I came to question “Western Civilization” in Paris as I was forced to contemplate the existence of a “half-flush” option on the toilet, strategically located next to a collection of scented, colorful rolls of toilet paper.
Before I headed to JFK, I thought I was completely in control of the semester abroad thing. That lasted until Air France conducted its flight entirely in French.
It was at approximately this time that I began to wonder just what, exactly, I had been thinking.
It wasn’t like getting to France had been easy. Trying to get a visa for France is like going on a scavenger hunt for items that you aren’t allowed to know. Dealing with the French bureaucracy, on the other hand, is something like throwing yourself down the stairs, dragging yourself back up, and then throwing yourself down again. Repeatedly.
After getting denied on round one (like most students who are crazy enough to try and study French in France) I had to go back to the consulate and beg.
A few weeks later, I found myself successfully and legally wandering the famed “city of love.” After the first bit of jet-lagged ecstasy, reality started to sink in. Here I was in Paris, not to see another sign in English for another four months. Merde.
To calm the panic that was beginning to make breathing difficult, I went out onto the rooftop garden to get a reassuring eyeful of the sun setting on the Eiffel Tower.
By the next week, I was successfully making the adjustment to a lifestyle I had only previously imagined. Namely, one in which a human subsists on bread, cheese and chocolate. It hasn’t been all fun and games though. There is nothing like being expected to function in French by 8 am; living in a country that speaks a language other than your default is in some ways like perpetually being in class. Some people call that hell.
The trickiest thing, besides French itself, is the fine-tuned hierarchy of acceptable vulgarity. In a country where it is acceptable to suck someone’s face in public at any time, it is essential to remember that you will be shunned like Amy Winehouse at an AA meeting if you cut the tip off a morsel of Brie.
The importance of tact was revealed when my labeling of the class newspaper as “shit” proved marginally less upsetting to my Parisian professor than a classmate’s assertion that Napol√É.√©on stole the Obelisk from Egypt, or my silly notion that “French Colonialism” was an awful lot like “Imperialism.” Revisionist history has not yet reached France.
Moral of this story: No matter how internationally savvy you may consider yourself, nothing makes you realize just how much culture matters like getting dropped into the middle of someone else’s.
That said, time abroad should be required of all students. If our system of higher education is going to cost this much more than the average European’s, we ought to get something out of it.