hey check out my lungs

Well, after three months of waiting - the French government isn't particularly punctual or informative, preferring to wait a few months and mail me a letter than to respond to my emails - I am at last an official resident! And I didn't even have to buy an expensive envelope or drive for several hours on multiple days, which is more than can be said for the visa process. In fact, it was relatively easy and only took something like an hour and a half. Plus I was afraid of metro issues making me late, so I left early and ended up going in before my appointment was even scheduled. No one yelled at me or told me to leave because I was unprepared. That is not to say, of course, that it wasn't a weird experience on several levels, but I've gotten used to the fact that everything that is going to happen to me for the next several months is going to be slightly incomprehensible.

The thing about being an English speaker in France is that everyone knows a little bit of English, and when they recognize your accent they default to whatever English words they know, even if there are about five of them. This is particularly difficult when you have been speaking almost exclusively in French for a long time and suddenly a doctor is giving you a really intense look and saying, "Your teeth. Are they good?" and "Do you have pregnancy?" The woman who gave me my vision test used a mixture of comprehensible French and disjointed, single-word English, switching back and forth between them so that every thing she said caught me off guard and I'm pretty sure I looked like I didn't actually speak any language.

"Pregnancy?"

"Uh, what?"

"Pregnancy! Do you have pregnancy?"

"Do... I..."

"Are. You! Pregnant!"

"Oh! Oh, no. Definitely not."

I then stood half-naked in a room for a while, pushed against a big plastic box so they could x-ray my lungs. I'm not sure why they're particularly preoccupied with the lungs of their immigrants, but this part was actually kind of interesting. I've never been x-rayed anywhere but my mouth, and that's just kind of, you know, "Yeah, those teeth pretty much look the way they do when I look at them in my face." Lungs are much more interesting!

"Do you have asthma?"

"Yes, how did you know that?"

"Your ribs are shaped weirdly, see, how they're horizontal like that. That tends to happen to people with asthma."

I have never even heard of this. How does that work, the lungs and the skeleton are two completely different systems. But they do look funny! I have horizontal ribs! Is that not the coolest thing that you have ever heard?

very professional correspondence

Mr. Jalabert,

I wanted to tell you it's possible that I can not come in tomorrow - like Simone, I gotta go get my residence card. I do not know how long it will take, but if it's very long I'm not going to come. Thank you for your understanding.

I also have questions about the writing assignment that you submitted for foreign students. I spoke to my manager and she said there is no need for me to do, but if I decide to do to have more opportunity to improve my score, do you explain some details of duty, as possible topics and how many pages you want to write?

Sometimes (often) when I write emails in French, I use Google Translate to make sure I'm actually saying what I intend to. While this generally reassures my confidence in my own language skills, it also frequently makes me question the skills of the people who are responsible for these translations.

useless questions for Philippe, translated

"Philippe, how do you say 'raccoon' in French?"

"What?"

"They're animals. I don't know if they only exist in the US or what. They have... Wait, how do you say 'tail'?"

"...What?"

[vague pantomime]

"Oh! Queue!"

"Right. They're animals with a long tail, shaped sort of like this, with lines on it."

"Les ratons-laveurs? They smell bad, and they wash their food before they eat it?"

"Uh, maybe. They have hands, like people. And they look like they're wearing masks."

"Yes! Ratons-laveurs. You know, because they're like rats, but they wash their food. We have them in Europe, mostly in Germany I think. Only in places where there's a lot of water."

"Oh. You see them everywhere in the US. They get into people's trash cans and stuff... Actually, I forget why I asked this question in the first place."

There you have it, America. In France, raccoons are called "little washer-rats."