standing abbey dates from the 13th century, but its grounds have ruins from three different churches, one from the 4th century, one from the 12th century, and one from the 13th century. It’s surreal to visit places that have been around literally longer than my actual country. We don’t have 1500-year-old church ruins in America. The abbey tour had a guide whom, luckily, I could understand pretty well. And I’m glad I could, because I learned my favorite France story so far: Around the 13^th century, the abbey was home to a brotherhood of monks. One of your standard 13^th-century miracles occurred, and a miraculous spring bubbled up outside the abbey. The monks, of course, didn’t want to waste their new gift. So they built a brewery and used it to make beer.

Here’s the abbey. You can’t tell from this picture, but it was built directly into the hill behind it. 

Here are the ruins of the churches. They built each new church on top of the ruins of the old one, so the ruins are all stacked on top of each other.

And then, on Saturday, a group of friends and I went on our own to visit the castle of Chenonceau. Chenonceau has been called the most beautiful castle, and I definitely agree (although my experience is so far limited to three castles).

Here’s Chenonceau from the side. It bridges the Cher river, which incidentally was the border between France and Vichy France during World War II. Its galleries were used as a military hospital in World War I. 

Can you tell I love history? I’m a complete history nerd. I’m here to learn French, but getting dropped in the middle of a valley full of French history, literally from Roman times through World War II, is such an added bonus.

May 28th – June 3rd

My first two days here felt like they lasted forever, but the rest of the week absolutely flew by. I had an awful time getting here: it involved a three-hour bus ride, a nine-hour flight, another hourlong bus ride, a two-hour train ride, and very little sleep. On top of all that, my suitcase handle broke at the baggage claim in Paris. A friend of my host parents came to pick me up at the train station in Tours and found me dripping sweat (I arrived in the middle of a heat wave) and trying unsuccessfully to carry a 50-pound suitcase along with my duffel bag. And for the next 48 hours after that, it was meeting my host parents, and getting settled in, and unpacking, and orientation at the Institute (the language school I’ll be at for the next six weeks), and then my first classes at the Institute, and a lot of napping. But aside from (and even amidst) all the chaos of the first couple of days, I’ve been having a great time.

Here’s L’Institut de Touraine, or as we all call it, the Institute. We all hang out in and enter the building from the courtyard behind the building, and there are two other buildings as well, but this facade is the prettiest.

In a lot of ways, Tours isn’t much different from my home town of South Bend. But in a lot of ways, it is.

For one thing, the people here all speak French.

For another thing, everything here is much smaller than I’m used to. Streets are just about exactly one lane wide. Sidewalks range from a foot to a foot and a half wide, which is about 30% as much sidewalk as I’m used to. The bathtub in my host family’s house is just big enough for me to kneel in. And don’t even get me started on the elevators. I don’t love elevators as a rule, since I’m a bit of a claustrophobe at the best of times. But I refuse to have anything at all to do with French elevators. I literally thought the first one I ran across was a mail chute. It had space for two people, maybe, if they were reasonably small people, and if they were comfortable being very close to each other. I took the stairs.

Here’s a photo of the bathtub, with me in it for scale. 

Another inconvenient difference: air conditioning is the exception here rather than the rule. My classroom at the Institute has it, which is lucky, because not all the classrooms there do. But my host family’s house does not. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, France was suffering a heat wave earlier this week, so I spent a lot of time lying in front of the fan my host mother kindly installed in my room, trying not to melt.

Not all the differences are inconvenient, though. In fact, I like some of them a lot. For example, although here we don’t eat dinner until 8:00 or 8:30, the standard dinner is four courses: appetizer, main dish, cheese, and dessert. (Side note: the French word for appetizer is entrée.) I’ve met people who can’t stand the long, multiple-course meals that are standard-issue in France, but I love the opportunity to sit down, relax, talk, and eat for an hour-plus at a stretch. Also, I immediately felt at home in this culture that not only considers cheese its own food group, but also sees it as a necessary part of every dinner.

I’ve really lucked out with my host parents. They’re absolutely lovely people, and they’ve been hosting students for years, so they’re very well-equipped to help us acclimate.

Here’s my host parents’ house. I live on the third floor. You can kind of see the two dormers poking out from the roof; that bathtub is right behind the one on the right.

It’s actually surprised me how quickly I’ve been able to settle in. (Probably because using a slightly smaller bathtub isn’t exactly earthshaking culture shock.) Even after just a week, though, I’ve fallen pretty easily into a routine. Every morning my host mother makes breakfast for me and the other host student living here (actually another Notre Dame student; his name is Thomas and you can read his blog too). Then we walk to the Institute; it’s a ten-to-fifteen-minute walk from our house. We have class from 9:00 to 12:20 every morning. Wednesdays and Fridays I have no afternoon classes; since I’m in the intensive program, I come back at 1:30 on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays for another couple hours of class. Then I have time to do whatever I want. I spent a couple evenings this week exploring the city (by which I mean I got hopelessly lost with a dead phone, but that was just on Monday). One evening I went to a play with my host mother. I did not understand a single word of it, but it was a pretty visual play so that was okay. At one point one of the (male) actors stripped fully nude, right onstage, facing the audience. This wasn’t some kind of X-rated play, either. It was at the community theatre. There were middle schoolers there. So maybe there’s something to these French stereotypes.

On the topic of not being able to understand that play: one thing I’ve rediscovered here is that my spoken French is abysmal. I already kind of knew this, but being forced to communicate always and only in French has made it unavoidably clear. I am much, much better at reading and writing French than conversing in it, but unfortunately, in France as in America, speaking is the standard mode of communication. Although I’m in the upper intermediate level here (there are six levels, ranging from complete beginner to completely fluent; I’m in the fourth) I still have to plan out what I want to say in my head before I say it. And I can have a lot of difficulty understanding people who speak French to me, too. My host parents and the teachers at the Institute are used to dealing with students of the language, so they usually speak slowly and clearly enough for me to understand, but I’ve had to ask shopkeepers to repeat themselves multiple times. And that stereotype of French people judging you for not being able to speak their language? It totally feels true.

This is the Loire riverside, about a 15-minute walk from my house.