Today more or less marks my second week here in Paris. The first week was marked by jet lag. I was just in a completely unpleasant, zombie-fied state. I couldn’t stay awake at work, I couldn’t sleep at the hotel room, and when I finally did fall into slumber, it would be like 1-2 hours before I’d have to wake up. This second week has been anything but laggy however. It’s been a succession of opening bank accounts, credit cards, apartment searching, lease signing in addition to daily work, 1-2 hour commuting, and hulu/slingbox sessions (thx juna). Life has been pretty busy, but it should slow down once we are done transitioning. We signed a lease which begins on Feb 1st and now there’s a laundry list of things to do here, such as sign up for internet/tv/phone, set up electricity, get money into my French bank account and then a few loose ends back at home, such as pick up my work permit, coordinate storage and shipment of our possessions, buy loads of two-ply toilet paper, then Helen and I fly back to Paris permanently for a year.
Things have been smooth so far, because we are mostly interfacing with English speaking people. The biggest headache by far has been the language barrier. While the Eiffel Tower probably defines the typical Paris experience, the Tower of Babel defines mine. If you are not familiar with it, the Tower of Babel is a biblical story in an ancient time where all the world spoke only English but God found it fit to “confuse” the nations and have them all speak different languages. For example, if you took Spanish, soup is sopa, whereas soap is jabon. In English “4″ is just the number 4, but in Chinese, the “4″ is the number 4 and also means death. Things are just as crazy here in France, for example, the movie “It’s Complicated” is titled “Pas Si Simple“, which interpreted back in English is “Not So Simple”. Apparently, when the Tower of Babel fell, God struck the word “complicated” from the French lexicon. The biggest pain is when we are ordering food, which is a huge problem because the only reason why we came to Paris was to order food… and order lots of it. Unfortunately we can’t read half of the menu– it might as well be scribble scrabble, and when we finally do order we’re so nervous of getting it wrong and being unintelligible that it tends to ruin the first half of our dining experience. The waiter is confused, we’re confused, I mean how hard is it to get some plain tap water?
My worst encounter by far was at a nearby Korean restaurant, which for me is like being in a foreign land within a foreign land. The menu was in Korean with French captions. I had the brilliant idea of ordering in Korean, triumphantly rattling off the names of dishes I know. I felt like I was doing her a favor, but now she assumed I could speak Korean, so she said something to me and I replied back in broken Korean. By the look on her face, I knew confusion was in the air, so I repeated myself but got absolutely no where. I did the second best thing and attempted to speak to her in my dilapidated, non-existent French. As her face grew more and more puzzled, I could tell that this vertiginous conversation was spiraling out of control so I did what any red blooded American would do: speak to her in English. She took one last befuddled look at me, and asked someone else to wait on my table. Once we are all settled down, French lessons are definitely going to be a priority.
