Mes premiers jours à Bordeaux

It has been almost a year since I moved to Bordeaux, and I believe its time for a few reflections on the whole experience. I couldn’t understand a word if French when I arrived. I had no idea how ostracizing it would be to live in a country, work in a school, or dine in an apartment in which I couldn’t communicate readily with the people there. On the flight from Amsterdam to Bordeaux, I struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to me, an old Bordelais who was busy reading Le Monde and taking advantage of Air France’s liberal wine policy. I told him in English that I was moving to Bordeaux and he asked how long I had studied French. When I replied that I had not, in fact, studied his language, his face changed from one of coldly interested bemusement to one of out and out disdain. I forgot the exact words he used, but his tone was clear enough. Il a pensé que les affairs n’irent pas pour moi.

I arrived to the city by taxi. The bright afternoon sun cooled by the breeze from the Garonne pleased me, as did the rows of grapes we passed along the way, each with a rose at its head to protect against a certain type of disease common to vineyards. I met Iris, the girl I had found on appartager.com to be my roommate, and she whisked me around to diners and parties for the first week or so. I stayed with her some nights, with other of her friends other nights; for our lovely apartment on 47 Rue de Begles was yet to be vacated by its current tenants. Finally we moved in; I collected my things from all over the city, met Hanna, our third roommate, and began cleaning one of the dirtiest charming little 3 room apartment I had ever seen!

The first week of October was an orientation of sorts to my new job. We had eight hour long meetings each day explaining how our contracts worked, what type of insurance we had, general job description stuff, etc. Or at least, that’s what some friends told me we had discussed; for, I had not understood a word of the meetings. not a word. My head was frantically trying to process this language, but I didn’t understand a word. It was wearying. By the end of the second week of meetings during the day followed by diners and fierce discussions of politics with Iris and her friends, I was exhausted. By the end of the forth week, my shocked brain learned to comprehend French. Of course I didn’t understand each word, still don’t; pourtant, j’ai compris. I could feel the computer in my head, physically feel it rewiring itself. It was an agonizing evolution. I’m not sure I could force myself through it again. Well maybe I could, but that is because there is something of the masochist within me…

After the orientation process, I was to present myself to my new school and my new principal. I woke early, dressed myself in the fashion, and rode my bike 3 kilometers outside the city center to Jean Cocteau, Ecole Elementaire. I clumsily asked the lady who came to the door for Madame la Directrice and was immediately whisked up the stairs into a small, poorly lit but brightly decorated office where sat Madame Gabrielle with her black frizzy hair branching out stiffly over her bare shoulders as though it had a volition of its own.

She wore thick dark makeup around her eyes, which, along with her coiffure and sharply manicured nails, added to her misplaced forest creature appearance. She was a petite, plump middle-aged lady stuffed into a long skin-tight black lace skirt with a generous slit up the leg, complete with fishnet stockings and dangerously high stilettos. Before her, rising out of the heaps of papers and childrens books, lay a tiny cup of coffee, a paper cutter, and a large hunk of uncut sugar. After kissing me with her rouge covered lips, she let out a shrill plaint in French about the lack of a proper sugar cubes for her coffee, and she violently lodged the hunk of sugar in the paper cutter’s teeth and shattered that hunk with all the force those fat little hands could muster. She finally succeeded in forcing a large shard of sugar into her petite little cup.

After a few minutes of confusion and chaos, she brought out her first English sentence. “vouldayoooleekatay, marie?” Oui Madame. And we went arm and arm down to find the other teachers in the break room. The chaos recommenced and I kissed a thousand strangers who soon after began arguing loudly amongst themselves about when I would come to whose class. I was sitting there with them, drinking coffee (for although La Madame had offered me a tea, she had done this so much as to propose a tea as to try a "proper" English sentence), but after the initial kisses, I was more or less irrelevant. After a half an hour or so, I was handed out a scratched out and scrawled over piece of paper that was my schedule for the next year. I was then led off to another office, where a haughty French man gave me important papers and asked me important questions, none of which I understood. After he left the room, a secretary came up to me and shyly asked in a heavily accented English (but in English!) if I would like some help. I gratefully accepted and we got to work on the nightmare of documents and signatures and letters that is the French bureaucracy. Monsieur Renault, the haughty French man who was in fact the boss of my boss (La Madame) returned and showed annoyance at the aid his secretary was giving me, but the work was for the most part finished, and I was soon released with orders to present myself for courses the following Monday. I went back to my dirty little pallet on the floor of 47 Rue de Begles and I slept!