French

A potential benefit from this trip was some improvement in my French. In past trips, Deborah has been there, when my basic French skills faltered, to carry on the conversation. She speaks French quite well having spent time as a student in France and French speaking Switzerland. I was looking forward to being forced to survive without her language skills and improve a little. Performing technical support in French, as was to happen, wasn’t on the list of things to master.

Standard things like buying tickets, getting a meal, asking directions and so on went fairly well. There were a few awkward moments as expected. What to me was perfectly clear French was met with uncomprehending looks. But with repetition, gestures and pointing, those moments were easily overcome.

In general, the formality of the French in public, which some mistake for coldness or unfriendliness, works to the tourist’s advantage. The dialogs you learn in the language classes actually work: you greet, they greet and ask what you want, you say what you want, they acknowledge and ask if there is anything else, you say no thank you, they tell you how much, you pay, then you both say good-bye. Works like a charm until there are complications and you don’t know the words and phrases. But still, if you have made the effort in French and don’t bring an attitude, everyone I’ve met has been helpful.

While otherwise very nice, the Ecrins Mountain Lodge was not ideal for learning French as it is run by an English couple. That the other eight guests were from England meant that French language practice wasn’t a lodge activity at all. Although I became more confident in blurting out what seemed to me to be French, my language skills weren’t any better after the first five days in France.

I knew from email correspondence that my B&B host in Paris did not speak English very well. Her English was in fact comparable to my French. This meant that anything other than standard dialogs was going to be a challenge. Imagine then, if you will, the scene as we tried to debug the WiFi connection problems. I made feeble attempts to translate the technical questions I had into French. But her computer knowledge not surprisingly was non-existent. And gestures and pointing aren’t effective ways to communicate technically.

She presented their laptop and I tried to view its configuration. Although I’ve never used Microsoft Vista, let alone in French, I did find my way to the wireless network configuration. But telling her that someone with administrative rights needed to sign in for the configuration to be seen was futile. And so it was every other technical question that was in perfect English in my head. Near I as could tell, my laptop wasn’t getting a DHCP address. She kindly lent me her laptop and while it was working I was able to do the one post and send email to Deborah. But, by the time I left, their laptop’s DHCP address had apparently expired, wasn’t renewed and no connection could be made.

Had my French been better, maybe I could have traded technical consulting work for free lodging. Perhaps that should be my motivation for being more diligent in my French language lessons.