First Night In France

Everything was cold. The huge marble staircase in the foyer of the house. The gray cement that covered the entire exterior. The Fiat that brought me here, stuffed with me and too much pink and purple luggage in the back seat.

I had been in the place I would call home for the next three weeks for about 45 minutes now. “Le diner?,” I asked in pretty good French, for a fifth grader at least. I had been traveling for over 24 hours: too many hours by plane with 40 other American exchange students first to Detroit’s international airport than on to Charles de Gaul. A forced, 2 hour whirlwind tour of Paris via motor coach, never stopping to really see the sites, only seeing them in a blur out the window. 5 1/2 hours by bus from Paris west to the Alsace region. 25 minutes by car to the tiny town I was assigned to, alone and separated from my friends and classmates thanks to a last minute snafu with my French exchange student counterpart who decided she would rather sock a guy in the mouth than come to America. I didn’t really want dinner, but it seemed like it was close to that time.

“Oui, dans quelques minutes,” my French mother said to me as she passed in the hallway.

Not really understanding her response, I continued to put my overtly-American, touristy sweatshirts, stretch pants and faded jeans into the bureau I was given. I hid my plastic bags of purchased in bulk chocolate covered pretzels, trail mix and gummy bears – “American comfort food” my parents had bought me for the journey, which would later be found and thrown out.

The silence in the room was interrupted with a yell up the marble stairs: “Diner!” I walked down the stairs, still dressed in the navy blue sweats I had traveled all those miles in, to find my host family seated around the dinning room table. On the table was split pea soup. The only food that I still to this day will not eat. Fat, stinging tears began to well up in my eyes, gone unnoticed by my non-English speaking hosts who were chatting away in French.

Later that evening, after the soup had been cleared and I had secretly eaten an entire bag of M&M’s, I wandered down to the kitchen to find my French mother baking.

“Can I have a hug?,” I wondered, jet lagged, homesick. I silently cursed the teachers who taught our after school French lessons – we had not covered this sort of thing in class.

“Pardon?” - she didn’t understand.

I walked over and wrapped her arms around me, unsure if they hugged in France and if they did, if I was doing it right. She didn’t really hug me back, so I pulled away, now believing that they actually didn’t do things like hugging in France - of course I would later find out I was wrong.