Un Peu de Background

I’m starting to develop a serious urge to start writing about all the Frantastic things that are happening here, but first let me lay out a few facts. About 8,001 people live in Pézenas, and the 8,001st lives on the 3rd floor of the student dormitories at Charles Allies Professional High School. He enjoys the local cuisine immensely, and uses his patchwork linguistic knowledge to maintain a pseudo-teaching position, thus allowing him to continue tasting all things local and delicious. (Back to the first person) After about 4 weeks of being here, I have to say this place has begun to have an incredibly positive effect on me. At the very beginning I enjoyed it because of the climate, the sea, and the little lizards that spastically cruise around the pavement like they own the place. But very quickly I found that, based on horrifying testimonies from other English assistants in the region, I am very fortunate to have been specifically placed at Charles Allies. The people here have made this an amazing experience, not necessarily the consistent weeks of 70 degrees with sun.

...Okay, that’s a lie. Like the unification of Jif Super Chunk peanut butter and Smucker’s raspberry preserves, it’s the combination of the two that makes this a truly unique adventure. Moving on!

One surprising evening I met a couple from Indiana at a local café. When they looked at me incredulously after I mentioned, in true Midwestern diplomatic fashion, that our Minnesota Gophers had humiliated their Hoosiers the evening prior, our conversation quickly shifted to the question, "What are you doing here?" In America I believe the equivalent to this would be, "Why are you not wearing pants today?" It’s a pertinent issue that demands investigation. Because as appealing as it seems to visit a quaint French village with a rich history, vibrant weekend markets, and more scenic vineyards than bidets, Pézenas finds itself smack dab in the middle of about 10 other villages which offer nearly the same or better experience. To the southeast, most honeymooning couples would find the beaches of Sète plus manifiques, and everyone else would probably want to re-enact battle scenes from the movie Gladiator in the Roman arenas of nearby Nîmes. It’s hard to believe that a city like Pézenas, with buildings dating back to before the days of J.C., simply wouldn’t be unique enough to warrant some serious tourism. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not calling upon the people of the world to rediscover this place. On the contrary, it works absolutely in my favor. A tourist walking the streets on a weekday in October is about as common as a baguette being cooked in a microwave. As a result I have often found myself being treated as a local, until I start trying to speak the local language.

In truth, my French is not that bad. I was a bit concerned when a student asked me how many years I had studied French, and I came to grips with the frightening reality that I’d been hitting the books de grammaire for nine years. Nine years and I can’t understand a word anyone is saying, I thought. There’s a nice little title on my college transcript that says “French Minor,” which I probably milked dry of any credibility a long time ago. Fortunately, like so many things, “minor” has a fantastically different spelling in French: “sous-spécialisation.” So in my mind, that’s got to have added at least a couple more weeks of swagger. Either way, I’m learning. There are days where I wish I had the camera out because I just explained to a group of students how the Green Bay Packers almost won the NFC Championship last year. But then there are days where I almost completely shut down and can’t even grab a single word from a colleague’s conversation and run with it. That’s okay, says everyone, and I believe it because most of them can’t understand my language…another eye-opening experience to add to the collection. On those days, it’s nice to know that I have that 3rd-floor room in which to retire, and a place to rest my brain until I’m ready for the next moment of discovery to find its way in.