Things I learned today:
1. If the fire-alarm goes off in the middle of your lesson, you
can guarantee it will be raining outside. And if you set a great example to
your students by following official protocol and leaving all your worldly
possessions inside, a feeling of righteous smugness won’t keep you dry.
2. If you try and fit in a visit to an underground shopping-precinct
in the gap between finishing teaching and getting to your French class, you can
guarantee they will be renovating both the Métro station and the
shopping-centre so that you can’t find the shop you want. The shop being the
strangely-named ‘fnac’, which you
have no clue how to pronounce, so you can’t even ask anyone. (I think it’s
basically the noise you make when a bug flies into your nose).
3. It doesn’t matter which queue you choose at the cash-desks,
it is guaranteed to be the slowest. In which Parisians will demonstrate a huge
inability to queue normally. By which, I refer to their habit of sending their
small children into other queues to reserve a place, despite the children
having no idea of their role in this activity. Or the tactic of the woman behind me, who expressed
her unhappiness at the queuing-time by standing far too close to me while taking the art of audible tutting to a whole new level.
4. When you finally get off the Métro at 13.50, you will inadvertently
run the wrong way down the street, away from your French class that starts at
2pm sharp. When you realise your error, an insane spoof of a James Bond film
will ensue, whereby you get on a random bus, travel for 1 stop, panic and get
off, and then chase the bus down the road for 8 full minutes. You will then
arrive at your French class only mildly late, but unable to breathe for
approximately 20 minutes due to all the running.
5. You will confidently approach the coffee-machine you were
scared of last week, having studied the buttons carefully and worked out how to
order a standard coffee. The machine will then ignore you, fill the cup to
overflowing (to punish you for not asking for a tiny expresso) and will add extra sugar, when you asked for none.
Standard.
6. The highlight of your day, visiting the boulangerie that has been declared vendor of the BEST BAGUETTE IN
PARIS 1998 AND 2014, will be thwarted as it is naturally closed on Wednesday
afternoons.
7. Despite writing ‘toilet-roll’ on your hand and accepting the
fact you will get strange looks from people all day, you will forget to buy it
at the supermarket.
Things that made up for all the shit things that happened:
I’m not working this evening. I’m watching Friends dubbed into French in my
pyjamas. (Tap-dancing class is un cours
de claquettes).
A shit day in Paris is still a pretty awesome day.
I got to take the tram home. Which tells you the name of
each stop by announcing it in both a female and then a male voice. And each
stop has its own little jingle, most of which seem to have been taken from the
soundtrack of a 40s detective thriller.
Red wine.
