#cambresis

Unfortunately, even in the short and overall enjoyable time that I’ve been in France thus far, culture shock has managed to creep in.

In order to fully appreciate what culture shock is, it’s important to first think about what culture is. To loosely (and badly) paraphrase the multicultural psychology class I took during my junior year of college, culture is the shared customs, values, beliefs, and symbols of a group of people. Culture is food. Culture is language. Culture is music. Culture is fashion. Culture is etiquette. Culture the alphabet and the signs on restroom doors. In sum, culture is all the things we surround ourselves with every day that we don’t even think about.

Culture shock is when all of those things suddenly become effortful. Culture shock is wondering if you’re saying something relevant to the conversation or just babbling because small talk doesn’t exist here. Culture shock is momentarily forgetting how to pronounce the individual letters in your name or the words for the numbers in the year you were born. Culture shock is forgetting that when someone in a store asks for you name they want your last name because strangers refer to each other formally. Culture shock is being unsure if it’s okay to cross the street because you don’t know the traffic laws. It’s trying to figure out what specialized store sells the specific item you need since big box superstores are a rarity here. It’s being afraid to look for an apartment not because you’re still confused about all the laws and taxes surrounding renting but because you’re scared that you’ll ruin your chances when the property owner hears how incompetent you sound on the phone. Culture shock is not understanding why your debit card won’t work on a foreign website, or why your computer thinks the only Internet connection you can access is unsafe. It’s having to look up technical vocabulary before going out to buy anything or in order to tell the man at the front desk that the electrical outlets stopped working in your room.

**Before I mention anything about the past couple days in Cambrai, I just want to mention that the city is GORGEOUS and that the food here has been phenomenal so far. I guess I could post pictures but that’s too much work for now.

Monday started off well but took a turn for the rough. I did some exploring and was pleasantly surprised at how nice everyone in the town is. The lady at the tourism office gave me a good map of the city and a brochure of noteworthy places in the area. The people at the Orange boutique were cordial and set me up with a decently priced phone plan. However, I was irritated that they wanted to speak English with me through the whole process and then threw me out to the wolves to activate my phone (those automated French voices are way hard to understand). I went to a papiterie (I’m pretty sure I fail at spelling this word) and got a French version of The Great Gatsby (what a great way to dive into reading French books). The man behind the counter gave me a loyalty card. My seventh book will be free!

During my exploration, I stumbled upon a kebab restaurant and couldn’t resist. Great food and an opportunity to sit down and get my phone set up? Yes, please. Only, for whatever reason my data didn’t work. After I left the restaurant, the blisters that had been forming on my feet from wearing new boots only got worse, so I walked the 2 miles back to the hotel, figuring I would take a break and get started on the apartment hunt/work on some blog posts before dinner. Only the wifi was hardly functional, so I worked on my blog offline, but then I needed to charge my computer and the outlets weren’t working, so getting that fixed was a debaucle. My feet still weren’t feeling better by dinnertime, so I tried to order a pizza online since the Internet was behaving a bit more (I could have called, but I was sick of making an idiot of myself with my rusty French and the phone is my kryptonite), but my cards wouldn’t work online. When I tried to call the numbers on my cards to make sure I didn’t accidentally freeze them by using them on a foreign website, I discovered I couldn’t because like an idiot I said I didn’t want an international plan. I settled for chips from the vending machine for dinner and vowed to have fun the next day.

Tuesday was an interesting one. After realizing that I didn’t let one of my contact professors know what my phone number was (which was my plan once I got my phone), I texted her and she suggested we meet after school. Not only did we meet after school, I went with her to pick up her kids and ate dinner at her house. She even let me use her computer to continue my apartment search and gave me suggestions on finding housing and had her husband see if he could get the data working on my phone (He couldn’t, so I’ll have to return to the Orange boutique and see if they can figure it out). They were both very friendly and she was very helpful in showing me where some things were around town. I was very nervous about how working with French teachers would be, but it seems like in America where most of them are nice.

Interesting cultural moments of the past couple days:

·         Seeing someone bring a Minitel into the Orange boutique

·         The Betty Boopt-themed diner and the Domino’s next to the train station

·         The Domino’s serves Kebab pizza

·         Watching Lady and the Tramp in French. First off, the French title is La Dame et La Clochard. Also, the bloodhound’s accent is all wrong.

·         The teacher said I could stop by the school anytime even if I’m not working. Um, what? Forgive my Americanness, but I always thought work is where you went to do your job.

The biggest cultural moment of all:

·         I totally fucked my chances of renting an apartment at a specific location. I sent an email to someone on leboncoin (the French equivalent to Craigslist) and that person asked me to call her after 4:30. I had no idea the conversation was going to essentially be done in the style of a job interview. “Why do you want to live here?” can be a loaded question. Since I was caught off-guard, I sounded like an incompetent ass and I may have alluded to the fact that I liked the price, which is basically like saying you want a job for the salary (To be fair, I’ve never had to look for an apartment before, so I was basically oblivious to any etiquette from any culture). Also, I had a hard time comprehending her and she had a hard time comprehending me. Additionally, she wanted to know about my background and why I’m in France. Call me a capitalist, but is there no French equivalent to the phrase “shut up and take my money”? But the biggest roadblocks were that I don’t have a garant (guarantor) or an official piece of paper saying how much I will make a month (my arrêté de nomination only says that I have the job that I say I do), and I would only be renting until the end of April. The lady said I should call back soon with that information, but I don’t think I have a good chance of getting it since she had several other interested parties.

It is commonly advised not to bring a lot of luggage on the train in France because you, the passenger, will be solely responsible for lugging it around. While I would concur with this advice as a general rule, I would also add that I didn’t have any real problems. On the first leg of the trip, which took me to Saint Quentin, the cars were divided into compartments, so I was able to stick my big suitcase in front of the window and place my carryon on the overhead rack

Getting off the train, one of my fellow passengers was very nice and helped me with my bags. I was struck not only with his kindness (although I’ve seen other French people do the same thing before) but also with how much the station resembled the Amtrak stations back in Iowa. During the hour and a half I had between trains, I also started to notice how much more casually dressed people were. When I got on the next train (which, incidentally, was newer and more baggage-friendly), we passed rolling hills and farmland. Suddenly it seemed like I was in the French Iowa. I wondered how applicable any of the skills I acquired in Paris will be over the next seven months.

When I finally arrived in Cambrai, things could have gone a lot worse, but they also could have gone a lot better. Due to the size of the town, there were no taxis waiting, and since did not yet have a French phone number, I could not call for one. Since I was used to dealing with cold, overworked Parisians, I decided I would try seeing if could follow the walking directions I printed off from Google Maps (it was only about 2 miles to the hotel). Of course, that didn’t go well, as there was one street I simply could not find (also, people were looking at me like I was a weirdo, which I never had to worry about in Paris where people mind their own damn business), so I decided to try plan b: going back to the train station and asking them to call me a taxi.

To my surprise, the man behind the counter was very pleasant, and when he wasn’t having any initial luck, he handed it off to one of his coworkers. I wound up explaining to him between phone calls that I would be teaching English at two of the middle schools in town and he inquired about where I was from—a conversational direction that was dangerously close to small talk. He informed me that it was difficult to get a taxi for such a short distance and that if he didn’t have any luck calling anyone he could give me a ride to the hotel since the train station closed in a half hour and he would be off work. I know that on paper this sounds extremely sketchy, and as a rule I would say that it is. In fact, every step of my reasoning that it wasn’t sketchy is pretty faulty:

1.       He seemed like a genuinely nice person (of course he didn’t; that’s how sociopaths get what they want).

2.       This was probably my most realistic option (surely I could have insisted that he kept calling different cab companies)

3.       I went back to the cardinal rule of decision-making in a foreign country: Would I do it at home? The answer was potentially, yes. People at small towns in Iowa are known for their kindness and it was something I could imagine someone there offering to do.  Plus, I would be a pretty stupid person to kidnap because there were people in the town who would notice I was missing and it would be pretty easy to figure out that I didn’t go missing until sometime after the first leg of my train trip. (But not everyone who commits a crime is smart)

To summarize, the guy from the train station obviously didn’t turn out to be a creep, but the fact that I got by unscathed doing something once doesn’t mean that it isn’t a dangerous thing to do. The biggest piece of practical advice I can give from this situation is to try not to arrive in small towns on a Sunday, as many businesses are closed. Theoretically, I could have gone to the Orange boutique, bought a phone, and called a taxi myself. The other big takeaway from this is not to be afraid to ask people for things because you never know what you could get.