You can't see this from a tour bus

Tonight has proven rather eventful and perhaps somewhat revealing of the sort of French culture you can’t find on a post card. As such, it merits its own blog post, and besides, I thought it would be a nice break for y’all if I broke up the novel-length entries I’ve been throwing your way.

To start, my host dad revealed to me the secret of speaking the French language. I had been drinking tea for the caffeine boost as I worked on grad school essays, and my French had begun to suffer from all the English. At this point in the semester, my French has noticeably improved, or my comprehension at any rate. I have, however, begun to notice my ability to speak the language plummets after I have been thinking, reading, or writing in English. Because of this, I try to read mostly in French, and when I write, it is usually for class, and so is in French as well. As for thinking, well, I don’t. Ok, so I think a little, it’s just in Franglish. My routine, however, has been shaken recently by all my grad school applications, which unfortunately cannot be written in Franglish.

It’s no surprise that writing something as intense as grad school essays takes some ardent thinking, and even more so for me because I have the grammar, spelling, and phrasing of two different languages floating around my head. It takes serious concentration to keep the two straight. This is the context I found myself in tonight, and I had begun to notice my speaking skills rapidly deteriorating. For example, when explaining my philosophy of colors suitable for editing papers, I said “tu vois, le red est pire que le bleu parce qu’il est beaucoup plus harsh.” “Red” and “Harsh”, for the record, are NOT French, but I didn’t catch my mistake until much later.

I must have responded with one too many English words mingled in my French phrasing because my host dad looked at me and said, “Quand tu bois du thé, tu pense en anglais, mais quand tu bois du vin, tu pense en français! Ça c’est le secret de la langue française.” This translates to “when you drink tea, you think in English, but when you drink wine, you think in French! That’s the secret to the French language.” So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong.

If tonight were a play, my little conversation with my host dad, while amusing, was only Act I, scene i. As I type, one of my host sisters is having raw onions taped to her head. Yes, raw onions. I love all my host brothers and sisters, but Louise is up there on the favorites list. She is 14 and one of the most dramatic people I have ever met. Recently, she has been complaining of a mysterious malady that seems to have had a grave impact on all aspects of her life. The illness has migrated from her throat to her ears, and they are taking it rather poorly. As a result, Louise has been moaning about the house, ensuring everyone is aware of her pain.

This afternoon, I was working at the dining room table when I heard her yelping from the kitchen. She kept this up for a while, but because her mother was in there with her, I felt confident that it wasn’t life threatening. About 30 minutes later, I was coming out of my room and I saw Louise sitting at the computer with gauze strapped all around her head. Call me crazy, but I’ve never seen a malady short of brain surgery that merits such bandaging. I found it rather odd and maybe a bit drastic to have such bandaging for a simple cold, but thought little more of it. I merely looked at her, said “aww..la pauvre” and went down to dinner.

During dinner, I gathered that the gauze was keeping some kind of medicine in her ears, but it wasn’t until after dinner that the truth came out. As people began leaving the table, Louise pulled off the gauze and large-ish white things started falling out. Horrified and fearing something was seriously wrong with the poor girl, I demanded “qu’est ce que c’est?!?” It was then that the smell of raw onions slapped me in the face. Yes, the gauze had been holding raw onions to her ears, and it was time to change them out.

I listened as my host dad and Pauline, my other host sister, explained to me that the onions cleared up the lymph nodes. I'm skeptical of the remedy, but even if there is some truth to what they say, I’m not sure it’s worth having onions taped to your head.