Running away to France?

A few days ago someone told me I was running away to France because of all the stress of the past year. After everything that has happened, I couldn't be happier than going to France; this is true. But at the same time, just because I'm going to be an ocean away doesn't mean that all the stress is going to be left behind.

The idea that a year abroad is a vacation is a pretty common one but so far in all my preparations I've learned that this is certainly not the case (Although I wouldn't mind a vacation and have lingering images in my mind of sitting on a French beach with my velo locked to a bikerack and a bottle of wine snuggled down into the sand).

For instance, the amount of cultural and language misunderstandings that can occur that might inflict some pretty serious social consequences are astronomical. The simple word for a vegetable group, which includes my favorite zucchini, cucurbitacee can be pronounced incorrectly prety easily, resulting in a string of swears (ass-ass-dick-enough). Then there's the infamous tu and vous forms and when it's appropriate to use them. While tu can be something used between colleagues of equal level, it can also be used instead of the normal vous form as an insult.

Stephen Clarke gives some really good examples in his book Talk to the Snail that I picked up at the book store last night. I'm already half-way done with it and out of my post-vacation reading slump. I read too much over vacation and wore myself out!

Anyway, Clarke is a pretty tongue-in-cheek writer who mocks a lot of French cultural oddities that may well be rightly so mocked. But he does get down and dirty with a lot of things other culture books skip on, like how to get a waiter that's insulting you to serve you and that French women really can be fat. He also brings up the cucurbitacee word but I'd heard it before from Charlotte, the French girl I lived with last year.

But back to work.