France Struggles

Well, it's pretty weird to say it...but my time in France is coming to a close! Today we're buying my plane ticket home, and I'll be back in Wisconsin in just over a month. Okay, everyone knows that I really love France. I did choose to major in French, and come live in France for 7 months. However, there's also some weird cultural things about France that start to grate on you the longer you live here. Enjoy reading about my struggles. I know you all just feel so bad for me, right?

1. When you know you're breathing in more cigarette smoke than oxygen.

2. When you always think you see a lesbian couple but then it just turns out to be just yet another French man wearing a scarf that's cuter than yours and jeans that are tighter than yours.

3. When you constantly have to explain that you really don't use the metric system and no one believes you because they find that ridiculous because a French man invented the metric system and obviously it's so perfect. (Sorry French people: I can't tell you anything about the temperature, my height, or the distance between places...).

4. When you just want sliced bread to make grilled cheese but they don't sell sliced bread (at least not sliced bread that doesn't taste like cardboard), and you just can't grill a baguette.

5. When after each hour of church everyone lines up to cheek kiss everyone in the room and you try to avoid it like the plague but you still know that you can't avoid kissing at least a few strangers every given Sunday.

6. When you lie to yourself and pretend that the euro and the dollar are worth the same, and then you come home and check your balance and remember that you lied to yourself.

7. When there's a weird pact in the teacher's lounge that if you sit at one table, everyone else will sit together at the other table and pretend you're not there.

8. When you go shopping and the sizes on the tag says something like "Europe: XL  USA: M", and you can't help but think that they just did that to make a fat joke about America, but really you know it makes sense because their clothes are smaller and OH MY GOSH how is everyone in this country skinny??

9. When people tell you how lucky you are to be in France because it's not soooooooo dangerous like America (French people think everyone in America is in constant danger of getting shot all the time hahaha).

10. When you accidentally let out a 'bonjour' when you should have said 'bon soir' while walking into a store and then everyone stares into your soul because you just revealed that you're a tourist and now you're not friends anymore.

Maybe when I go home I should come up with some America struggles. I think it would go something like 'When you can't see a different Gothic cathedral every week' or 'When you remember that in America horrible things like Crocs exist'.

Grass is always greener on the other side, right? :)

Comments

  1. You make me smile, Marissa. : ) Enjoy your remaining weeks in beautiful France and don't sweat the small stuff.

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  2. Yup! I guess I don't know the teacher's lounge thing, but everything else yes. Except for sliced bread. I know for sure that you can buy sliced bread. Just don't buy LIDL's verson. Cardboard.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yeah, I've eventually found sliced bread, but they don't have it at ANY of the places closest to me. And a lot of it is the cardboardy stuff, so I've just given up on that front.

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