From a conversation with my favorite aunt yesterday

Favorite Aunt: But you’ve been to Paris before?

Me: No, I’ve been to the south of France. I’ve been to Cannes and Nice and Monaco and Montpellier, but I’ve never been to Paris.

FA: How is that possible, it’s a very small country? Nobody goes to France and misses Paris.

Except for me, that is.

Have I told you peeps my favorite France story so far?

I was in Montpellier. We had rented a small studio apartment with a kitchen near the university. I was tired and starving and the bastard Russian didn’t want to go out. So on my own I wandered around till I found a tiny market that was open on a Sunday and normally served the visiting college students. It was run by a little old man who was ancient enough to have been around during the Roman conquest.

I looked around and most of the stuff that I wanted, like produce and meat were all behind the counter while chips and soda (college student foods) were readily accessible.

I know exactly 2 words in French, hello and thank you. I had just come from Italy where I managed to get by mostly because Italian and Spanish are so similar and because I had poured over my tiny Langenscheidt dictionary for days before going. But French scared me. It’s difficult for me to figure out how it’s pronounced with all the silent letters and mushing together of sounds. Spanish and Italian are fairly straight forward once you know the sounds each letter makes (there is this weird thing in Italian with c’s. One C is pronounced like ch, two C’c- cc is pronounced like a hard c, but I have never figured out how to pronounce cch).
Being that Montpellier is fairly close to the Spanish border and that several of the meat products I wanted were Spanish (Jamon Serrano, oh how yummy you are. Better than prosciutto) I tried all the Spanish and English words I could think of for onions, carrots, potatoes, eggs and garlic. I also tried pointing, which was useless.

Finally, the ancient old man just let me come back behind the counter and pick what I wanted. He was very kind and charming. Once I finally had the makings of a Spanish style omlette/tortilla dinner and had paid, the old man pointed to a jar of candy on the counter and gesturedd for me to take one. So I did take exactly one. He shook his head, gently grabbed my hand and proceeded to stuff it full of candy. I think he might have been happy to have someone buy something other than chips and soda. (Though I did get some peanut flavored chips while I was there and OMG- they were awesome).

For all the scary talk you hear about how the French are rude and horrible, I didn’t find that at all. Every single person I dealt with was kind and patient, including the overrun pharmacist when I was trying to buy Advil for a migraine. She must have had a dozen people waiting in line, but she perfectly understood my gestures for headache and ibuprophen. I am sure that the symbols for migraine are universal.