In Which Our Intrepid Author Attempts Sport

Tonight I went to a beginners' class on Nordic Walking, which is basically hiking with poles. (Not to be confused with hiking with Poles, which is completely different.)

Getting to the place was a bit of an adventure; the bus deposited me here:

and my first thought was well, what the crap do I do now? And I felt really stupid when a couple of minutes later, the bus came back around and drove past me again. So I grabbed by cell phone and held it to my ear so that all four people on the bus would think, "Oh look, there's someone taking a phone call before heading confidently to her destination" instead of, "Oh wow, that chick has no idea where she is."

Worse than that was when I looked at the bus schedule and saw that the last one of the day came by in about an hour. Okay. So after my hike through the woods, I'd have to hike back home. (It's moments like these that I have to force myself not to dwell on The Car Situation but instead remind myself of the suffering of others: victims of genocide, puppy mills, how my poor mother can't see her driveway from the window. It could always be worse.)

I eventually found the meeting point and the group of 20 or so complete strangers who were going to learn how to walk with sticks alongside me. And I soon as I got there, I remembered one tiny, inconsequential detail: I am incapable of small talk in French.

Here is my problem: people think my French is a lot better than it is. I can't count the number of people who rave about how well I speak. I'm not bragging here, because it makes me want to claw my face off when they say it, as all I can think is if my French is so freaking good then why do I only understand half of what you're saying?!?! Ultimately it boils down to two different understandings of the phrase. When I say "You speak well," I mean "with an ample vocabulary formulated into structured sentences." When French people say "You speak well," they mean "without a horrendous accent."

There's the rub: apparently I am going to have to start speaking with a profoundly obnoxious American accent just to get people to friggin' slow down when they talk to me. As we were walking around with our sticks, people would walk up alongside me and say... something. If their intonation indicated a question, I muttered an agreement; if their intonation indicated a statement, I would use my fallback phrase, "Ah, bon?" Which means, roughly, "Oh, really?" And that was it.

So I met a very nice lady whose name may or may not be Nadia, and who does some kind of roller skating activity that might be roller derby, I'm not really sure. And I also met a guy who just moved from Paris a week ago and is here to coach... something. He liked the park because, you see, they have woods in Paris, but you can still smell all the pollution from the city, and so this park is much nicer. I also met a girl who does karate and is going to email me about this group who meet once a month to practice speaking English. Because, of course, that's going to improve my French. But who cares, I'll go.

The hiking bit was nice enough I guess; I didn't realize we'd be walking quite so long, and after a while all I could think was okay, it's trees, I get it already. (This is not entirely my fault. I was raised by city folks who failed to instill in me a great appreciation of nature. In the same vein, it's also their fault that poor Miss Cake's ficus nearly died, because I honestly thought "ficus" was a generic term for "fake plastic tree," and didn't realize I had to water the thing.)

Well, at any rate, it was fine, and afterwards everyone got in their cars and drove away while I started walking slowly down the dirt path back towards the city. I felt very stupid walking alone while all the cars went past, but what could I do? Then a car pulled up and it was Nadia-- she went out of her way to give me a ride home (and to talk more about this roller skating thing she does), which I thought was terribly nice. Even if I only understood half of what she was saying.