Comprenez-vous? Say what? Oui, mais non. Hmm. Désole?

Its been two and a half months in La Villette already. I cannot believe it. How time flies. Obviously I'm well settled into the routine of the college and surely my French must be improving by now? Hmm, scratch that last statement, for my French is far from (some nice alliteration there for you) a comfortable zone of comprehension at this stage. Instead I have developed a very odd and trés bizarre dialect I like to call Franglais, or Frenglish for those of you belonging to the pure English speaking world. I feel like the half blood of Europe, a child of two worlds, torn between both and yet belonging to neither. Its all very confusing. Ma tete pauvre!

How has this happened? Pour les deux mois j'ai passé ma vie á Paris et maintenant je sais plus les mots francaise jusqu'a je suis arrivé ici. But I haven't grasped the grammer. La grammaire. Zut! What the hell is with the past tenses? Maybe if I actually bothered to revise them I would be fine. Alas I've turned into that schoolboy, the one who shows up every morning looking dishevelled and underfed, copying students homework behind the sheds before class begins. I am literally being carried on the backs of other students through my muddled semester at La Villette. Merci beaucoup tous le monde!


Prendre Mardi dernière pour un exemple. OK I know I keep switching languages but bear with me it here. Its a symptom of the franglais. My very own créole langue!! Anyway back to last Tuesday. (brace yourself for another of my signature long winded rants) First off I think I deserve a pat on the back for going in at all as Naomi was visiting and I was in holiday mode. Anyway I went it to present my big urban development for a large site in north Paris. Nothing too fancy, just my urban plan, the site section explaining the horizontal division of uses within the site, the areas of all the zones - commercial, cultural, residential, etc, concept stuff on housing models, office develpoments, transpot links, sustainable develpoment, un batiment pour recharge votre véhicule électrique etc.

It turns out I had got the brief wrong again. Quelle surprise! Cette problème avec la barrier de la langue - ca m'enerve! We had to have a written explanation of what we wanted to do, not a diagrammatic one. Everyone handed in booklets, I had presentation sheets. It was all a bit awkward. I tried to explain that I got the brief confused but I stopped halfway, realised I simply wasn't arsed and just shrugged my shoulders. Comments were made. Helpful I'm sure. If I understood. Encore j'ai ete perdu. A French student was given my project to write comments on after class so I could develop it up. She took my sheets, excused herself and left. They had gone through her program and through mine so I followed her lead, packed up and left. But that it seems, was a mistake.

I was out the door and halfway down the open courtyard when I heard 'Bran-dan!!' behind me. I turned around to see a fellow student beckoning me to return to the classroom. Holy God. It wasn't over. Back to the classroom, some smiling comments from the professor, me head down, nodding, lost; completely lost. I was given another students handup and sent off with it at the end of the class, I assume I am to copy it in some form but its so tedious to look at, je ne veux pas le lire! Anyway I must start that god awful booklet now so I best sign off now.

Á bientot