Bonjour Paris!

"You want to live in Paris for awhile?"

When Anthony came home from work to tell me that he might be getting a temporary job transfer to Paris, I couldn't believe it. Like, actually was physically incapable of wrapping my consciousness around the idea. I was honestly too afraid to even try, as if the waves my brain sent out from the effort of comprehension might somehow alter the energy that had manifested such good fortune to begin with.

I still didn't believe we were actually going as I set out to put together decent winter wardrobes to get us both through a Parisian winter. I didn't believe it as I packed my suitcases. I still didn't believe it when our friends gathered together for a heartwarming bon voyage party, or even when we boarded our flight. Not until we touched down at Charles de Gaulle and hopped in a taxi did I let myself finally dive in to the idea of living in Paris. 

As a linguist and hopelessly studious nerd, I relished the idea of learning a new language. That aspect of living abroad I actually did let my brain mull over. Several weeks before our departure date, Anthony and I started trying to learn French using DuoLingo, an online language learning program a lot like Rosetta Stone (only free!). In my first few hours of study, I was taught useful phrases such as, "My dress has a pocket," and "Your duck is perfect."

Curiously enough, I haven't gotten to use those yet. Obvioiusly DuoLingo isn't perfect, but it is free, and I found its odd sentences engaging. Even if I think that learning vocabulary such as "suitcase" and "hotel room" might have been more useful, learning animals and basic adjectives was a lot of fun. However, DuoLingo, in its effort to teach me masculine from feminine noun forms, neglected to tell me it was teaching me vulgarities.

When learning words like "dog" and "cat," DuoLingo gives you a choice to use either the masculine or feminine form. Being a bit of a feminist, I always favored using the feminine form, wanting to give female animals fair representation. I had gone through several lessons practicing talking almost exclusively about female animals when Anthony informed me he had been reading the discussion boards after the lessons and had learned some interesting things. Apparently, he said, the female forms of "dog" and "cat" in French are only used as vulgarities. As in "bitch" and...well, you can guess what cat is.

I was hesitant to believe that a program would be teaching me curse words, so when told to translate to English the French phrase "Ma chienne est sale," I typed in "My bitch is dirty." And it was correct. I also have yet to find an occasion to use "My bitch is dirty" in conversational French, but I'd wager it's easier to fit that into a tête-à-tête than "Your duck is perfect."

Anyhow, my first foray into applying the ghetto street French I had learned from a free Rosetta Stone knock-off program was with our Laotian cab driver. He was splendid. For the twenty or so minutes it took to get from the airport to our apartment, he taught me all sorts of things. I haven't had a formal lesson on how to talk about the weather yet, so he is the only reason I can say "It's raining/snowing/sunny." And he seemed quite pleased as I kept oohing and ahhing as we drove through the increasingly scenic avenues of our new home.

All of Paris looks to me as if it's smeared with buttercream. All the buildings are that sunny shade of fatty dairy product, adorned with curly 19th century iron grates on the windows, much in gingerbread house fashion. Or maybe I'm just fat kid at heart excited to be in the pastry capital of the world. To my surprise, the cab stopped in front of one such building on an exceptionally cute stretch of street. Do we really get to live here? I thought. We thanked the French professor/cab driver profusely and walked through the iron gate to meet Sophie, the real estate agent waiting at the door to show us our apartment.

Sophie was adorable, too. She happily chatted to us in Franglish about how to use the dishwasher and where the spare towels are stored. When he had mostly sorted everything out, she left us with two sets of keys and fobs, mine with a tiny blue Eiffel Tower on the key chain. We bid Sophie adieu and locked the door. Home, in Paris!