Post- the second: Welcome to Conflans goats and monkeys...

Bienvenue a Conflans! Je suis...ici! Et je suis tres fatiguée. An implicit goal of this blog=teach a little more French to the non-French speakers reading this. Oh, and maybe teach myself a bit more along the way, too, or at the least provide the actual French-speakers reading this with some entertainment via my mistakes *laughs.*

And, very importantly, too, happy belated inauguration day. At laaaaaaaaast.

So, I have finally arrived at the house where I'll be staying until...until...well...heavens knows when these classes end or what classes I am actually taking.Yes, this is a major point of anxiety for me. I register for classes next Monday. Presently, I do not even know what I will be studying, what language it will be in, the format of instruction, the format of assessment, or when I will return from whenever the end of the semester is.

I have several days to postpone thinking too much about that, though. My Lufthansa flight (no Uncle Bob, I am going to have to respectfully disagree, Air France is better than Lufthansa) got into Charles de Gaulle Airport about 8:35 this morning. The eldest son in the family I am staying with came to the airport to pick me up. This was tremendously appreciated, as I guess I packed for 5 years instead of 5 months? He (Alexandre) leaves tomorrow to return to Oslo, where he is studying law as an exchange student. When he is not abroad, he is a student a the university I will be attending. We drove from de Gaulle through Cergy, where he pointed out the school and the "interesting" architecture. I will be right at home! Round buildings at law schools! Yay!

From there we drove to the house here in Conflans Sainte Honorine (http://www.mairie-conflans-sainte-honorine.fr/). He carried one of my nearly 25 lb suitcases up the three flights of narrow stairs (narrower than my old apartment! yes!) and I carried the other. After a brief introduction to one of his younger brothers (Maxime), his mother (Susan, yes, just like my actual mum's name), the cat, and the dog, I proceeded to collapse from sheer exhaustion. Or maybe that was just hunger....

Dear Lufthansa: WTF? What was that mush marinara that tasted oddly of tinfoil? PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: never order the pasta option on an airline. Ever. And that rubbery slab of something the color of orange traffic cones that I sadly assume was "cheese"? And um? No back of the chair in-flight-personal-entertainment consoles? I fairly thought that was standard on transatlantic flights. *Rant over.* Seriously, though, it was a decent enough flight (minus being a row between two crying babies all the way from Boston to Frankfurt) and the hour of midflight turbulance where I thought, well, that'd be a hell of a way to go. So maybe "decent" was too generous an adjective?

Frankfurt was fun though-- I spent 8 Euro on an hour's worth of Wi Fi (clearly I have my priorities in line (query: on line?) where I proceeded to find that the only person awake and online to chat was Ruthie. Gotta love that time zone difference in Malaysia....

Also in Frankfurt, their TSA equivalent decided my fingernail scissor was worthy of subjecting me to serious interrogation! Boston TSA (if they even actually were awake when my handbag went through the scanner) took no issue with this genuinely innocuous object.

Also in Frankfurt, which is a semi-decent airport after 06:00, when things actually begin to open, an older lady asked me where the bathroom was in some foreign language. I could not really understand her, though. I pretty much got the gist, and something about "toilette." But I didn't know where it was. So I told her that much in English, which she clearly didn't speak. I should have then tried French. But I didn't. Could have also tried Spanish. Or Hebrew. But I didn't. So, in any case, I smiled a lot. And she smiled a lot. And neither of proceeded to know where anything was or exchange any useful information. The only result was that I spent the remaining hour or so until my flight departed panicking that it was French she had spoken to me in and that I did not understand a word other than toilette!

At this point, I'm fairly sure she was speaking to me in German. Maybe I have convinced myself it was German. My French is quite, quite limited...more limited than I would like. I can read the language. I can understand a fair amount spoken. Or at least I thought I could. But I cannot string together a coherent thought of my own verbally...or especially in writing. Why is this language not spelled phonetically, consistently, predictably, like...Spanish...or even Hebrew is very predictable!! My hopeless lack of language skills. I will learn! I will learn! Or maybe I'll just whine about it some more first! This is the jetlag speaking.

-A

p.s.- Special prize to the first person to post in a comment what the title of this post is an allusion to (oh, and there are two "correct" answers)....

Long story short, after all of that, I am here, I am pretty tired, having just woken up from my nap. I am also pretty hungry, so I am going to stop being antisocial sitting here typing this post as opposed to actually interacting with people...and food.... Right now...food!

A tout a l'heure! (Yes...I am too lazy for proper typed accent marks...it's taken me 23 years to learn the proper ones for Spanish...so have some patience with me for the few that are different in French...standard American computer keyboards don't really facilitate foreign languages.... That is my present excuse.) And that is all.