Muserology Cafe

Une Nouvelle Mode de Vie (May/June 2009)

by Elaine Gillis, age 15, France

My first international plane ride was like any other I had taken before, only longer. This trip, a year and a half ago, was taking me toward my new home: France, land of baguettes and berets and snooty French people riding bicycles—as far as I knew.

We landed (my mother, sister and I), found our suitcases at the baggage claim, and went outside to wait for my father, who had been in France for the past month studying the language. He would have to speak French for work, and my sister and I would be going to a French school, in spite of the fact that we spoke about ten words between the two of us.

The first day of school was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. I didn’t understand a word, though I notified the teacher, with a sentence repeated a thousand times, that I was a foreigner. The first few days dragged by slowly; each foreign word I heard was followed by an internal “HELP!” I was afraid of what others would think, as well as how I would be able to survive if I didn’t understand the lessons. My sister, Deirdre, was in roughly the same situation, though she didn’t have exams coming up at the end of the school year—a bit of information that I received with great horror.

Along with the language, I had a whole new culture to learn. Cultural differences took many different forms: food, architecture, customs…There are at least 30 varieties of cheese at every supermarket; almost any part of an animal is available for sale (pigeon, cow tongue, rabbits and rabbit innards, horse); and I saw more bread varieties in three seconds at a tiny grocery store than I had ever previously eaten. The food here is also affected by our proximity to Germany: sausages, choucroute (sauerkraut), and tarte flambé (pizza minus the tomato sauce) are all traditional dishes.

As for the customs, the bise (air kisses, one on each cheek) is the traditional greeting between friends or family. In small towns, total strangers greet one another while passing by. People use public transportation much more than where I’m from; my sister and I take the train to and from school every day, along with other students, people going to their jobs, and people going shopping. The whole country more or less shuts down from noon to 2 PM: children and workers either go home, go to a restaurant to eat lunch, or head to their cafeteria. At 2 PM, classes continue and work starts up again. The day goes on, even for schoolchildren, until 5 PM.

The towns and cities here are older than most American ones; my little village is more than a thousand years old. Europe is a much richer place than America in terms of history. I feel much closer to the past because there are reminders of it all around me: old walls, signs saying that a certain pope was born three miles away, plaques set up to tell you that this was the site of a Roman camp, and so on.

Another reminder of history is the magnitude of damage from the wars between France and neighboring Germany. Our little village has been pillaged and burned several times in the past. It was completely destroyed in World War I, along with the surrounding woods. Just a 15-minute walk from town, you will find a bunker where soldiers fought and died less than a century ago, overgrown now with ivy. The dark, open doorway gives you a feeling of past hardships and suffering that leaves you cold long after you’ve gone back to the sunshine.

After a year and a half of survival and adaptation, life gets easier and easier but still remains a challenge. The language has become comprehensible, and expressing myself is no longer a problem. I know the day-to-day customs now as if they were my own, and the people are very friendly. The problem is that I am constantly reminded that this isn’t really my country. My accent is one reminder. Another is the way in which people speak about other countries: although American citizens like me are accepted here, America as a whole is greatly frowned upon.

When you live in America, you might watch a TV program about another country and not truly realize that it’s a real place, completely different from where you are, and that people there know nothing about you or your own mode de vie. The world is much larger for me than it used to be; I realize that other places and cultures exist, and I want to know them. What I have learned here, and am still learning, has affected me much more than I would have expected, and this greatly outweighs the difficulties.