David Sedaris
Non-Fiction (Biography)
Pages 150-181
David goes to live in France for a month with his friend Hugh, who he met through a mutual friend.The first summer that David spent in France with Hugh he had a picture in his mind of leaving in a paris and going out at night to walk the street of the beautiful streets. Unfortunatley, David found him self living in a little village outside of Normady with about a population of around 100 people at lived in a house thats electricity didn't work. He also went there only knowing the word 'bottleneck' in french. Therefore, he believes he was known as the village idiot because he responded to anything said in french with only "bottleneck." David also spoke of how french people don't hate all Americans and are actually very nice and polite and don't fit the American sterotypes about them. In order to learn the language he would write down random nouns that he read in magazines to broaden his vocab. After 3 summers in France David had accumilated a list of 5,000 nouns, which he would use to respond to questions. The french people were often shocked and confused when David would respond to a question like "How are you?" with witchcraft, exorcism, and death penalty. Eventually Hugh and David would move temporarily to France while their apartment building was being worked on. In the next chapter David decides to take a french class where he encounters the strictest teacher he has ever had. Many laughs await in my next posts as David is brutually insult by his teacher.
In David's story about living in Paris I can relate to the fact that he didn't know their language. I can personally say it is a very frustrating situation and brings much humor to the others who seem tobe making fun of your use of words. I would sometimes go to a part of town that was dominatly populated with latinos and at the time i knew no spanish. I'm sure that they found my attempt to speak spanish to be hillarious.
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