Day 42: Stamps Aren't Always for Mailing Things

12 octobre 2009 (Day 42)
It was hard waking up this morning. Sunrise isn’t until 8:32 am and when you have to get up at 7am it makes it difficult! It was okay though because the sun was shining! It was a perfectly clear, crisp autumn day. You could practically smell the homemade apple pie baking, hear the scarecrows groaning under the weight of crows, and feel the excitement of Mother Nature welcoming fall. Everyone was complaining that it was cold, but that sunshine was beaming right through me so I was warm all day long because I was so glad that it was clear and sunny.
Today with Madame Bonnier we practiced our Parisian R in phonetics. I can hold my own with the R, but the Spaniards were having a hard time. Bless their hearts. After class Madame Bonnier complimented me on my accent. She said that I didn’t have much of an American accent and then continued to talk to me about me wanting to be a teacher. I have a sneaking suspicion all the teachers talk about us. And I have had it up to my cute nose with people telling me “ca va arrive” or “it will come to you.” Speaking fluently doesn’t magically come overnight; it takes practice and a lifetime of working to become bilingual. I appreciated the compliment though, because it definitely doesn’t feel like I speak well in her class. She is always correcting my intonation and pronunciation. My favorite word of the day was Himalaya. I could not say it in a French accent if someone was threatening to push me off the Eiffel Tower, it is that bad!
I went to get my carte de sejour recepisse aka “we can do all this paperwork but cannot seem to get you the real thing so here is something that looks like the real thing until we do some pointless things and make the real one.” The man wouldn’t let me wait in line because I didn’t have a “timbre” or stamp. Thankfully he showed me what one looked like. You see, I had this gross misunderstanding that it was a stamp for mailing things and that they wanted you to buy a stamp to send your carte de sejour. I tried getting one at a Tabac nearby, but she said I’d have to go into centre-ville (the center of the city centre-ville). I figured that I might as well just go to the post office, seeing as it was a stamp that I needed. I waited in line at the post office and the nice man somehow understood what I wanted and said I couldn’t get it there but needed to go to Prefactsbingo, le Durianbo, or a Tabac. Seeing as I only understood the tabac part, I went to another little convenience store and asked for a timbre for 55 with OMI and held out my euro. Long story short, it was 55 euros and not 55 centimes. I’m pretty sure everyone thought I was crazy, but I thought I was getting a stamp for the mail, not a stamp that is like a receipt that says that I paid some random convenience store 55 euros. I got back to where you pick up your recepisse and the lady wouldn’t take me because she wanted to go on her lunch break. I went to fencing and came back early, only to wait for a long time. They don’t believe in first come, first serve here, so an Asian girl and I vented about this. After starting at 11am I finally got my recepisse at 2:15. Now I am to wait for a letter for a doctor’s appointment and then eventually I may be able to live here legally.
There were a lot (a lot being several, as in three) new girls at fencing class today. It was fun to see how bad they were because it showed me how much I’ve progressed. It was actually difficult fencing them because they didn’t have fencing skills! One girl was Asian, didn’t speak French, but knew some English, so I translated David’s French into English so she could translate my English for herself into Chinese. Whew!
Poor Madame Josse was sick today and couldn’t get the projector working in art history. We mostly talked about George de la Tour in class. I had a lovely dinner of potatoes and ham [more like really thick bacon] that tasted delish. A kid came and sat by me who honest to goodness looked like Matt McGrath, a young man I went to high school with. I had a strong desire to take a picture of him so I could show Matt that he has a twin, but I couldn’t think of an inconspicuous way to do so; I just stared at him for the rest of dinnertime instead.
Vive la France!