Sunshine and Light

The Wake Up Call

As things are slowly starting to come back into my mind as processed memories, one thing that I just thought of was the struggles we had as essentially non-French speakers in France. Belgium - no problem. The Flemish Belgians were friendly, easy going, and mostly English speaking anyway. But in Compiegne and in Cysoing, the group ran into a few French people who were so stuck on our pigeon French or complete lack of French (depending on which member of the group was involved), that any urge they may have had to assist us was completely shut down. Which is a really polite way to say they either ignored us or else were pretty ugly to us.

When we were talking about this on the flight from Paris, Chris was talking about how appalled he was at the treatment he got. I kind of agreed. We weren't talking about a "No Speak English" treatment, we're talking about open rudeness at times. We were talking about how we would at least try to help out a non-English speaker using hand gestures, maps, our 3 words that we know in other languages, etc. (And my brother actually has a great story of me falling on my face in my attempt to speak to two lost-looking French people at a B&B in Ireland.). Anyway, about that time we got off the plane in O'Hare, and entered the first of two customs halls. One was for US citizens, the other for everyone else. A very large security guard/police officer was yelling in a very thick Chicago accent that US citizens were to go through this hall while all others were to proceed to the next hall. At that point the "AHA!" moment hit. Being fresh from a country where we didn't speak the language, we looked around and realized the signs were ONLY in English and the only directions that these potentially non-English speakers were getting were from a screaming policeman who we natives could barely understand. This was CHICAGO, one of the major entry ports to the US. Maybe there are ways in which we aren't too many steps above a small town in the French countryside after all.

Labels: Travel

posted by MyHusbandRules @ 12:30 PM