Sunday, November 30, 2008

Merci et au revoir

As I begin to pack my things and head back to LA, I wanted to take some time to express my gratitude to all those who made this experience so wonderful and so rich. 

First of all, to Valerie, Julie, Claire, Thierry, the teachers at OISE language school. Thank you for your professionalism, expertise, patience, encouragement, and humor. For knowing when to push and pull, and when to back off and support.  A delicate balance no doubt, but one you accomplished masterfully.

To Claire, the office administrator. Thank you for speaking so fast, and forcing me to improve my listening comprehension.   And for  your stories, especially the one about the mouse and the omelet. 

To Lucy, my host.  Thank you for your warmth and hospitality. It was such an honor to get to know you, your family and your friends.  They are truly a reflection of you and your many passions.  Thank you for that amazing Thanksgiving dinner. It was most definitely one of the highlights of my stay. I can’t remember the last time I dined with someone for 6 hours. Thank you.

To Azziz, my dear Morrocan friend.  Thanks for helping me to feel more secure in the way I speak.  For your warmth,  your kindness, and for introducing me to Morroccan cuisine.

To Yannick, the only person I knew in Paris before I arrived. Thanks for your encouragement and support the past month.  It meant a lot coming from such a distinguished Parisien as yourself.   Merci beaucoup, mon cher ami.  And thank you for inviting me to dinner with your friends on my last night in Paris.  I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect ending to my time here.  Je t’adore!

To the servers at The Gai Moulin restaurant.  Thanks for helping with my homework, for making me laugh, and for the best food in Paris.

To Veronique at the Montparnasse Boulangerie I went to every week day.  Thank you for your  musical accent, and  for the wonderful desserts and sandwiches. I don’t think there can be a better fondue or pain au chocolate in all of  Paris. How I didn’t gain any weight over the past month is a mystery to me.

Finally, to everyone with whom I spoke.  Thanks for listening and teaching me how to better speak this beautiful language.  In spite of the stereotypical view that the French are cold and stuffy, I found everyone to be quite warm and most welcoming. 

Merci Paris, 

Je t'aime.

A bientot.

PS. Thanks for all your emails of support during this first leg of my journey.  I’m sorry I haven’t been able to respond to them all yet, but I promise to catch up with my correspondence next week.

 

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Incroyable!

I can’t believe how quickly the time is passing here.  Only one more week to go before I head back to LA, yet it seems that I just arrived.  Wow, what a ride!   I’m just trying to savor every moment and enjoy the beauty that unfolds before me every day.   Sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be enough adjectives in either language to describe the magnificence of this city.  I mean how many times can you say  incroyabe, extraordinaire, magnifique, formidable, genial, chouette, without sounding so ordinary. Therefore, if everything is so, all of the above, is there anything that is actually just ordinary?

OK, there are a few things that are, hmm... shall we say, tedious. For example, the metro at 830am Monday through Friday. Oh la la! It reminds me of my days in the Ivory Coast except that it doesn't smell as bad, and it's definitely not as hot.  Boarding the metro during rush hour is neither for the light hearted nor the shy.  It's more like push, push, push, until your face is smashed up against the window.  Then you try and hold on to the rail, but  there are about 5 people between you and the end of your arm.  So you just stand there. The train moves and you realize that you don't even need to hold on because no one can move anyway.  We all support each other during the bumpy ride, and no one falls. Kind of a metaphor for life, I suppose.  Except that sometimes it's a bit challenging to breath, but "le voila" another metaphor.  It's quite a ride, literally. Then I have to change trains and do it all over again. By the time I get to class, I feel like I've been in some kind of school yard brawl.  Ah, but I'll take it over the 405 any day. Well, most days.

Then there's the torture, I mean, joy of French grammar, comprehension, news reviews, and constantly being corrected for tense misuse.  It's almost like starting over.  All my bad habits are being purged, a purification of sorts.  And you know how much fun that is.  But hopefully with a cleaner palate, I'll be able to express myself a little more clearly in the near future. 

It's been an awesome week, but I don' think I've been this exhausted in years. Perhaps it has something to do with going to a 5 1/2 hour opera after class on Tuesday.  Wagner's Tristan et Isolde with Bill Viola video.  It was an, I don't have the adjective to describe, experience.

Finally, I've attached a few pictures from my day at the Rodin Museum yesterday. Also one of those...experiences. Enjoy.



Wednesday, November 19, 2008

My first week of school

Saturday November 15th

They say Paris is for lovers.  I would argue that is simply more for the passionate.  Seems a bit more inclusive to me. When I woke up this morning and considered how to spend my day, I could think of nothing more amusing than taking a walk in the park. No park in particular. I simply wanted to sit somewhere beautiful and reflect on my amazing good fortune. So here I sit in the Luxemburg  Gardens on a pleasant, typically grey, November day in Paris, writing this blog entry.

I mean, really, who gets to do something like this?  “Whose life is this anyway?” I ask myself this almost everyday.  Even when I had a mini melt down earlier in the week, I was able to take a walk down the Seine and have a good cry.  Kind of puts things in perspective doesn’t it? Talking a walk down the Seine? Come on!  

The origin of the meltdown you ask—language woes.  I’m not exactly sure why I thought going from speaking French  1 hour a week to 12 hours a day was going to be an easy transition.  But in fact, that unmet expectation seems to have been the source of my frustration.  I thought my head was going to spontaneously combust and fly off my shoulders.  Holy #@$!!!

Anyway, thanks to my amazing professors/therapists, I was able to loosen up a bit and get back to work.  It seems that my expectations for improved fluency have been about as high as those of the world toward Obama.   Things are much better now that I’m starting to practice what I preach—breathing.

As for the language, suffice it to say that I understand much more than I am able to speak. It doesn’t matter though, because I speak to almost anyone who will listen.  I even make up things so that I can talk to people. But my new favorite thing to do is that when I learn a new way of saying something, I interject it into a conversation as much as possible. Kind of like Eddie Izzard in his “Dressed to Kill “act.  For instance, I was so proud to have successfully told Lucy, my hostess extroidinaire, that I couldn’t figure out how to work the coffee machine.  So I tell everyone I can,” Je n’ai pas reussi faire fonctionner la machine du cafĂ© ce matin. “  You’d be amazed at how relevant to the conversation I can make that phrase.

Alas, French is like a symphony to me. I just love how it sounds, how it flows, how it moves me. Even how at times, frustrates me.   It’s truly a language of passion.

 

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Paris at last

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. “  Ernest Hemmingway(1899-1961)

It’s hard to believe I’ve only spent a week in Paris thus far.  Truly, it has been a feast. A feast of cuisine, language, culture, history, and even spirituality.    I actually managed to find the Sivananda Yoga Center here, which is the tradition with which I will do my teacher training in India.  Talk about an exercise in mindfulness. I’ve only taken a few classes in this tradition back in LA, and now I’m taking them in French!  So between trying to remember the sequence of poses, deciphering the vocabulary, and focusing on my breath, I was starting to feel little bit like Lucy and the conveyer belt of chocolates.  

Feeling overwhelmed, as I’ve recently learned,  is only a  temporary feeling.  It’s actually a mind.  A mind that can be controlled with patience and mindfulness.  So my challenge this week has not been to not get frustrated, since that is inevitable when trying to adapt to all things new.  Rather, to observe the feeling as it arises and attempt to patiently accept it.   Accept that I am in a foreign country, adapting to its culture.  So spending 40 minutes trying to figure out how to make a phone call, getting lost in the rain looking for my school, after asking 3 different people for directions, and just getting lost in general, are merely opportunities to practice the mindfulness of patient acceptance.   Not yet quite there, ;).

The pictures I’ve attached are from my day at Sacre Coeur and Montmarte, the highest point in Paris.  It was a spectacular fall day, as is today.  Beautiful blue sky,  50 degrees, surrounded by the smell of pastries and the sounds of language.  As the French say, “rien ne me rend plus heureux”. Nothing makes me happier.