Mrenda
5421
What I’ve found is that once you make the effort to speak French, French people will accept you and then switch over to whatever language you can speak, if they do speak it. So once you make an effort to order in French, or ask for a baguette in French, they’ll be happy that you’re not an overbearing, arrogant tourist determined to demand their own culture be accepted wherever they go. And then they’ll generally speak English. Unless you’re English, in which case they’ll speak French.
Exchanges can be hit and miss. Two friends of mine went with the same company at the same time to the same area. One of them ended up with a family living in a rural area, where the family never showered, had a bath that they’d only leave be half filled once a week, and went to bed at 9pm. The other guy spent his nights tearing around the nearby city on the back of a scooter, came home with two tattoos, half his hair missing and a sock full of hard and soft drugs.
I realise both of them are probably full of shit.
My sister had a horrible time with her ‘teach English’ program in France. Luckily she went with her boyfriend cause when she got there the woman she was supposed to be staying with was in the hospital and the company told her to just stay in a hotel until they sorted it out. In the meantime she went to the school she was supposed to teach at and they said they’d never heard of her and had no interest in trying to figure it out. As they burned through money in the hotel, they complained to the company who said ‘Well just get an apartment.’ But to get an apartment you had to have a bank account. And to get a bank account you had to have a French address. All of which would have been taken care of if the company had provided a person for her to stay with, which they were supposed to do. After two weeks of misery, she ended up just coming home flat broke because of all the money spent on hotels and entirely disillusioned with France and how rude every single person she went to get help from was.
You know, maybe there’s one common denominator there and it’s probably not “they were all French”…
Right, but there’s some people who may want to get better using the native language, and not receive a sneer every time. It’s just a humorous reversal of the usual overbearing, arrogant tourist narrative.
Yeah, my sister was a Spanish major/French minor and her boyfriend was a French major, both right out of college. They were doing the program to help their language skills so that they could then come back here to teach, which both of them have since done. But it really was horrible that she’d call us up in tears every day that no one, absolutely no one cared or would help them and that they were running out of money in a foreign country now with no job lined up since the school they were supposed to be at wouldn’t even talk to them and the company people at the headquarters in Paris would just laugh and tell her to grow up because ‘these things happen.’
No, it really is ‘they were all French’. Rudeness and bureaucracy are the French national pastimes. The stereotype is funny because, well, it’s mostly true.
I get a sense these exchange programs have morphed into a cash cow business with little regard for the students’ experience. They just find some random family, throw a few gold pieces at them, and wash their hands of the time consuming details. All they really do is provide a veneer of service and professionalism as a “gateway” into the country. Nice photography and shiny brochures are cheap.
Well I went to Paris for a few days and found everyone to be nice when I was prepared for the worst. So it goes.
Have the Simpsons taught us nothing!!!
Mrenda
5429
I’d imagine actual exchanges would be a lot safer and better than a simple placement programme. I never did a foreign exchange, but when I was in school and playing rugby we were often “hosted” by our counterparts in the Dublin school we were playing against. And then we took them in when they came down to us. I never had a bad experience. I know there’s no cross-cultural dealings or language barriers, but even still we were always treated well, and I think a big part of that was that the links were long established, and there was an actual exchange.
For the placement programmes, I’d imagine you pay for what you get. Established programmes will be expensive, because they actually have checks on the family prior to you going, and they check up on you once you’re there. If you can’t find someone in your school or university who had a good time on one, then the programme is probably a sham. Similarly, if there’s a teacher you trust not to be taking kickbacks, they’ll probably have built up relations with a company that provides a good service. And it all boils down to the fact that staying with a family, with three square meals, and the occasional bit of transport will be expensive.
I think it’s ultimately an issue of demand. There are probably more students wanting to take a 3-6 week exchange program than there are reliable businesses to manage them and good families to house them. Back when this was an upper crust thing, it was probably more manageable and better run; now everybody’s daughter wants dad to pay for a month in Paris to justify those years of French in a country where it’s virtually useless otherwise. And anyway, teaching French in America schools is to a great extent a kind of Anglo-Saxon cultural holdover from the 19th C. when French wss the lingua Franca (literally!) of the civilized world and a mark of class for an English speaker. Today (unless you’re planning to work in Quebec), Spanish or Chinese would make far more sense, and French is just kind of a luxury and school girl fantasy language than a practical one. Not that some haven’t gotten jobs there, with financial or university connections; but for the vast majority, it’s just not useful.
Having attempted to learn Chinese, your advice is not fit to clean dog waste from my shoes. Language, indeed. They should call it “Random Shit We Use To Confuse People.” Fucking tonal bullshit goddamn.
Seriously though I do love the Chinese and all, but that fucking language, man. Gotta fix that shit.
H.
JoshV
5432
While I’ll agree that Spanish, Chinese, Japanese or Korean are all probably more useful languages, there are a lot of french colonies that still speak french.
Oh casual racism and MS Paint, is there anything you can’t make horribly unfunny?
The Chinese language is a race? Who knew . . .
H.
Good enough for Time Magazine.
Marged
5437
The art museum I work at is toying with the idea of a small fantasy/sci fi/comic book art exhibition. I’m so excited!
So, I’m driving home from work tonight, and when I get to the intersection of Routes 2A and 289, I see a dark shape go dashing by, out of the corner of my eye. No sooner had I whipped out my camera than it was crossing the intersection, heading for the railroad tracks ahead and the woods beyond.
Super Enhance-o-Vision:
As it’s a mite blurry, and there are folks from warmer climes here, I’ll have you know that’s a young moose the size of a large horse. Generally not the sort of thing you want to see when you’re on the road, but better when you’re stopped at an intersection than when you’re barreling down the highway.
Damn, that’s a YOUNG moose? Crikey.
My interesting thing recently is that I attended a huge festival devoted to Tribal Style belly dance, one of my hobbies, in northern California.
I took a workshop from a belly dancer with years of experience in doing crazy-ass bellyrolls and layering. She can make her belly do flutters, incredible rolls, things like that, and she can layer them over shimmies so that the combined effect just looks amazing. And I actually learned how to do it! I was already able to do basic belly rolls when I walked into the workshop, and I could almost do flutters. But now thanks to her workshop I can do some stuff that definitely goes beyond that thanks to her.
If you’d have asked me years ago if I’d ever be able to do that kind of thing (nevermind actually perform it in public on stage, even) I’d have laughed at you.
