Segment 5: A Week of Vacation
This past week we had a fall break of sorts from language classes. Most of the week, I worked pretty hard: studying to try and feel caught up with my French class, practicing and deciding on some repertoire for the next few weeks, and generally doing odds and ends that had fallen by the wayside. I stayed pretty busy and worked pretty hard, but over the weekend, I relented and enjoyed more leisurely and social days.
I tried out a few conversation groups on the campus where I lived. Two out of three were frustrating because the leaders spoke quickly and not loudly enough for the rather boomy room and because their proposed topics of conversation were not particularly relatable as far as vocabulary and feeling the necessity to voice my own opinion (ex. Artificial Intelligence, Sexual abuse in the Catholic church, and a 50 year-old quote from the front of an atlas, I kid you not. The leader even admitted that it wasn’t easy for native speakers to understand…). The third class was much better as the teacher asked each of us about ourselves and then we talked about our COVID experiences in our home countries. This was finally encouraging!
I downloaded a language exchange app and started sending messages back and forth with several women who want to improve their English. At first, I was not so sure about the app because of the absurd amount of random dudes who started sending me messages… gee whiz. But I have found responding to these messages while I ride public transit to be a great way to get myself thinking and creating sentences in French.
I attended several concerts this week as well. On Thursday evening, I had the delight of attending short performances of three friends at the Musée d’Orsay. They are participating in a wonderful Song Residency that meets four different weeks during the year to work with master teachers and perform at the museum and an abbey north of the city. Each pianist-singer duo chose a piece of art and programmed 15 minutes of music to present in front of it. I think this is such a wonderful interdisciplinary collaboration! Especially relating music and art that were composed around the same time period.
That same evening, I was invited to an Austrian wind quintet performance and enjoyed pieces by four Austrian composers of the last century and a half, none of whose work I was familiar with but all of which I enjoyed immensely. This concert also helped me see some of the progress that I am making with language, as I understood every word of German that was spoken but was meanwhile crafting responses in my head and discovered that my new go-to second language is French!
Over the course of the week, I really felt like I made progress: with language, yes, but also with being proactive and working towards living adventurously, which is so important in a life abroad. Otherwise, it is too easy to stay in a safe and comfortable place and never accomplish anything. Finding a balance can be difficult, though. For example, I am practicing saying yes to things without figuring out all the details first. Thus, I ended up meeting a large part of the American Mennonite clan in Paris to go to the zoo in the morning, then I met the sister of a colleague from New York in the afternoon and after that I met my American friends who were in town for the song academy residency and we had a ball of a time laughing and being shushed in a cafe. This of course, was a marvelous day! But, it was more than I had talked in one day since this past summer in Vermont (maybe even more than that!) and it was all in English. There wasn’t space in the day to be practicing sentence structures in my head. Thus, my first morning back in class today felt a little intense.
I feel like my steps are starting to fall into a rhythm of sorts and like I can start creating smaller goals within my larger goals. For example, Fabienne and Guillaume invited me to spend some of my Christmas holiday with them in the south of France, and thus, one of my smaller goals is to feel comfortable with my French speaking by then, able to express myself without so many stops and hesitations (though this is hardly a quantifiable goal…).
A new month now, and what adventures will it hold?
Marie in Paris
