2008 Woodie Awards
Summer a la France
Amy Popplewell
Issue date: 9/12/07 Section: Opinion
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Café- it tastes better, it lasts longer, for a lot of people is a need turned to pleasure. It's time for yourself, to gather your thoughts and get your day started. Or you meet with your friends, kill your hangover, just like everyone else.
Adapting to a new culture takes preparation, cultural relativity and dedication up to changing your daily life. Adaptation to this culture means changing every consistency in your life into a pleasure.
Everything takes longer, there are no to-go cups of coffee, in its place is at least a half-hour of relaxation, normally including a good friend or a book and a cigarette. Conversations are more descriptive, and if they're in the beginning stages of learning the language, they're long and confusing. Relationships, romantic or friendly, take much longer to develop, but have more meaning in the end.
Lunch breaks are not a mere half-hour of scarfing down a homemade sandwich at your desk, all the shops close for two-to-three hours every afternoon and all the restaurants are filled with good friends. Of course not everyone works in the town where I lived, Aix-en-Provence, as most of the economy thrives off of trust funds, so it's very stylish and social.
The produce markets make an appearance every morning, which was where most of the town mingled. "People take time at the open-air markets to admire the fruits, to taste the honey, to talk with the man selling the turnips (or apples)." Katie Soulard said, a senior at Chico State who I studied with in France. We always admired how much attention the French give to detail.
One of the hardest things to get over was when the café workers would just break out in English the second they heard our accent. We couldn't figure out if they were just mocking us, challenging us, or practicing their English. Turns out it was a mixture of the 3, and not as much of the expected mockery.
According to the workers at the Italian restaurant below my apartment called La Dolce Vita, every year Americans come to Aix bearing intentions of meeting French people and mastering the language, but most of the time ended up taking the easy way out and hanging out with the Americans they could relate to, thus leaving them at best mediocre French speakers.
Adapting to a new culture takes preparation, cultural relativity and dedication up to changing your daily life. Adaptation to this culture means changing every consistency in your life into a pleasure.
Everything takes longer, there are no to-go cups of coffee, in its place is at least a half-hour of relaxation, normally including a good friend or a book and a cigarette. Conversations are more descriptive, and if they're in the beginning stages of learning the language, they're long and confusing. Relationships, romantic or friendly, take much longer to develop, but have more meaning in the end.
Lunch breaks are not a mere half-hour of scarfing down a homemade sandwich at your desk, all the shops close for two-to-three hours every afternoon and all the restaurants are filled with good friends. Of course not everyone works in the town where I lived, Aix-en-Provence, as most of the economy thrives off of trust funds, so it's very stylish and social.
The produce markets make an appearance every morning, which was where most of the town mingled. "People take time at the open-air markets to admire the fruits, to taste the honey, to talk with the man selling the turnips (or apples)." Katie Soulard said, a senior at Chico State who I studied with in France. We always admired how much attention the French give to detail.
One of the hardest things to get over was when the café workers would just break out in English the second they heard our accent. We couldn't figure out if they were just mocking us, challenging us, or practicing their English. Turns out it was a mixture of the 3, and not as much of the expected mockery.
According to the workers at the Italian restaurant below my apartment called La Dolce Vita, every year Americans come to Aix bearing intentions of meeting French people and mastering the language, but most of the time ended up taking the easy way out and hanging out with the Americans they could relate to, thus leaving them at best mediocre French speakers.
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