Kelly Diot

Interesting things I’ve seen /done recently:

· A lady taking her dog for a walk IN A STROLLER. Excusez-moi, Madame, but isn’t the point of walking a dog to give it exercise?

· A lady riding her bike down the street singing opera very loudly.

· For kids learning to ride a bike, the French have bikes with handles on the back (kind of similar to the handle of a shovel) so parents can hang on to their tots without having to bend over. Genius.

· The use of “wetback” as a technical term for Mexican immigrants to the U.S., and the term “Taco Belt” for where they migrate to in the textbook my students are reading. Yikes. I don’t want my students visiting the states and horribly offending someone. Going to have a chat with the teacher about that one. In fact, the whole book is strangely written in a way I would never speak. I don’t even think Brits speak that way. For example, they were learning about Thanksgiving and instead of just regular pilgrims they call them the “Pilgrim Fathers.”

· My students have the cutest French accents. One was doing a presentation on Central Park and said, “Ze park is in ze ‘eart of Man’attan. Zere is a big green space. It is splendid and serene.”

· On my way home today I found an awesome bookstore and bought a French copy of the book that the show True Blood is based on. It was an easy read in English. I’m going to try and read a few pages a day to improve my French.

Today we had orientation, which if it were the States, we would have had BEFORE we started school. It was a bit dull. ß Wow, can you tell I’ve been hanging out with Brits? It was all information I would have LOVED to know last week, but now that I’ve been to my school it was fairly redundant. I did get a few good tips and even a free delicious lunch out of it. I met a girl named Sandra that is from Orange County and is here doing a grad program through NYU. I can’t imagine taking five classes on top of being a language assistant. Yikes. I have been eating yogurt every day, it is SO good here. I love it. It is dessert for lunch and dinner. Which I guess makes up for the pastries for breakfast.

I have been going up seven flights of stairs to my room for the exercise. I’ve realized that from a combination of bike riding and running my calves are rock solid, so I figured I would do my derriere some good. J I haven’t seen anyone else on my floor so I have a lot of privacy when I finally reach the top floor wheezing uncontrollably. I love my room, but I’ve kind of been an idiot since I moved in. The first morning I was hurrying down the stairs to leave for work, totally biffed it and missed three steps, falling on my knees on the landing below. I haven’t skinned my knee since I was like seven years old. Maybe being an American in Paris makes you regress to a previous infantile state? That’s how it feels sometimes.

Then, today I needed to send an e-mail to my school about whom I am observing tomorrow before I left or they wouldn’t get it in time to get back to me before tomorrow. There is free internet downstairs so I took my computer out to the street. Of course on the bench outside my front door my computer couldn’t pick up the network I needed, so I ended up squatting on the corner like an idiot precariously balancing my computer on my (injured) knee only to find that I had lost the signal AFTER logging in to my e-mail. Of course I was running late so I ran (okay, I lost some speed toward the top) up seven flights of stairs with my computer. I quickly deposited it in my room and hurried back down, careful to avoid recreating the scene of my accident yesterday only to trip on my way out the front door DIRECTLY in front of a Frenchmen, who smiled at me sympathetically as if to say, “Silly American.” Le sigh. Sometimes my life is like a sitcom that is only not funny to ME because I’m living it.

Stay tuned for the next episode of Stupid American in France! ;)