My Failed Experiment in

International Living

            by Kate Jacobsen

 

We were restless.  It was an 8-hour train ride from Paris to Nimes, ironically longer than the flight we’d taken from New York to Paris. The countryside that had been gorgeous for the first 3 hours of the trip was now boring and repetitive, with more green fields than you could count.  While I’d been napping, the girls had convinced the two lone guys of the trip that they needed makeovers, and to the horror of our chaperone and the other train patrons, proceeded to Spackle them with bright pink lipstick and blue eye shadow.  When I woke up, Sara the chaperone had dug up our home-stay information and was finally going to tell us about our families.

            Most of the assignments were predictable.  The girl that was allergic to dogs had been put with a family without pets. Both guys had been given host-brothers instead of sisters.  There were a few assignments that were so strange that they had to have been accidents. The one bulimic girl on the trip had been assigned a family where both the parents were chefs. The Mormon girl on the trip was to stay at a vineyard.  I was the last person to get my assignment, “Kate you are going to stay with the Santiago family.  They’re a mother, a father, a kitten and three daughters: 13,16 and 20 years of age. They live in an apartment at 331 Rue des Amoureux,”

Wow. 331 Lovers Lane. This was sure to be an interesting experience.  The idea that I would finally have sisters was exciting, as I had grown up around boys and only had a few girl cousins.  Now that I finally knew a little about my new family, I started imagining what they would be like.  I pictured the dad as a businessman, who went to work everyday and came home for lunch.  The mom would be a sweet little homemaker, who would bake, clean and pack the kids lunches every morning.  My sisters would be atypical French girls, and we would inevitably become great friends.  With this picture in the back of my mind I went back to sleep, hoping that when I awoke we’d be at the train station in Nimes.

            When I woke up we were still an hour outside of Nimes, but my friend Lucy had secured a pack of cards that helped to pass the time.  When we stepped off the train at the other end, Nimes looked…nothing like I had pictured.  While I had thought that it would be a sleepy little town on the Mediterranean Sea, like we had seen for the past eight hours, it was almost the exact opposite.  Nimes was three times the size of Berkeley, and nowhere near the Ocean. The station was huge and confusing, and our little group of thirteen Americans got lost three or four times before we finally found our host families. 

            By the time we found the right staircase to thump our suitcases down we were all hot, sweaty and exhausted. I’d gotten tired of lugging my suitcase around, so I went first and kicked my bag down the stairs. I was only a little embarrassed when I turned the corner to find all of our host-families standing at the bottom. Sara and Collette, the head of the office in Nimes, circled us up and matched Americans with families.  I found out that all of the other Americans had been writing emails and letters to their families for weeks.  The families already knew almost everything about their Americans, and the Americans knew much more about their families than I did about mine.  Again I was called last, and matched with my family.

            They were close to the polar opposite of what I had pictured.  The dad was the tallest in the family, and about five foot seven.  The whole family was dark haired with incredibly tanned skin. When I saw my family, my first thought was, “Oh shit; their last name is Santiago; I’m going to be staying for two weeks with a family that doesn’t speak French” which may seem a little bigoted, but I had reason to be worried. When my aunt signed up to go to a French speaking country, she was sent to Corsica. France controls Corsica, but instead of speaking French they speak Corse, which is basically Italian.  It took her a week to realize that her host family didn’t speak French; she that either she was stupid, or they just had a horrible accent.

            I was already picturing the hand gestures I would use to speak with my family when my new father walked up and started speaking in rapid-fire French.  He had such a strong accent that it sounded as if he was just speaking in consonants, without opening his mouth.  I stood there, looking completely confused, until my new sixteen year-old sister jumped in to rescue me.  She spoke slowly and loudly, and though she had a strong accent, she was much easier to understand than her father. “Follow…Me…To…Our…Car,” she said to me as she mimed driving with her hands. I followed the family out into the parking lot, struggling with my bag and hoping that they hadn’t parked too far away.

            My bag wouldn’t fit in the miniscule trunk, so they made me keep it on my lap.  The biggest problem was getting in; I didn’t fit into the car. I threw my self in head first, but then I couldn’t get my lower body to fit.  After much deliberation they decided to have the girls walk, so that I could take up the whole back seat. I felt incredibly bad until I realized that we were parked at the end of the street on which they lived.

            It was the longest two-minute car ride of my life.  I sat with on foot wedged under the driver’s seat and the other wrapped around my suitcase as my new host-parents shot questions at me.  I answered the questions I understood, and I gave a weak “Oui” to the questions I didn’t understand.  I could tell when I answered the question wrong because the dad would say in French, to his wife, “It’s impossible that she is the same American from her letters! She was so smart when she wrote to us!” which was when I remembered a soon to be problem.  As part of the application for the program, we had had to write a letter, solely in French, to our host families explaining who we were, what we liked to do, and asking questions of the family.  I, wanting my letter to be the best that it could be, had my French teacher proofread and correct my letter.  So apparently my family thought that I was going to be an incredible French student.  Great.  I had set myself up for failure already and I had only just met these people.

            Because of traffic control and stop lights, the girls got back to the house before we did.  By the time I’d wrestled myself out of the car, the family had already gone in through the automatic gate that surrounded their property.  It closed behind them.  They hadn’t given me a key or a pass-code to the gate, so I found myself locked out onto the street.  I didn’t know what to do, so I did the easiest thing; I just stood there. I figured they would eventually realize that they had left their American locked out of the compound and come out to rescue me.  It was only after about fifteen minutes that I started to lose it.  It may have been exhaustion, or the fact that I was suddenly alone in a foreign country, but I started to panic and couldn’t stop.  I knew that I didn’t want to be stuck out there all night, so I took the initiative and decided to hop the eight-foot wall.  I looked around and realized that if I climbed up onto the top of the car, I could pull myself up onto the top of the wall and jump down the other side.  I threw my bag over, and carefully climbed onto the hood of the car.  I started to pull myself up onto the wall.  Of course this was when my host sister was sent to find me.  She opened the gate to find me half standing on the hood of her car, half stuck over the wall to her house.  She looked at me incredulously, “What are you doing? Why didn’t you just push the button?” she said in perfect French.  She poked a little button on the gate that said “Poussez” and the gate swung open.  Apparently I’d missed it.  Thoroughly embarrassed, I scurried through the gate and retrieved my suitcase out of the nicely pruned miniature orange tree. 

            The Santiago’s house was incredibly modern, with metal fixtures and bright yellow-orange-red walls.  I stood awkwardly in the middle of their living/dining room (resisting the temptation to comment on their unique choice of paint colors) while my new sister told the family about my aborted trip over the wall.  They laughed and stared at me, completely oblivious to the fact that I understood everything they said.  When they got tired of hearing the story repeatedly, the daughter told me to follow her to my room.

            The staircase up to the second floor was the most modern part of the house.  It was about two feet wide, with no hand railing and was easily the steepest set of stairs I’d ever seen.  My new sister bounced up them like they were nothing, while I followed behind carrying my excruciatingly heavy suitcase.  The stairs made a hairpin turn half way up, and my bag didn’t quite fit.  I tried to lift it up and around the banister, which drastically shifted my center of gravity.  The second I lifted my bad I thought, “Shit; here I go, I’m falling in front of the family with whom I’m going to be staying for the next two weeks, and I haven’t even been here half an hour; way to go Kate, that’s a new record.”  When I hit the ground, I just lay there hoping that I was actually still asleep on the train.

            Instead of sleeping, I got up.  After my mother made sure I hadn’t broken any of her furniture, I started up the stairs once more.  My new dad didn’t want me to break any of their shiny things, so this time he grabbed my suitcase and suavely ran up the stairs.  I, on the other hand, did not want to make a fool of myself once again, so I walked up the stairs slowly and deliberately.  I was staying in my sixteen year-old sister’s room, so she showed me around.  There wasn’t much to see; a window I wasn’t allowed to open, a fan I wasn’t allowed to turn on, and a kitten.

            Oh, the kitten! They doted on her, called her Baboosh, and in return she was perfectly angelic towards them.  The minute I walked in, though, she took offense at my feet.  They annoyed her, so she decided to attack.  From that moment on, she would attack whenever she got the opportunity.  In the mornings I would swing my feet over the side of the bed, and she would be right there, ready to sink her teeth into my toes.  Occasionally, she wouldn’t even wait for me to be awake; she’d jump up on the bed and slice at my poor defenseless arm.

            I caught my sister trying to sneak out of the room.  Before she could leave I asked her what I should do next. She said quickly, in French, “Whatever you feel like, it doesn’t matter to me; we’ll eat in an hour,” and left the room.  I didn’t know what to do, so I lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling.  When I woke up, three and a half hours later, my stomach was rumbling like crazy.  It was nine o’clock at night, still sunny outside, and the whole family was sitting around the dinner table out on the patio.  I asked them why they didn’t wake me for dinner, to which they responded, “We did wake you up,” Right.  If I had been awake, I think I would have noticed.  They were on their cheese course, so that’s what I ate for dinner.

            It was the oldest daughters 21^st birthday, so her boyfriend came over and the whole family got plastered.  As it turns out the French get incredibly boisterous and belligerent when they are drunk, which is incredibly fun to watch when you’re sober.  During their fourth time through the French National Anthem, my middle sister turned to me and said,

“You can go to your room now; it’s fine if you want to go to sleep”

“But I’m having fun and I’m not tired” I responded.

“No, you can go to your room is you want,” and then looked at me expectantly. 

So I went to my room.

            It’s amazing how boring just sitting alone is, especially when you’re alone in a foreign country and everyone around you is drunk.  Since I’d taken a fairly long nap, I wasn’t tired anymore.  I sat on the bed, reading brochures on the Camargueais region.  The Camargue is famous for white horses and sandy beaches, as well as its extreme heat and killer mosquitoes.  That last part was in very small lettering at the bottom of one of the information sheets Sara had passed out on the train.  It’s not like I couldn’t have figured it out on my own.  It was ten o’clock at night, and still 80 degrees outside, making it seem like about 180 degrees in my room.  I couldn’t stand the heat anymore, which meant I had to commit an act of civil disobedience; I had to open the window.

            I opened the window, stuck my head out and was instantly cooled.  I could hear my host family in the backyard, loudly arguing about the pending vote on the new constitution.  The dad thought it was a horrible idea and wasn’t going to vote for it, which angered the boyfriend.  It sounded as if they were about to start hitting each other, when there was a loud splash and more boisterous laughter.   Someone had fallen into the pool.  Though the party was loud, the heat was worse, so I left my window open and lay down on the bed.  On the train Sara had drilled into us the importance of being presentable around our host families; we had to eat the French way, never be seen in our pajamas, and make our beds every morning.  The way the blankets and sheets were put together on my bed, it looked as if they had been folded origami style.  I decided that given the heat, and they fact that I would never be able to put the covers back the way they were, I would just sleep on top on the covers.

            When I woke up the next morning, it looked as if a gang of mosquitoes had jumped me.  I had welts the size of silver dollars on my leg, and my ankle had swelled to twice its normal size.  I calmed down once I realized it wasn’t leprosy.  They couldn’t have been deadly mosquitoes, or the Santiago’s wouldn’t have windows at all.  I got dressed, walked out of the room and instantly found myself on the floor with a major headache.  As it turns out, the Santiago’s had built their house to fit their needs, which meant that everything was about a foot closer to the ground than you would find in the average American home.  There was a beam that crossed the hallway outside my room about five feet and ten inches off the ground, painted the exact same color as the wall at the other end of the hall.  As I am a person of above average height (I’m six feet tall on a good day) this meant that I had just walked full speed into a wall.  My head hurt so much that I couldn’t open my eyes, so I lay writhing for a moment or two.

            From the floor, I began to hear the sweet sounds of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. My first thought? “Great, I’ve finally killed myself and Heaven is filled with Queen,” and as the throbbing died down, the singing got worse. Eventually, my headache was replaced with an overwhelming want for whoever was butchering a perfectly good song to be shot.  Minutes after I thought that I couldn’t take the singing anymore, it stopped.  The oldest sister opened the door to the bathroom, half-wrapped in a towel. I could sympathize with her shock; opening the door to find her American sprawled on the floor would be surprising.  On the other hand, all sympathy was lost when she walked over me on the way to her room without acknowledging my presence.  I took this as a hint to leave, got up and carefully made my way downstairs.

            When I walked into the kitchen, my father grunted what I assumed was a good morning towards me.  I figured that I would need to start a relationship at some point, so I sat down next to him and tried to start a conversation.  I began with the obligatory, “Bonjour,” and had made it all the way to “How are you doing?” by the time he acknowledged my presence.  I guess it may have seemed like a yes or no question, because he answered with a curt “Oui” I sat there dumbfounded, trying to figure out if I had said in French what I had meant to say.  The awkward silence lasted about five minutes, until my sister walked in and I jumped on the opportunity to change the subject.

            “Alice, what are we going to do today?” I said, as nicely as possible.

            “We are going on a tour of the salt factory,” she said, not nearly as nicely as I had.

I was instantly overcome with joy.  The thought that I wouldn’t have to spend the day in my room alone instantly brightened my outlook and I found myself waiting to go on the tour.  My sister made me a pate sandwich to take as a lunch and we set off to take the bus.

            I had fun at the salt factory.  We got to ride around on a little pink train and listen to a man talk in French about giant piles of salt.  For hours.  At one point, I found myself counting the number of times I saw bird’s pooing on the salt mountains.  At the end of the tour the guide gave everyone free samples of salt to take home as souvenirs.

            After dinner that night, I was told to feed the cat.  I looked through the fridge and found vegetables, fruits, a can of pate and a large assortment of cheeses, but no cat food.  I spent fifteen minutes in the empty kitchen looking through the fridge, closing the door and then reopening it to get a new perspective, but still nothing seemed suitable.  I was about to let the cat go hungry when my sister walked in.  I told her that there wasn’t any cat food, and showed her the contents of the fridge.  She looked at me as if I was a complete imbecile, reached in and grabbed the can of pate.  It had a colorful picture of a nice, smiling cat, and normally I would have thought that it was cat food if it hadn’t said pate all over the can.  The thought that I may have eaten a cat food sandwich for lunch made me cringe.  For once, I went to my room with little prompting from my family. 

            We spent the next day kayaking thirteen kilometers down a river.  At the head of the river, there was a little booth where you rented your kayak.  My sister and I rented a double kayak, and she decided that since I’d done this before (I hadn’t) that I should be in the back seat and steer the boat.  I spent five minutes trying to explain to her that crew and kayaking were complete opposites and eventually gave up when I realized that the word I was using to mean “to row” as in paddling actually meant “to row” as in crew.  We pushed off down stream, which involved me falling into the river twice.  I took off my shirt and spread it on the kayak’s stern to let it dry in the sun; when I turned back to check on it a minute later, it was gone.  After frantically searching for my shirt for what seemed like an eternity, I gave up and resigned myself to taking the bus home in my bathing suit.  We pushed off, and slowly floated down stream once more.

            It’d been an hour, my ADD had kicked in and I’d gotten horribly bored.  I was looking around at all of the pretty trees when my sister started yelling, “Un barbe! Un barbe!” and while I was trying to figure out why she would be yelling, “A beard! A beard!” it hit me. Actually, we hit it.  We ran smack into a half-submerged tree (it turns out she was yelling “Un arbre! Un arbre!” or “A tree! A tree!”), and the angle of impact turned us sideways across the trunk.  The current pushed us further and further up, until we capsized and fell into the water.  Once free of it’s load, the kayak made a run for it down stream.  As it passed my sister I realized that she was more intent on making sure her shirt was clean than catching our only way back to civilization, so I went after our boat.

            To slow it’s progress down stream I threw myself on top of the kayak.  Though the boat did slow down a bit, it didn’t slow enough to stop and we floated down stream.  As I was trying to figure out a way to stop the boat, one of my flip-flops floated by.  I grabbed it, and hoped that my sister had grabbed the other.  The boat finally came to a stop on one of the many sand bars that littered the river.  When my sister got to us, she chastised me for having left her alone.  When I asked if she had cared to pick up my shoe, she said, “No.  I had to make sure nothing happened to my clothes” I now had one flip-flop, no shirt and a long bus ride home if and when we finally finished our trip.

            We made it to the end of the river, three hours after we had planned to be back.  After another hour of waiting, our bus pulled up and I argued with the driver about my lack of suitable bus-riding attire.  It looked like I was going to have to walk the thirty miles back to town, just because he didn’t want to let a soaking wet, stringy-haired, half-naked, blonde giant ride his bus when my sister appeared out of nowhere and told the driver, “She’s American.” The driver looked at me, laughed in my face and cordially invited me onto the bus for the ride back to town.