not as easy as i thought

I don't really know what I expected this time in France to be. I knew it was going to be challenging, adapting to a new culture and trying to live my life in French. I guess I just didn't realize how much of a challenge it would be. Every day is somewhat of a struggle to speak French when all I really want to do is to take the easy way out and just speak English, especially when it comes to communicating with my fellow Winnipeggers (but we're trying our best to speak French as much as possible!).

It's pretty frustrating to me to try to formulate sentences, because to do so I'm thinking of what I want to say in English and then translating it in my head and then trying to say everything in the right order in French, while at the same time trying to have a bit of an accent so I don't sound too anglophone. As a result, I speak slowly when trying to tell a story or say several phrases at once, and in the amount of time it takes me to say 3 sentences, I probably could say 6 or even ten if I were speaking English. Also when people talk too fast, I don't understand exactly what they're saying, and that's frustrating too. I have to keep telling myself that it's not that I'm too unintelligent to comprehend, it's just that I don't catch everything, and thats why I don't get the joke. But I can say now that I truly know what it feels like to be a foreigner and will for sure never look at newly-arrived immigrants to Canada in the same way again.

Of course, not everything is hard. I've become an expert at talking about myself, my studies, my country, the weather in Winnipeg, my family, etc., etc. These are the topics I get asked about most often when I meet new people. But it's when I start to try to talk about something else where I stumble. I guess I'm mostly frustrated with the fact that I've already learned a lot of the vocabulary that I seem not to know, and I feel like I should have retained it somewhere in my head in order to use it later. The thing is, I'm also a perfectionist so I can sometimes have unreasonably high expectations for myself and subsequentially am way too hard on myself when it comes to situations like this.

So where does this leave me? Well, alone, for one. I've been spending a lot of time alone lately, doing homework, reading, writing emails and blog posts. Maybe this isn't the healthiest thing for me, but sometimes I just can't help it. I make efforts to hang out with people, but I have a really limited social network here, and we all have different schedules. Maybe something I'm supposed to learn from this time abroad is peace in solitude (well, one of the things at least).

I don't want to scare anyone: I do have friends here, and I do have stuff to do and classes to go to and church to attend (after which I always stay for lunch to talk to people) and potlucks to bring food to, but I just seem to be spending a little more time by myself than I do back home, and maybe that's not an extremely bad thing. Oh well, I guess time will tell. All I know is that I'm not getting a lot of practice speaking the language I came here to learn when I'm by myself. So let's hope that changes soon!