The Fine Land of the French

It's only natural that in a predominantly catholic country, the secular concept Spring break is replaced by Easter or "Pasqua". For Easter break, we get classes cancelled and everyone either goes home or goes on vacation. I decided to spend my week and a half break in France. I'll admit, I went into this trip with a strong bias toward the French. They were going to be mean, they were going to be snobby, and they would probably pee in their fancy French food because I'm not able to pronounce the items on the menu. But, I decided to go anyway. It's not very often that your boyfriend has an apartment in Paris.
So I packed my bags, took my first ever RyanAir flight (which will also be my last) and found myself in a strange land where people make weird nasal sounds when they're communicating which I tend to stumble over and then swallow like three-day old baguette chunks.
Honestly though, I was impressed and I have now added French to my growing list of languages to learn before I'm thirty (this list also includes Latin, German, to reteach myself Spanish, and Russian)

Here are some nice (and not so nice) things I learned about France:

1. When they laugh at you, it's actually more encouraging than demeaning
You would think that the guy working at Subway would at least speak a little English. That's incorrect. When we went in the first time, my friend Kelly tried asking for a six inch sub using her fingers to demonstrate. The guy looked confused, then started laying out six napkins to make six sandwiches. We've lived in Europe for seven months now and we still can't remember that they don't use inches. Thankfully, he found our attempts to communicate enjoyable (not pathetic as we obviously sounded). He even helped with the pronunciation of words like "oignon" or "laitue". I can now count to ten and successfully pronounce the word for "twenty" which is "vingt". Trust me, it doesn't sound like it looks.


2. Sometimes there are lines....(It is a tourist destination)
We spent one entire day moving from one tourist hot spot to the next hoping that there wouldn't be a two hour line (d'Orsay, Catacombs, Tim Burton exhibit all were a bust).
3. French is absolutely beautiful
If you've ever heard a native French person speak, you know what I mean. There's no snobbery about it. Just pure butter. (Although, Italian will always be my number one).


4. The Louvre is the worst museum in the world.
I cannot imagine a worse way to spend a day than in this museum. I like museums. I went to some unbelievably wonderful museums while in Paris. But, the Louvre was not one of them. It's disgustingly gigantic. Our tour guide said if you looked at everything for only ten seconds without eating or sleeping it would take you more than 6 months to get through the place. It's crowded. Overwhelming. Claustrophobic. And the crowd of a hundred people bunched around a tiny Mona Lisa really isn't worth it. The reputation of French snobbery must have originated amongst the tourists at this cultural Mecca.

Kelly and I in front of the Invisible Pyramid outside of the Louvre

5. Goat cheese is France's way of saying it loves you.

6. The Paris metro is better than Disney Paris.
Full of accordion players, violinist, puppet shows and bleeding drunk men, the Paris metro is full of surprises. And the best part is it's free! Well, sort of... The two for one deal is quite common. For me, this means staying close to Kyle as we use his metro card to go through the turnstile at the same time. For some other stray Parisians who just don't feel like paying, it means grabbing onto to my friend Kelly's waist when her back is turned as she's walking through.

Kyle and Joel goofing around in the metro

7. A good Parisian waiter can make make (or break) your night. 
We ate only one meal in an actual French restaurant (Paris is expensive!). After watching him scold another American woman for accidentally ordering rose wine when she had really wanted red, I was afraid of even ordering at all. The moment our waiter looked down his skinny nose at my pointing and gesturing to a dish on the menu, I was almost sure he'd be the one to pee on my food. Thankfully, we came at the end of the night, and as soon as the clock struck "almost time to get the hell out of here" our nightmare waiter became helpful and jolly. By the end of the night, he had brought us complementary postcards from the restaurant and joked with Kelly as she tried to pronounce the phrase "it was delicious!".

8. And finally, the Eiffel Tour sparkles!

I spent my last two days in Nice, France on the Côte d'Azur. The weather was perfect and I have two square sunburns on each ankle to prove it. In the end, I think France was rather good to me. Soon I will master their elegant "unh"-ing and "oui-ing". Then I will return to eat all their goat cheese and lecture them on the negative consequences of peeing in tourists' food. They will love me.