Bumbling along en francais

Last night I went to dinner at the Medici, a Hyde Park restaurant/U of C hangout, with one of my colleagues from the French department. The atmosphere was great, the food was mediocre, and the service was lousy. I had an unexciting tuna-steak sandwich, and as I was, admittedly, picking at the last piece of the bun, the waiter came over and asked me if I was finished. I literally had to lower the bun from my mouth and look up to say, "Um, well, not quite." His timing was a little off from the get-go I'd say. We'd literally had 30 seconds to sit down and look at the menu before he asked us if we were ready to order. Again... "not quite yet, thanks."

But the dim lighting, the worn wooden booths scrawled with who knows whose names and messages, and the echoes of what sounded like a live band somewhere off in the distance made for a very cozy dinner. My colleague - who is Chinese - and I were speaking awful, awkward French to each other and struggling to translate our complaints about the cold, the workload, and the scary professors into this foreign language we've been hammering away at for the past month and a half in a desperate attempt to catch up to the native speakers in our program. She's got it worse than I do, though, since this is her first time outside of China. Not only is she studying in a foreign language, she's living now submerged in yet another. I struggled in vain to explain to her that what was in the little pot on our table was mustard. She tried it, reluctantly, and had no idea what I was talking about when I said the most famous kind comes from Dijon.

So we yammered on despite the food being pas tres bon and the conversation being pas tres courante. Last week in class one of my professors read us a quote from an interview with Samuel Beckett. "Try the first time and fail," Becket said. "Try again and fail better." My professor smiled and said, "That's what grad school's all about."

p. s. Crew team participation still under consideration. Much agonizing still to be done. Meanwhile, after expressing thoughts on situation to captain of team, captain thinks I'm crazy. Captain might be right.