Freedom Fries, J'adore.
Authored by: nines Like many American students, I chose France. It was my junior year of college, I knew I wanted to live in a big city and I already had some French under my belt, so Paris seemed like the obvious choice. More than anything else though, I wanted to spend my year somewhere where I could pass as a local. I'd had the experience of traveling in countries where I was immediately pegged as the foreigner, the American, the blonde even (brunettes being blondes, for all intents and purposes). This time I was determined not to be the outsider.

I chose my study abroad program accordingly. The pamphlets for the small, personalized program advertised a mandatory home stay program and extensive opportunities to study with real French students at real French universities. So great was the program's emphasis on an integrative experience that every time a student in the program acquired a new French friend, our director, a Parisian woman who could easily have been mistaken for a drag queen, would clutch the uneasy student to her heavily perfumed bosom and squeal, "Mais je suis ravie!"

By the time I was two weeks into the program, I was already walking around the city like I owned the place. Left bank, right bank, sweet crepes, salty crepes, I had it all down. I was just beginning to choose my classes and had just moved in with my host family the day before. I went out late that night with some friends to the "Academie de la Biere" (yes, the Academy of Beer) and caught the last train back to my new neighborhood. Suddenly it dawned on me that I hadn't written down my new street name, even though I knew I was only blocks away. Somehow I was able to come up with the name of a neighboring street and with this meager piece of information, I approached the only other people sill out in the empty streets, two teenage girls. Patiently they listened as I explained my predicament to them in my best French accent: "I'm, uh, lost, where's rue Rondelet?" Patiently they gave me the directions I needed: "Two blocks up, go left at the corner, walk until you see the Macdaux, then take a right." I repeated it back to them, taking great pains to gloss over the one word I hadn't understood, Macdaux, but stumbling over it all the same. Surely I'd catch it if they just spoke a little bit slower. They repeated the directions, then repeated them again, and then again. Macdaux. Mercot? Mandeau? Truffaut?? What the hell, I was never going to get back to the apartment at this rate. Finally, and with that special degree of condescension of which only the French are capable, they spelled it out for me: "MacDo-MacDonald's you idiot. That piece of shit restaurant you Americans brought to our country." MacDo, of course. That piece of shit restaurant that was my country's number one export.

From that moment forward, I felt much more humble walking around the streets of Paris. I bought myself a map and carried it with me at all times. I thanked people profusely when they mistook my nationality for Dutch, for Norwegian, for Spanish. And every so often, when I'd had an especially long day, I'd go to the one place in my neighborhood that was still open, and there I'd enjoy some fries and a chocolate milkshake. There are 3 comments