Paris to the… Moselle.

Le 2 décembre 2004.
Rereading Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon for the third time, but reading it this time in France, has been quite the relief. The majority of his experiences are ones that I have lived through, either in Toulouse or this year in Metz. Earlier in the book, he commented on what really makes culture shock such a disruption in your life is that it is the focus of the differences between the little things. Gopnik says that it’s the things like how lunch as a concept differs between the two countries or how soup in France is blended instead of in bits and pieces like in the States. You don’t really mind the difference, but the fact that the difference exists does unsettle you momentarily. For a second example, door knobs in France totally through me off for about the first month and a half before I re-trained myself to always look at the knob before reaching for it to avoid awkward and frustrating situation. In addition, he comments on how “[w]e breathe in our first language, and swim in our second” and this is completely true for the majority of the world’s population. The ease with which we speak our mother tongue can make the second language seem like such a travail- each sentence and pronunciation a task of such magnitude to make us want to cower under our covers for the entire day. But I remember finding the courage last year from someplace, getting out of bed, and going out to face the day. Each day then became for me a success story, rather a badge of honor for me to display for the simple fact of overcoming my own fears. It gave to each day such a feeling of sink or swim, but each day I swam, it increased my joy of life to such extent that returning to an all-english environment was like coming down from an incredible high. In the end, all I'm trying to say is that reverse culture shock and loss of such extreme meaning in my life made it so difficult for me to return to a setting that just couldn't offer me the same fulfillment at the end of the day. If and how that has changed me is something I'm still finding out. Yet, I feel it can't be that any of the changes would be undesirable, and that I hope in the end some differences have been made.