Lessons Learnt The Hard Way So Far

1. Pascale is not a man’s name. (See previous entry)

2. In a coffee shop, if you want to order the same thing as your companion, use ‘le pareil’ (‘similar’), not ‘la même’ (‘same’). My colleague and the waiter looked equally horrified when I apparently asked to drink from the same cup as her.

3. In France, the first answer is always ‘no’. The proverb may suggest that le client est roi, but in fact, most French people in the service industry value only two qualities in their customers: deference and tenacity. The same man who swears blind that all the tellers in the bank are busy until Saturday week will miraculously find you an appointment to open an account within the next ten minutes – but only after a long and unavoidable ritual of genuflection, sob stories and sheer doggedness.

4. It takes an incredibly short amount of time to have one’s brain hijacked by the French language. When typing the previous paragraph, my British spellchecker harrumphed at my gallified words like ‘inavoidable’ and ‘obstinence’; it appears I’ve already forgotten several English words. And I’ve even started talking to myself in French from time to time; only this evening, I was walking through town, mumbling to myself under my breath, “Où est ce foutu truc, eh? Où est ce salaud?” before I realised what I was doing. And this is only my second day here.

5. However, it takes a very long time to lose one’s British puerile sense of humour. The road where I bought my mobile phone is called Rue Le Bastard. I nearly had to be escorted off the premises when I discovered that while in the shop.

6. The French are solely responsible for at least half the world’s deforestation. Everything you do requires a dozen photocopies of each of the thousand or so documents you have to sign. Then, to make things even more complicated, you have to get it stamped by Monsieur So-and-So, but he only works on Fridays from 11h to 12h30, and then when you’ve tracked him down, he tells you that you have to get it validated by his secretary but she works in an office in a completely different building down the street which is only open on the fifth Sunday after Pentecost for an hour in the afternoon, and what makes it worse is that nobody thought to tell you this in the first place. Ah, la France: liberté, egalité, bureaucratie.