French Lessons

Hair: Personal adornment or personal
curtain? Eleanor is partial to what I
call the "Cousin It" look.

Eleanor, my eldest child, is a high school freshman in her first semester of French I. Learning a foreign language is challenging for the shy, because teachers insist on making you practice, which requires you to actually speak out loud in class. (I know, right? As any true book nerd could tell you, the whole purpose of learning a foreign language is so that you can correctly pronounce foreign words in your head when the characters in that book you're reading use them.)

So, French is a struggle for her, not academically but socially, and she is a little bit intimidated by this whole talking thing. I empathize with her completely--I took four years of high school French, followed by two years of college French, stayed with a French family for a week my junior year of high school and spent six weeks studying in Paris in college...and I was still intimidated by the thought of actually applying that knowledge by talking to real people.

So I told her the story of the shining moment I learned to really speak French, fluently and with confidence.

It was 1992, and I was studying abroad in Paris in my final summer in college. Overachiever that I was, that would put me at the ripe old age of 20.

Le sigh. Eleanor is closer to 20 than I am. So are Bruce and Betty.
Actually, so is Bob Cat. Damn. I need wine.

Anyway, I mostly hung out with two girls named Rachel and Leslie. The three of us were independent and adventurous, but of the three of us, I was the only one who spoke French.

We were encouraged to explore the city;
however, we were strictly forbidden to
go to Pigalle, the shady red-light district
of Paris. I swear, us getting off the Metro
at the one place in Paris we were forbidden
to get off the Metro was a complete
accident, but the fact that we stopped for
photos before getting back on probably
speaks volumes and may explain the
anecdote that follows.

We decided one weekend to take a trip to Mont St. Michel, on the northern coast of France. Mont St. Michel is a monastery perched on a picturesquely remote island. So, being the designated French speaker, I was in charge of purchasing our train tickets.

Me: We would like 3 tickets to Mont St. Michel.

Train Ticket Guy: There's a train that leaves at midnight, stops at Caen, and then arrives at Mont St. Michel.

Me: Is that midnight Friday or midnight Saturday?

Train Ticket Guy: Midnight Friday.

Me: Perfect!

So, we three young ladies in our backpacks show up at midnight Saturday, which is of course, the time after 11:59 PM on Friday night. You may be able to see where this is going, in which case you're ahead of us.

A train actually arrives at midnight, quelling my last lingering fears about how that conversation with the Train Ticket Guy went. We make it to Caen and look for our connection. It is not until 2 p.m.

WHAT?

As it turns out, every night at midnight there is a train from Paris to Caen. But the immediate connection to Mont St. Michel only happens on weekdays, i.e., right after the 11:59 PM that happens on Thursday. Thankfully, no one was too mad at me, realizing that it was pure madness for any civilized country to schedule a train departure for midnight. Had any parent or responsible adult known our predicament, they would have suggested a hostel or hotel; however, as mentioned, we were young, independent, and adventurous and felt that that would be a poor use of money that could otherwise go to wine.

Speaking of peeing in the park, this is one
of my favorite statues (at Fontainbleu).
I love the dogs' expressions. Diana the
Huntress is all power and energy and
doing the Queen of the Hunt thing, while
the dogs are like, Meh, I gotta go.

So we decided to spend the night in the train station, obviously. You meet all kinds of people at a deserted train station after midnight; fortunately, none of them killed us. We met a young couple going to "meet the parents." There was a large, loud, drunk group of creepy guys who kept trying to hit on us. That was amusing for a while, but eventually we went back to the waiting room and slept on the train station floor. If I told you this was the only public waiting area I slept in on this particular trip, I'd be a liar. It wasn't the cleanest, either.

You don't exactly sleep in, when you're sleeping in a train station, so we got up at 6 and wandered around Caen. This happened to be the day of the local celebration honoring the Normandy invasion in World War II (it was June 6). The thing I remember most from Caen was at the festival, when a young mom suddenly stopped, pulled down her 2-year-old's pants, and swung him in the air so he could pee in the park.

Anyway, some hot cocoa and sightseeing later, we got back on the train and finally made it to Pomtorson, the town closest to Mont St. Michel, at which point, as the designated French speaker, it was my job to call the hostel and ask them to come pick us up. And it was the hostel's job to tell me that we were too far out of town and they weren't going to and we couldn't make them and we might as well just stay in town.

It was at this moment that six years of French finally paid off. I was tired. I had slept in a train station, gotten lost in a strange town I hadn't intended to visit. I had a very bad cold. I had had enough. So I let the desk clerk have it. I argued, vehemently, eloquently, rapidly, occasionally profanely, and above all fluently in French for an entire five-minute phone card. It was the culmination of my French education, which almost made up for the fact that I lost.

It probably goes without saying that we did not give up at this point. We did manage to find lodging in town, and had pizza at a restaurant that sold pizza with fried eggs on it, although none of us ordered that (the limits of our adventurousness didn't go quite that far).

In the morning, we walked to the depot to rent bicycles to ride to Mont St. Michel, a distance of some 7 km or so. Unfortunately, the bike rental place wasn't going to open for another 5 hours. So, naturally, we hitchhiked. After walking a couple of kilometers, we got picked up by an empty tour bus and the driver lectured us about the dangers of hitchhiking all the way to Mont St. Michel.

Mont St. Michel. For some reason, other people had no problem reaching it in much less dramatic ways, as evidenced by the fact that we ran into one of the other people from our group there. Also, as evidenced by the fact that Sunday mass was super crowded, and it is probably safe to assume that none of those people had to hitchhike on an empty tour bus.
In hindsight, I was like the worst tour guide EVER.

So, as much as I might hope that Eleanor gets over her shyness and becomes fluent in French...I have to say, I hope she becomes fluent in a more traditional manner, by speaking in the safe, well-lit, climate controlled classroom environment and that she never, ever takes a train leaving at midnight.

Me, on the left at Chateau de Azay-le-Rideau.
Ah, 1989!