Elsa Lang Lively

I had been dreaming of participating in an exchange to France for years.  All throughout high school, my weekends involved researching the most cost effective exchange program I could afford.  And although I had managed to find several that would have been incredible, nothing was really within my price range.  So I had accepted the fact I would just have to wait until college when I could spend a semester or year abroad in France.

What I did not anticipate, however, was that a military family had just moved in two doors down from my house.  My mom and I initially went over to invite the family to a neighborhood Oktoberfest party at our house, and we found out the mother was actually from France.  She had met her American husband while he was stationed in Germany, and they eventually were married and moved back to the United States.

Not even a few hours into our neighborhood party, the mother asked me if I was available to babysit in the near future.  This was an ideal family to babysit for, as I could practice French with their three bilingual children and just walk two doors down to get to their house.  As the months went by, our families became very close, spending holiday parties together and talking about various European experiences and cultural differences.  I had also become a regular babysitter for them, allowing them to go out on date nights and get some shopping done in preparation for the birth of their fourth child.

The times I spent over at this family’s house are truly unforgettable.  Sometimes, I would go over to make French desserts or sample imported Swiss cheese while looking at pictures of the Franche-Comté region where the mother grew up.  It was wonderful to be able to witness the three children embracing their bicultural home life, speaking both in French and English.  Going over to their house was almost like entering another country.  It was a fusion of French and American cultures, with pictures of both the Alps and California all over the house, and French desserts fresh from the oven to sample in the kitchen.

Around Christmas of 2011, I started talking to the mother on one particular instance about my interest in doing an exchange in France for several weeks to improve my French.  Within the following week, I started to receive e-mails from her saying she had already written to several of her relatives in France, and they had said they would not mind hosting an American exchange student one bit.  Now the only thing left to do at the time was to select a family to stay with, and then try to convince my parents to let me go alone.

So, several months and lots of planning later, I found myself on my first international flight without my family to Geneva, Switzerland.  My stomach had been in knots for a few days at that point, because I was so nervous and excited to be starting my own French adventures at last.  So as the plane took off, the questions and anxieties began to resurface, such as … “What if my host family forgets to pick me up from the airport?  How do you say ‘I need my inhaler’ in French?  What if customs doesn’t let me into Switzerland?  Boy, I would be really angry if the plane crashed on the way over and I never got to see France….”

Needless to say, I did not get any sleep on the overnight flight to Geneva.  Instead, I spent almost the whole seven hours listening to Edith Piaf on my iPod and cramming new useful French phrases into my mind … just in case.  And it didn’t hurt one bit that the elderly man sitting next to me was actually from Egypt and was trilingual.  He was on his way to Lausanne, Switzerland to visit his mother who only spoke French.  He was so nice I forgot about being so nervous and practiced some French with him before he fell asleep.

After landing early the next morning in Geneva, clearing customs, and picking up my luggage, I met my French host mother and her daughter named Floriane, who is the same age as me.  Immediately, they began asking me questions about the flight, my family, and school in rapid-fire French.  It certainly didn’t help matters I had barely slept in two days.  They were very nice with me, however, and understood I was pretty drained from the trip.  So they didn’t seem to mind too much when I just mumbled “uhhh… oui…” to virtually every question they asked.

After a thirty-minute ride across the Swiss-French border to Vétraz-Monthoux, or simply “Vétraz” as the locals say, I promptly fell asleep in my shared room with Floriane after a brief tour of the house.  A good five hours later, I awoke to whispering and giggling from Zoé, the youngest child in the family.  At four years old, she was looking for someone to play with her and was curiously looking me up and down as if she had never seen an American before.  She had come to wake me up and let me know that my lunch was waiting downstairs for me if I felt like eating anything.  My lunch was comprised of fish sticks and Mac and cheese. How’s that for a first French meal?

The rest of my first day in France went very well, although I was still trying to recover from jetlag.  The nice part about immersion programs in this sense is you are so physically and mentally drained from speaking and translating a secondary language all day long you are exhausted at the end of the day and can more easily adapt to the time change by not staying up all night.  I had met all the six children in the family as well as both of the parents and had even managed to find time to play their upright piano in the living room.  Two of the daughters played piano, so we were able to exchange sheet music and teach each other new songs.

In the days that followed, I began to settle into my temporary French lifestyle, attending school with Floriane and Anthony, the oldest son.  A typical school day in France, on average, is much longer than in the United States, often with  three-hour long classes at a time and an enormous exam called the baccalauréat (or just “le bac”) that determines a student’s academic fate during the eleventh and twelfth grades concerning plans for universities.  And for good reason, the students who were preparing for their bac (Floriane included) had to study for hours per day in order to achieve high marks on their diplomas.

This meant I had a lot of downtime during my three weeks in Vétraz.  I didn’t mind necessarily, though, because I had plenty to read and could always watch Disney movies in French or practice piano when things got dull around the house.  During my stay, I managed to read the first Harry Potter book en français and an entire Belgian comic book series about American cowboys.  Needless to say, these comic books, or “bandes dessinées,” were full of stereotypes about the American Wild West and about American culture overall.

When asked what Americans thought about the French people, I really only had two stereotypes to tell them — that the French don’t shower often and that they are snobby.  Both of these sound quite ludicrous once you experience authentic French culture.  By this, I mean if you go beyond Paris to see “la vraie France,” you will meet some of the nicest, most hospitable people in Europe.

Yet when I asked about the stereotypes the French have about the Americans, I was instantly met by close to fifteen or twenty stereotypes about Americans.  Some of these included: Americans are fat (which I could not truthfully deny), Americans are narrow-minded, Americans are not environmentally-conscious, Americans are very emotional, and Americans think they are better than everyone else.  Honestly, I could understand where many of these opinions were coming from, but there are also many things about American culture the French people I talked with could simply not understand given their own cultural backgrounds.

For example, I was explaining one night to my French father all of the men in my extended and immediate family had previously served in the military or were entering into some type of military service.  He was shocked to hear how supportive I was of our military and the need for American presence in the Middle East.  In France, he explained, the military is seen as being a necessary evil.  The only support the military in France gets occurs once a year on the French national holiday on the fourteenth of July because of military parades in Paris.  He also said military officers in France are usually those who did not do well enough in school to attend universities or obtain well-paying jobs.  Coincidentally, however, he is a huge fan of American war movies and television shows.

Other interesting topics that arose when talking with my host family included the French socialist system and gun control.  They seemed to be very content with their socialized health care, saying it was well-organized and met all their family needs.  When I tried to tell them how socialism might work well in France in some aspects but could not work as effectively in America, they could just not understand how the government providing for people of every income and circumstance could ever be a bad thing.  And when it came to talking about guns, there was almost no way I could reason with them about why it is a good thing Americans have the right to own weapons.  According to them, guns should only be used when hunting animals.  There is no need beyond that to own a gun as a civilian.  I concluded there were just some things we would have to agree to disagree about.

All in all, my stay in France could not have been any better.  I was able to make a home away from home among a family that called me their daughter and sister, eat the most delicious cheese and bread day after day, and wake up amidst the beautiful French alps each morning.  I miss my French family very much and think about my experiences in Vétraz every day.  In fact, I have already been invited to go back and go skiing this winter.  And hopefully, Floriane will be able to stay with my family here in Virginia next summer and have her own kind of foreign adventures in America.

For those who are considering doing an exchange to a foreign country, I would deeply encourage you to pursue your options to spend a few weeks or even a year abroad.  The more time you spend abroad, the more comfortable you will become using the language and grow more accustomed to the daily life of your host family.  I hope to return to France next summer and stay with relatives for six to eight weeks in order to improve my French even more.  Once you get over the initial homesickness and jetlag, you will discover how to make the most of every opportunity where you are at the moment.

Most importantly, do not be afraid to take some risks and step out of your comfort zone a bit.  Remember spending time abroad experiencing another culture is not something you get to do every day.  Making mistakes while practicing another language is completely natural and unavoidable; therefore, just be prepared to laugh at and learn from your mistakes.  When you decide not to let your shyness or self-consciousness get the best of you, I guarantee you will make some of the most incredible memories of your life and have some great stories to tell for years to come.