by Louisa Lin
It was on an ordinary afternoon that I received an English letter from France. A French girl wrote and asked if I would like to be her pen pal. I replied “yes”. Her second letter surprised me, since it included a note from her father, written in simplified Chinese characters. Later I found that he had been studying Chinese on his own for four years. So I began to write to both the daughter and the father, to the one in English and the other in Chinese. At the same time I began learning French and enjoyed it a lot. I can’t remember when I started writing in French to Clo, my French pen pal. I think it must have been at least one year after I began taking French, when I thought it was time to practice. She was amazed and showed my postcard to her family. Then they wrote back and congratulated me as if I had won a million-dollar lottery. Around the end of last summer, my high school classmate Stacy, who had been learning French with me, suggested that we go to France for a study tour 遊學. I mentioned it to my French pen pals - this interesting family - and asked many questions concerning language schools, transportation and accommodation in France. As Clo was busy preparing for her “baccalaureat” (somewhat like our Joint College Entrance Examination), it was her father, Uncle Patrick as I call him, who always replied with satisfying answers and provided valuable information for me. The whole family-including Clo’s mother and sister, even though I wasn’t writing to them - kindly invited us to stay at their villa which is in Les Vosges in Lorraine (a French province in the northeast) where they would be going for vacation in July. Later they even invited us to stay in their apartment in Paris, despite the fact that it is very small. You could never imagine how happy and touched I was to read these few lines written by Uncle Patrick. And so we went to France. As we planned, we went first to a language school in Vichy (a small town in central France) to improve our French. Four weeks later we left for La Serpentine (which means “walking like a serpent”), so named because of the winding lane leading to it. We were heartily welcomed and had dinner together in their dining room, with a great view over the whole paradise-like area. We had fun talking, and Stacy and I were again embarrassingly praised for our halting French. Of course we didn’t forget to bring some presents in return for their hospitality. During the five days we stayed with them, we went boating, biking, shopping, and hiking. I wondered from time to time if I were dreaming; everything was just so fantastic. Five days later we said goodbye to them as they packed up and went back to Paris for work. While we traveled I wrote a postcard to each member of the family, since we had all become very good friends. We met again in Paris a month later. Clo’s mother came to pick us up at La Defense (a commercial district in the suburbs of Paris) and we went “home” together. We felt as if we had known each other for years. This time we stayed with them for another 10 days. On weekdays we traveled on our own. Uncle Patrick had to work, but on the weekend he drove us around Paris. We went to the Latin Quarter, visited some great bookstores, and stopped at a cafe like typical French folks; we visited Notre Dame, and the next day, the Flea Market. That evening after dinner we went out with the whole family to Haagen-Dazs (yummy…), and then dropped by the Eiffel Tower-my first time to see the Tower at night, and it was magnificent. Everything went surprisingly well and smoothly, except that there were still things that confused us, like how they managed to take a bath in the bathtub without splashing any water on the floor, since there wasn’t a shower curtain; we never figured that out, so we always caused floods. As for the food (the ordinary kind-if you still believe all French people eat snails, forget it-that’s a myth), at first we thought it was O.K., but in the end we decided to switch back to our Chinese diet. It’s not that French food was unbearable, but that we preferred what we were used to (our French friends had the same experience in Mainland China, you can be assured). Another thing is that, like many other French families, they had dinner as late as eight o'clock in the evening, so we usually had to hear our stomach grumble for two hours before we dined with our French friends. You might consider all this aspects of “culture shock”; well, maybe it’s better to view such things as interesting subjects to explore, rather than “shock”. At the end of our stay in France, we said goodbye to them all, and Uncle Patrick drove us to the airport. On the way there he played his favorite Beatles, as usual, and at the airport he helped us check in our luggage and then gave each of us two kisses on the cheeks like all French people do when they say goodbye to each other. Stacy thanked me because it was me who had spent time writing to them and earned such hospitality for both of us. I thanked her, too, because it was she who introduced me to “making friends by pen and ink”, now a great pleasure in my life. Uncle Patrick has an e-mail account now, so we are currently corresponding “electronically”. As for the language, we of course write in French! a
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The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
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