A Window is not a Fork, and I am not a Nun

Bah, I have a whole lot that I could say about the past few days. But I'm really tired right now, as it's 12:30AM here in Montpellier. I could just wait until tomorrow to do this. But what fun is that?

I will thus begin with the fact that classes are going very well. I like the 3 professors that I have. They are three very entertaining French women, and they are very good at their jobs. Which is good for me. Now I've been asked numerous times what kind of classes I'm taking. I finally have an answer since I've now had a week of classes! I will be tested in 5 areas: reading comprehension, writing, oral expression, listening compression, and phonetics (for some reason, it took me a long time to figure out the common English expression for those things - apparently they don't translate exactly. Like so many other things). So I guess these are the classes I'm taking? Though I'm not quite sure still. Oops.

Story time (just for the heck of it): the first week I was here or so, I didn't speak a lot of French; I was with Americans most of the time. However, on Sunday I went to my friend, Ryad's, place. He speaks English, but Katy (an American STINTer with whom I went) and I wanted to practice our French. So we'd throw in random French phrases. I felt like I was doing pretty well until we began to eat a cake that Katy made. Now, maybe I was getting too cocky with my speaking or maybe I was just tired. But I said, "J'ai besoin d'une fenêtre." Katy and Ryad just looked at me, though I'd known that was incorrect as soon as the last word came out of my mouth. I tried desperately to think of the correct word, but nothing came to me. "I need a fork," I said. "Not a window." Fenêtre is a window. Une fourchette is a fork. Oops. Of course, we all laughed about it. For a long time.

Oh well, that's not the only interesting translation issues that I've had. On Tuesday, my first day of class, I spent most of my time with a girl from Iceland and a guy from Ireland - we spoke English. However, on Wednesday, I changed it up a bit and spent most of my very long day with two people from Japan. THEY DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH AT ALL. So we had to speak French. It was a lot of fun. But during lunch, I was talking with Konomie (the Japanese girl) about what I want to do with my degree in geography. Well, I don't know the French translation for LDI (Leadership Development Institute - it's a sweet thing at my church that I'm considering) so I told her it was an internship with a church. She understood but not quite. She asked me what I would be doing. How on earth do you explain that to someone in French?!!? I had no idea, but I went for it anyway. I told her that I'd be assisting the pastor. But I didn't know the French word for pastor. So I said the French word for priest. Well, she didn't know what that was. But she did have her handy-dandy little Japanese translator, so I told her the English word for pastor, and she typed it in. Suddenly, she looked up at me with HUGE eyes. Like the anime eyes. You know the ones I'm talking about:















Now, I'm not stereotyping at all. But her eyes were huge. She asked me if I wanted to be one of those, and I said no. I wanted to be an assistant one (because my French is bad and this was getting complicated). She then looked at me funny for a few seconds until a light bulb went off. She said - in English (?) - "You want to be a sister!" She'd finally understood. Our translation struggle was over! But oh, she was so wrong. I told her no, that I wasn't Catholic, I was Protestant, and that I wanted to work for a Protestant church and help the pastor. She didn't ask anymore questions after that. I don't blame her.

Love.