Ultimate mistakes and cultural mishaps

How many of you started out just like myself.....

I considered myself totally culturally perfect, a culturally sensitive beast poised to integrate smoothly into my new chosen country, that of my husband ( at that time, I might add!!!).

I would surround myself in things french. I would NEVER become a blind and exclusive"ex pat", would NEVER hang out with anglophones. I was in for the total emmersion package. I would surround myself with witty french girlfriends with whom I would go shopping, lunching, wine-ing and coffee-ing....yes we would all hang out together speaking fab french, sharing the trials of our young childrens' lives, swap recipes, bitch eternally about our husbands,exchange professional tips, go on family holidays....wrong WRONG WRONG! I had totally set myself up for major misunderstanding and mishap!!

I have to clarify that I DO have french friends and they are just wonderful ( of course they are...I CHOSE THEM!!) but I had made the ultimate mistake of assuming that the girls/women here would be just like " us". They aren't. They are as different to our anglo:american sisterhood as we are to theirs.

 I suppose as a young wife and mother this was just the most difficult thing to understand and accept. Who else has felt this? Don't get me wrong I am not so stupid and insular to think that all anglophones are the same. I have certainly made my share of mistakes in that domain too....

EXAMPLE 1 HOW TO SHOCK at a Brit dinner party when you assume everyone shares the same language and ipso facto, humour. .....when I arrived in South West France 16 years ago I acquired my dream dog, a St Bernard. She was to become my butter to my bread, my gin to my tonic, yep, a "girlfriend"...One evening at a british dinner party I made the "gaff" of assuming my antipodean sense of humour had global acceptance. Thinking it would create a titter I burst out with " I have a 100Kg fanny...." Silence. Total silence. It was duly translated into french " Elle a une chatte qui pese 100KG"..to which I made things worse by saying its not my cat its my dog and her name is Fanny. Talk about Lost in Translation and floundering in my own language. More to come.....

Comments

  1. Michael Wilson29 September 2009 at 20:14

    To be fair, that line might have made jaws drop even in New Zealand :)

    ReplyDelete

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