Right. So, a first dilemma would be, with the same type of awkwardness as two English men, in a room, when they haven’t met before, in what language should I write? I don’t want to sound big-headed but I fluently speak many of them and hazily cannot organize my thoughts in neither, that this is quite a dilemma.
So, since I’m a host in an English-speaking country, and when in Rome, do like the Romans, much to the grief of many of my French friends, I’ll start to blog in English.
Let’s start with the start.
And that start was in France.
No, that start was actually in Romania. In the summer of 1997 to be more precise. I was 17 at the time, at the first time I left the country through a Western European like type of Odyssey of two weeks. Two weeks of absolute freedom, discovering Europe’s most beautiful capitals and cities (Budapest, Vienna, Bruxelles, Paris and last but not least, London, where we spent most of the time). That trip was actually crucial, and pretty much the time I decided I had to get out of Romania (pretty much the second we set foot back at the border to hand in our passports). Why did I decide that? The reasons are so numerous but mostly leading to a general dissatisfaction with my country.
A few years later, at the University, still surrounded by that general feeling of dissatisfaction, I have the chance to go to France with a scolarship. Now, I hadn’t been as smitten with France as I had been with England – English having been my first language, both as a child and latter as a student, it was still a great opportunity – a chance in a lifetime – or at least this is how I perceived it.
I embarked immediately into it, and there I was in France.
Now, I’m not going to blog about France and my various states of minds running wildly from fascination in the first months through despair towards the end, while I was there, because that would be a blog apart, in itself! Let’s just say that the most important thing in the end for me, was to meet some truly wonderful French people that will hopefully remain my friends regardless of the distance (they’ll recognise themselves). On the other hand, there’s a few people that I met that I don’t hold in my respect at all, in fact, I wish that what they did to me, would be returned to them, in a way. One way or another it already did – one of my former exploiters got fired, looking forward to see what happens with the other.
Otherwise I have often been quite cruely disappointed – but aren’t we all when we have to tackle life quite alone at times, and with no one side to side to help us? Most of my disappointment came from some random intolerant behaviour and employment – it has been a long struggle wich I almost lost in the end… But there’s a lot of good stuff I miss from France too – and most of it revolves around speaking French, strolling through Paris, in areas that I liked and going to a “cinéma d’auteur”. I don’t miss the traffic though.
So there I am, now, in Britain. The road that led me to it was long and full of surprises, very intense and I never really believed it would happen; but now that I’m here, I’m not going to miss the opportunity to observe the English and analyse them and give my own opinion (even if it’s irrelevant) on why I think they are like they are….
Before I left I did try to document on them by reading a few books (some funnier than the others) that I’d recommend to anyone trying to understand them : Jeremy Paxman’s The English, Watching the English by Kate Fox – a book that’s quite a guaranteed laugh, and bits and pieces from the Hungarian George Mike’s very funny How to be an Alien.
I’m fully aware I have only been here for 3 months, I don’t think a lifetime is enough to observe the others really, and even after 8 years spent in France I still couldn’t stop discovering new things each day but I can try with the most powerful impressions.
