Darcy's Paris Blog

Supermarket & first day of French class

Today included two firsts: my first outing at Carrefour, and my first day of French class. In between all that was work, which was fine. Everyone again was very friendly, and very supportive of my baby steps with French. At lunch I decided to head to Carrefour, the grocery store near the office, to get a few things. Carrefour is, of course, like everything else in the 'burbs here, in the mall. I also discovered that it's basically like a Super Wal-Mart. They've got everything you could ever possibly need there -- which is great, but makes the trip a lot longer when the place is huge and you can't read the signs. I took a picture of the gigundo wine aisle, which I expected to see in a place in France that's that big to begin with. What I didn't expect to see was Carrefour workers on old-school roller skates. This was a total crack-up. I'm sure it's an efficient way to get around a store that big, though, but it has a certain sock-hop or Sonic drive-in feel to it. Definitely not tres chic.

After work I parked the car at its new garage spot -- today I got word that I actually have a garage now -- hooray! No more parking tickets. The guy at the front was very friendly and complementary again, via his translator, the other guy who worked there. Anyway, after dropping stuff off at the apartment I headed down to my first day of French class. There were supposed to be 6 of us, but today there were only 4 -- even better -- a 27-year-old guy from Spain, a 28-year-old guy from Germany, and a 41-year-old woman from Canada. Luckily English is a common denominator among us. The teacher was 30-ish, I think, and spoke almost zero English to us the whole time. Not when she walked in, no "hello"s in English or anything. It was a little intimidating, but I'm sure it'll make us learn faster. Thank goodness I'd already picked up a few words here and there so I could participate in class -- it was pretty much all conversation. Thank goodness, too, that I'd already studied another language before -- things like all the verb forms would blow my head off if they were all being given to me in French with no English whatsoever. The other people in the class were very friendly, too, and I'm hoping I might even get a few friends out of the deal. After class I took the metro home with the German guy -- he lives near here -- and after withstanding his 20 questions about what I'm doing here, I asked him if he knew anyone else here, either. When he said no, I suggested we exchange email addresses, to which he blankly replied, "But I'll see you on Thursday." Ok, dude, so not for the next 48 hours, but how about for the next quatre mois when neither of us knows anybody? When I explained, he was cool to switch addresses, but I guess he took me pretty literally at first. We have homework, too, which I think is a good sign. Now that I've already made my Carrefour run, that might be what I do tomorrow at lunch...

Oh, also opened the cheapest bottle of wine I've ever had tonight. Bought it last night on the way home for under 4 Euro, a Bordeaux. And it's not bad, either -- makes me wonder how good the good stuff really is...

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posted by Darcy @ 10:41 PM