Bad French, La Comédie Française, etc.

This is gonna be another ramble-y post, guys, so I apologize in advance. First off, I was told I should share something I put on my Facebook but didn't make it onto this blog. The other day I made an egregious grammar error in my intensive French course and my professor laughingly told me that French people might vomit (hurler) if they heard me say that, while miming vomiting. Guess that means I'm improving! I imagine it must have been like hearing someone say "I now will go have to store" in English. Whenever I speak bad French, which is 99% of the time, I hear the mistake about a minute or so after I make it and think about how much of a travesty it would have sounded like in English. The other day I was trying to ask if I should turn off the light but I couldn't remember how to use the conditional ("should I") and I didn't know how to say turn off, so I ended up saying something like "I do this? Close the light?" in French and poking the light switch. The person I was talking to kindly laughed at me and told me I could turn it off. I'm constantly getting the gender of words wrong, I have lost the ability to do the French "r" correctly, and I think my verb tenses are actually getting worse! I'm hoping it's a dip before improvement and I have a theory about why it's happening. In school I got to sit and think before I spoke and now I have to get it out there as fast as I can so as not to annoy native speakers. So whatever comes out, comes out! And they aren't correcting me as often as a professor might so I get in the habit of saying the most incorrect things so long as I can be understood. Here's to hoping that one gets better!

Ok, next topic is food again. I had a weird sandwich today that I feel the need to share. I can't tell what they are in the school cafeteria when I order and they aren't labeled so I always just hope for the best. Today's was a salami sandwich with pickles and BUTTER. I swear to goodness I thought it was cheese because it was so thickly spread but it was butter! It was weird but actually really good. I realized I never confirmed everyone's burning question: do French people really wander the streets of Paris holding baguettes. And the answer is yes they actually do! Because a single Frenchman (or woman) could probably eat an entire baguette his- or herself but restrain themselves to one per reasonable sized family per day, they buy their baguette fresh daily and it is consumed at dinner and the rest for breakfast or something. So on the way home from work or something they'll just grab a baguette and carry it in its little paper sleeve home!

They also mostly shop in a very small radius around their house. I live within a 5 minute walking distance of: a pharmacy, an ATM, wedding shops, a baker, several cafés (one with to-go crêpe stand attached), a butcher, a grocery store, a photography store, some general stores, a professional hairdresser store, bars, and a tabac which is often a café-tabacco shop-phone store-everything-you-could-ever-need store. Pharmacies here are literally just pharmacies with medicine and the like, although they are great because pharmacists here are basically doctors. But they aren't like CVS or something, a tabac is more like CVS.

Side note: I want to add that I initially spelled pharmacy as pharmacie (which is how you spell it in French) and had to correct myself. I only noticed because my browser kindly underlines everything I spell incorrectly.

On to what I've done! Last night my program had an outing to see Dom Juan by Molière at La Comédie Française theater and it was lovely. For those of you that don't know who Molière is, the most simple comparison I can make is that he's the French Shakespeare. But Molière mainly did comedies and Shakespeare did a lot of tragedies. They're from a similar time period and are very famous and excellent playwrights, okay? So anyway, we had read some excerpts in class (and I read an English translation to prepare myself) and it was funny and interesting and lovely. Of course, I sat in a weird spot, but I was 100% okay with that.

La Comédie Française

The view from my seat. Front row in the corner! My eyes barely could see over the stage because I am a tiny person.

On the way home I saw some graffiti I'd like to share with the world.

"Dad would like me to be a lawyer. Me, [I want to be] a painter."

So anyway that's all for now. Tomorrow is my last day of the intensive French course, and then I have 2 days of orientation at Institut Catholique de Paris and after that I start classes on Monday!

Bisous,
La vache espagnole