To my great pleasure, I have found that being an American living in France is a way to access not only French culture, but also cultures from all over the world. My location naturally forces me to eat French food, listen to French radio (which, strangely, consists mostly of American and British music), read French newspapers, and observe French architecture; my social interactions, on the other hand, have been delightfully varied.
My first evening on the town, for example, occurred when an American friend I met while looking for an apartment invited me to dinner with the Muslim family she stayed with when she studied here in high school. I was nervous about it to begin with because I had only met one of the girls in the family one time and that for the briefest of moments, and when we were the first to arrive at the Moroccan restaurant at a table reserved for eleven I realized it was going to be a long evening. But the event reached the level of full-on fiasco when groups of two and three kept attaching themselves to our table, until there was one person too many to fit at the table. And then, low and behold, yet another group showed up. The upshot is that our party of fifteen was packed into a confined space for upwards of three hours, so we had some time to chat. The girl I happened to be sitting next to was from Ethiopia. She showed me the alphabet of the official language of Ethiopia, a cousin of Arabic called Amharican. Her boyfriend from Djibouti (yes, I did explain to him why that word is funny in English) was fascinated by American culture.
Though that evening was exceptional (it's not every day that I'm invited to humungous family dinners), I don't even have to go out to interact with people with different backgrounds. I live in an apartment complex close to downtown. My most immediate neighbors, who live on the second storey with me, are two young men, one whose father from the Republic of Mauritius (in the southwest of the Indian Ocean) frequently visits, and the other is a student from Holland. My landlord is Iranian. All of them speak English, to varying degrees, so with all of them I speak a sort of bastardization of English and French.
It is an utter joy to live in this way, not only because making friends when I'm lonely and missing my people at home is hugely comforting, but also because I'm learning so much! After three weeks in France I know more about Colombia than I ever thought I would because I've met three people from Colombia (and not all on the same occasion).
Part of the reason I've met so many people from outside of France is geographic: I am living in a big city where there are a lot of people from all over the world to meet. Home to three large universities, Toulouse has the most students of any city in France, and so attracts international students eager to learn French and explore the world. But at the same time my own strangeness brings out the strangeness in others; our very lack of experiences in common is a commonality and a place to start a conversation. They understand what it's like to be isolated in an unfamiliar country and culture. Furthermore, the people who do travel are those who are interested in learning about the world, and who therefore want to ask me about my culture, compare what we think about France, and introduce me to the other non-native people they know. It is an experience I would never have at home because I already have a (fantastic!) social support network at home; here, my support is the goodness and curiosity of being human that connects total strangers.
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