One Week

We have completed our first week in France. I’ve been wondering why it feels so much different than the other weeks I have spent here. I think it’s like the difference between going away to summer camp and going away to college. After going to camp on a university campus I was so excited to go to college. And then I went to college and made no friends, starved, and got seriously ill in my first week. It took a long time for me to be comfortable and happy, but it was well worth the wait.

Today I discovered two things at work that made my life a little happier:

1. The coffee machine makes tea with milk and sugar. It’s not as good as the tea at Chez Basson (Roch et Sue), but it’s a lot better than sipping on an over-sweetened cappuccino.

2. The Auchan next to my work has a Vietnamese restaurant in it! Suddenly the future of my lunches has taken on a new light. I can walk there in 10 minutes! Mon dieu!

If you’re wondering what I had for lunch today, it was a ham and [French] cheese pizza. With an egg. It was my first egged pizza. And I have to say I enjoyed it.

We had lunch in the small restaurant attached to the Auchan (this is how I found the Vietnamese place). Of course the price wasn’t subsidized, but Philippe paid with his lunch tickets. Many companies in France give their employees these little books of tickets that they can use to pay for lunch in any restaurant. The employee pays for half. Something to do with boosting the local economy I guess. Philippe technically works for a contract company, so he has this benefit.

If you’d like to know what Dave has been up to this whole time, I’ll have to tell you myself. We only have one computer, and I take it to work with me, so he spends his limited time with the PC job searching.

Every morning Dave drives me to work. Then he spends his day studying one of his sister’s old French textbooks and intently watching tv or listening to the radio to pick up dialogue. Hence, at the end of the day when I’ve learned words like “workaround” and “update”, he’s learned “follow the example” and “traffic report”.

Sometimes he walks into Cergy for a baguette to eat with lunch or dinner. Then on his way to pick me up, he stops at the Auchan for the night’s dinner and next day’s lunch. I really admire him, he’s been great with selecting food for our meals and handling the newfound challenges of the grocery store.

After I’ve made dinner, I collapse on the bed while he cleans up. Then he retrieves the computer to check his e-mail and work on job contacts.

Sometimes we watch football (from now on I’m going to call soccer “football” like the rest of the world) if it’s on, otherwise a handball tournament that’s been going on in Germany because of the little need for dialogue comprehension.

That’s about it. Then we go to bed and start the whole thing over the next day.

Bon weekend!