"When good Americans die, they go to Paris." - Oscar Wilde

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

The Definition of Family

Greetings from my sister's super baffling computer. So Sunday and Monday were a shitfest. After my computer crashed (and waking up early Monday to bring it to the Apple store, only to find it was closed...), I became homesick because I felt disconnected from my home in America. No Facebook. No daily Skypes with Dylan. Just super expensive phonecalls to the U.S. On top of this, I got a less than stellar grade on an expression écrite assignment. I'm definitely going to pass CIDEF but the perfectionist in me is not content with simply passing.

However, today was much better. I brought my computer to the Apple store and the Mac man was super friendly and said he could fix it. After wandering downtown, I found an English store stocked with American goodies like Jif, Reese's Cups, peanut butter M&M's, and Pop-Tarts. I squealed and started spewing English when I found this treasure trove and the Irish woman who owns the store seemed amused, understanding.

Further, my home here is starting to become home. My family has been so accomodating and it's becoming obvious that they volunteered their home because they were genuinely interested in learning about another culture. Since students must pay rent and food, a lot of families use this as an opportunity to earn money, but my family doesn't seem that way. They offer to pick me up when I'm far from home and when it's late. They ask about American culture and home. They invite me out when they go to the cinema, to concerts, or to bars...and when my computer crashed, Berry's boyfriend Léo researched ways to fix it. Today Mme. gave me some of her history books because they parallel what I'm learning in histoire de France.

All in all, I realize how lucky I am. Of course I miss my family in the States, but having both a French family and an Italian family is super bad ass, n'est-ce pas?

No comments:

Post a Comment