Première Message

Let me preface this by saying that I am using my roommate's French laptop with French keyboard and thus will likely truncate my post when my brain and fingers are getting too pissed off at one another to cope (basically the A, W, Z & Q are flipped around, the M is off too, and forget about punctuation marks and numbers...)

My bags were way too heavy and now an embarrassingly large portion of my arms, neck and shoulders are quite sore from dragging the bags up several flights of stairs to get out of the metro. Thankfully there is a lift to get up to my flat. It is an itty bitty european lift with room for three people max, and only in a row front to back, so I imagine it'd be awkward to be the person sandwiched in the middle.

The flat is amazing, far too nice for a beginner flat in Paris honestly. The short version is that I am living with a friend of a friend of a friend from Penn. She owns the flat so is simultaneously my roommate and landlord, which I suppose has the potential to be awkward but thus far has just been sweet (e.g. she's letting me stay for the first week for free and I can basically peace out if I so choose).

She is British so I've been getting as much of an introduction into the ways of the British as the French. This evening she had two of her fellow expat Brit friends over for dinner during which I largely sat and listened because I was insecure about my horrid American accent. (One on one with my roomate has been fine, but three on one was unfair). When I did speak my linguistic instinct was to match their accent, but my don't-sound-like-an-ass instinct was to just speak normally, so I probably ended up sounding like I don't speak much at all.

The most interesting thing about what essentially amounted to my eavesdropping on their conversation is that they kept talking about the Brits and the French and the Germans as if they were just the next town over, and of course, effectively they are. Americans seem to deal with foreign countries with much more distance. We hardly treat Canada and Mexico as international peers, and everyone else is a decent flight away. A few years ago I was chatting with a friend from L.A. and I mentioned something about the 'tri-state area,' -- New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut -- which forms the geographic basis for all our local news and weather. Friend-from-L.A. was intrigued because she said in L.A. the only state of any constant local interest was California. This struck me as odd in the same yet exactly opposite way as my new British friends talking about country A, B, and C all in one breath seemed odd. And of course these girls all speak a healthy smattering of French and German on top of their native English, which just drives me mad with jealousy. Then again, befriending British girls while in Paris won't improve my French much...